‘Fatally flawed’: What this year’s 12 pedestrian deaths tell us about Anchorage’s roads

So far this year, 12 people have been struck and killed by vehicles while walking in Anchorage, an unusually high tally that’s already eclipsed last year’s death toll for the entire state by one.

The mounting death toll is prompting hard conversations. As city officials propose changes, including reduced speed limits, to save lives, some drivers say the bigger issue is pedestrian behavior, such as walking into rushing traffic.

It’s also prompting questions, some without clear answers: Does the current grim roster of pedestrian deaths have roots in the car-centric city’s street design? Is a municipal decision last year to decriminalize jaywalking partly to blame? What role does unsheltered homelessness play in the deaths, with camps where people live and walk set up directly alongside major roads?

To better understand the circumstances, the Daily News compiled data on every fatal Anchorage pedestrian collision this year using information from the Anchorage Police Department, media accounts and the municipality’s annual traffic report.

We found that most of the deaths happened under dark or twilight conditions and on high-speed highways or arterial roads. A quarter were hit-and-runs, where the driver fled from the scene and was later charged with a crime.

In all of the cases, the person hit was found in the road outside a designated crosswalk — or the road had no nearby crosswalk. The majority of victims identified by police were women.

Half of the pedestrians killed died this month, in startlingly close succession: The first, hit by a pickup truck as she crossed Muldoon Road a half-hour after midnight on Sept. 8, was Shannon Wallner, 42.

Hours later that morning, as the sun was beginning to rise, another woman was struck and killed by a truck on DeBarr Road. Danielle Washington, 45, was a mother and grandmother originally from Buckland.

The very next day, around 6 a.m. Sept. 9, Lola Giles was fatally hit by a minivan at Mile 108.5 of the Seward Highway, south of Anchorage. Her family later said they had no idea how she got there, dressed in leggings and sandals on a cold, wet morning.

As a rainy September continues, four more people have been killed trying to cross Anchorage’s streets.

A city not built for walking

Every time a pedestrian dies, people read a few basic facts: where it happened and whether the person was in a crosswalk, said Lindsay Hajduk, a member of a bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee of Anchorage Metropolitan Area Transportation Solutions, a municipal-state planning group.

People judge pedestrians, and the people doing the judging tend to be drivers, she said.

“Our city isn’t built for people to walk … You have to take all of these calculated risks to get somewhere safely when you’re walking, and that often includes crossing streets outside of marked crosswalks or intersections,” she said.

After two back-to-back fatal collisions on Sept. 20 and 21, Anchorage Assembly members this week proposed three immediate measures to improve safety for people walking: installing additional lighting along high-speed roads; lowering speed limits by 10 miles per hour on some corridors; and launching a driver and pedestrian safety education campaign.

State Sen. Löki Gale Tobin, who represents North Anchorage, in a letter, asked the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities to work with the municipality to “identify short-, mid-, and long-term solutions to protect everyday Alaskans using non-motorized means of transportation.”

Tobin noted that some pedestrians died trying to cross the Seward Highway, which cuts through the city with up to eight lanes of speeding traffic.

“No one should die or get injured simply trying to cross these grotesquely large roads, bifurcating our urban communities,” she wrote. “Pedestrians have the legal right to cross roadways. As Alaskans, we should resist the urge to turn Anchorage into some metropolitan maze of highways where being a pedestrian is discouraged and, in some cases, illegal.”

Fatalities on the rise

Nationally, pedestrian deaths have dramatically increased. In 2022, the year with the most recent complete federal data, 7,522 people were hit and killed by vehicles while walking — a 40-year high, according to Smart Growth America, a nonprofit advocacy group. Deaths increased 75% from 2010, according to the group. Experts have pointed to infrastructure and the increasing prevalence of large SUVs and trucks as contributing factors.

Deaths in Anchorage have followed a similarly steep trajectory, beginning to rise in the early 2010s. In Anchorage, an average of eight pedestrians died annually between 2014 and 2023, according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Daily News.

With months left to go in the year, it is “shocking” that Anchorage has already matched the average number of deaths for the entire state of Alaska, said Eric Cova, director of communications with Smart Growth America.

Of the 12 fatal incidents to date:

• Four, or a quarter, of the deaths happened directly on high-speed, multiple-lane highways including Minnesota Drive and the Seward Highway.

• Half of the deaths happened on major arterial roadways such as Northern Lights Boulevard, DeBarr Road, C Street, A Street, the Old Seward Highway and Muldoon Road. In those cases, each one happened outside of a crosswalk area, according to police.

• Only one death happened on a neighborhood street. Another happened in the parking lot of a shopping complex.

• Six of the deaths — half — happened when it was dark out. Four happened in twilight around sunset or sunrise. Two happened during full daylight hours.

• The locations varied widely, from south of Anchorage along the Seward Highway to the Dimond Center mall area to Fairview. Four of the deaths happened in the Midtown neighborhood corridor, the most of any single neighborhood.

• A quarter of the deaths were hit-and-runs involving drivers ultimately charged with a crime.

• The victims were mostly women. Of the 11 victims that have been identified by police, seven were females.

• The ages of people killed varied widely. The youngest was 24. The oldest was 79.

Heading into the darkest months

Historically, pedestrian fatalities peak in September and October, said Sgt. David Noll, the head of the Anchorage Police Department’s traffic division. It’s a time of lengthening nighttime hours, with no snowpack on the ground for illumination.

The darkness has a direct impact on safety, Noll said.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the change in lighting and visibility,” he said.

The notion that at least some of the pedestrians killed this year were people experiencing homelessness, living in camps along nearby roadways and traveling on foot is partly accurate, Noll said.

“Out of these six deaths in September, some might have had housing challenges or have been living in places near these roads,” Noll said. The police department said they do not specifically track the housing status of pedestrians killed in road collisions.

But Noll said it would be wrong to assume that all, or even most, of the pedestrians killed by vehicles were unhoused.

“I’ve talked to the families of most of these victims … (the idea) that all of these people are homeless, living in camps near the highway is incorrect,” he said. “That’s not the case for everybody.”

Whether there’s crossover between the victims of collisions and unhoused people “is a good question,” said Hajduk. “Regardless of homelessness, or where people are camping, we know which roads people are going to be killed on — and they are the fast roads, and they’re at speeds that kill.”

“It’s especially disheartening when it feels like the greater community is discounting the value of the people’s lives that are killed,” she said. “And it’s especially frustrating knowing that there are some really simple solutions that we could implement.”

Fatal flaws

It’s also not clear whether some kind of substance intoxication or medical impairment was a factor in the pedestrian deaths in Anchorage so far this year.

Toxicology reports can take months, Noll said. Data from 2019-2022 showed that roughly half the pedestrians killed in vehicle collisions in Anchorage had some level of impairment at the time they were hit, he said.

Last year, the Anchorage Assembly voted to remove citations for jaywalking and legalized pedestrian road crossings where a crosswalk or pedestrian tunnel wasn’t available for 150 feet. Some have connected the change in law with the outsized death toll this year, but Noll says any connection is not at all clear.

“Do these people even know that there was a change in the law, and if so, did they change their behavior because of that?” he said. “I don’t have any evidence that makes me believe one way or the other.”

On Tuesday, Anchorage Assembly Vice Chair Meg Zaletel called the idea that the change in jaywalking law was related to the deaths a “frankly ridiculous corollary.”

“The roads are fatally flawed in their design,” she said. “People cross where they’re going to cross because it’s convenient. If you’re going slower and we have better lighting, there’s more time to react.”

Anchorage is reaping the result of roads designed for vehicles, not humans, said Alexa Dobson, the executive director of Bike Anchorage. Many Anchorage roads are built to move many cars as fast as possible, she said. Higher speed limits mean lower survivability if someone is hit, she said.

“The fact that we’ve had so many in such a short period of time all over the city shows us the systemic problem,” Dobson said. “This is an example of what happens when you build roads for cars only.”

In the aftermath of the recent deaths, Dobson said she’d heard a lot of what amounted to “really awful victim blaming,” she said.

“The popular response so far, is ‘Why was that pedestrian not crossing at a crosswalk?’” she said. “The answer is, well, the crosswalks aren’t where people need them to be, and most of the time, drivers don’t even respect those crosswalks.”

Still counting

Not a week had passed earlier this month since Lola Giles was struck on the Seward Highway when Kaycie Martin, 24, crossed Minnesota Drive in the pre-dawn hours of Sept. 13 and was struck and killed by the driver of a Honda Pilot, police said.

On Sept. 17, Danielle Washington’s family held her funeral in Buckland, in the school gymnasium. There were yellow roses and large photos of her, her mom wrote on Facebook.

A few days later, Ambrose Aguchak, 79, was killed on the Seward Highway, becoming the fifth pedestrian killed in September.

The next day, 38-year-old Crystal Anvil died crossing Northern Lights Boulevard, becoming the sixth person killed on an Anchorage roadway in the month of September, not yet finished.