In 2024, fifteen pedestrians were hit by drivers and killed in Anchorage. We called it a crisis, stood up a Vision Zero Task Force, held press conferences and wrote op-eds, and made a plan to reverse course.

Now, in the final weeks of 2025, we’ve actually gotten worse. Fifteen pedestrians plus one bicyclist have died on our roads so far this year, and it’s not over yet.

It’s horrible, and we’re all looking for answers. How does this keep happening? How do we stop these needless deaths? Who is to blame?

So, let’s look at the facts and figure out what’s going on so that we never see another year this deadly.

FICTION: The road safety crisis is about pedestrians.

FACT: Traffic violence kills and injures drivers, too.

The rate of pedestrian fatalities has risen at an alarming pace, and it’s gotten most of the media attention so far. But we must not forget that traffic violence affects vehicle drivers and passengers too: In 2024, the deadliest year on Anchorage roads in decades, there were 29 total traffic fatalities, 91 major injuries, and 1,554 minor injuries. Those people’s stories matter.

Dangerous driving doesn’t discriminate; when people drive faster, more aggressively, or more distracted, everyone is at greater risk, including those behind the wheel. This is a whole-system failure, and it affects every one of us, no matter how we get around.

And it's not just Anchorage. Cities nationwide are seeing a spike in traffic crashes and deaths, from big metros to small towns. It didn’t start here, and it won’t end here unless we take real action.

FICTION: The crisis was caused by the Assembly decriminalizing jaywalking.

FACT: That could only be true if the Assembly has a time machine.

The Assembly passed AO No. 2023-65(S-1) in August 2023, which modernized many parts of the municipal traffic code relating to walking, biking and rolling, including removing fees for some traffic citations, like crossing the street on foot via a route that is not at a right angle. This was falsely characterized by some as “legalizing jaywalking,” and has since been blamed repeatedly for the recent pedestrian deaths on our roads. This claim is false in two ways:

First, there are still rules of the road for people walking. For example, when a person crosses a roadway outside of a marked/unmarked crosswalk, they need to yield to vehicles. It's still commonsense, and that was true before and after the assembly's code revisions. The few “jaywalking” laws that were changed were almost never enforced when they were on the books, and there is still a law in effect that prohibits walking in a way that might “obstruct free passage upon a roadway” without proper right-of-way or a permit.

Second, if these claims are to be believed, then we’d better check the Assembly chambers for a time machine, because there were actually more people walking who were hit by drivers in 2018 (143) and 2019 (137) than in 2024 (122). Impressive results for a law still five years away in the future! However, fewer of those crashes proved fatal in earlier years: 9 in 2018 and 5 in 2019, compared to 15 in 2024.

What changed, then? If crashes are becoming more deadly, the most likely culprit would be the vehicles, and the people driving them. Vehicle size and speed make a huge difference in whether a crash is survivable. This chart from the Vision Zero Network shows how crashes get deadlier with even small increases in vehicle speed:

More recent research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has found that the fatality rates are even higher for taller and heavier vehicles like pickup trucks and SUVs.

Bottom line: We have to be honest about the scale of the problem, and it’s much bigger than one municipal code change.

FICTION: The pedestrians who died were drunk.

FACT: DOT&PF’s wording is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

At the July 2025 Assembly Transportation Committee meeting, a DOT&PF staffer said that 86% of the pedestrians who were killed “had the presence of an impairing substance in their toxicology.” They immediately went on to clarify that “we don't know if they were actually impaired.” Pay close attention to the wording used here. Were they impaired, or not? Does the toxicology report include medications being taken as prescribed by a doctor, or remnants of substances no longer active in their bodies?

The day this statement was made, Bike Anchorage reached out to DOT&PF asking for clarification on this point. The agency would not provide any further information. That fact alone tells you what you need to know about how that statistic is being used.

By the way, we do have solid data on another group that was impaired at the time of these crashes: nearly half of drivers.

Setting aside the questionable accuracy of this claim, even if some proportion of the people who died were intoxicated at the time, that absolutely does not mean they deserved to die. Would we rather those people got behind the wheel of a car and drove home? What can we say of our streets if they are not safe for the most vulnerable among us—yes, intoxicated people, but also children, elders, those with disabilities, anyone who moves slowly or unsteadily and needs a safe way to get where they’re going?

Victim-blaming is dehumanizing and ghoulish behavior that brings shame upon our public agencies. But even more than that, it's completely unproductive, distracting from the root causes that we need to address to save lives on our streets. We deserve real action from our transportation and law enforcement officials, not excuses.

So… what’s actually going on?

1. Traffic laws are simply being enforced less.

The Anchorage Police Department’s 2024 Traffic Summary Report shows basically everything going in the wrong direction. Fatal crashes are at a 20-year high, but DUI arrests, speeding tickets and overall citations all decreased.

In 2025, APD’s “pedestrian safety campaign” made 643 traffic stops and issued only three citations for texting while driving, less than half of one percent of the total. Actual prevalence of distracted driving due to screen devices is estimated at 60% of drivers (or at least, that's how many will admit it on a survey).

The terrible consequences of this under-enforcement are on full display in the case of Gladys Graf this summer. She was crossing the street, in a crosswalk, with the walk signal, when she was struck and killed by a driver who was later charged with criminally negligent homicide and using a screen device while driving. Pedestrians can do everything right, but that still won't protect us from distracted drivers.

2. Cars, and the people driving them, are deadlier.

Since the pandemic, nearly every dangerous driving behavior has become more common: Street racing, speeding, texting, road rage, driving under the influence, you name it.

Vehicles themselves have changed, too. Trucks and SUVs keep getting taller and heavier, with gigantic blind spots that make it harder for drivers to see and vertical grills that cause deadlier injuries. Combine risky driving with deadlier vehicles, and the results are exactly what you’d expect.

3. DOT&PF is sabotaging its own safety work.

If you thought it couldn’t get worse, buckle up!

The Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities receives federal funding specifically for road safety projects, and has planned Proven Safety Countermeasures on high-crash roads like Gambell and Ingra, A street, and Northern Lights.

But then last week, DOT&PF announced that it is defunding most Anchorage-area safety projects for 2026, cutting roughly $19 million from Central Region—almost all of it within Anchorage—while fully funding projects in every other region of the state.

The reason? They’re afraid of making drivers angry if the safety improvements mean that cars might have to slow down by a few seconds. That’s not editorializing or opinion, but the actual words of DOT&PF’s Chief Engineer, on the public record.

Let that sink in. At the height of a traffic-violence crisis, the state chose to strip safety funding from the roads that need it most. And in the meantime, these stopped projects are in turn delaying other projects, like sidewalk repairs along Northern Lights.

It’s safety failures all the way down: Lifesaving projects paused, then defunded; taxpayer dollars wasted; and so many lives needlessly lost.

Let’s bust one more myth on the way out…

FICTION: We can’t do anything to change this.

FACT: Not only can we fix our roads, other cities have already shown us how it's done.

Take Hoboken, New Jersey, where they have gone seven consecutive years without a single traffic death. How?

In Hoboken, much of the recent Vision Zero work has been focused on “daylighting” intersections. That involves installing things like flexible posts, rain gardens or bike racks to prevent cars from parking at street corners and improve visibility between pedestrians, bikers and drivers. It’s already illegal to park in many of those spots to begin with, but the daylighting projects make it practically impossible.

Hoboken has also added multiway stop signs at some intersections, repainted crosswalks for higher visibility and added curb extensions in some areas to help get pedestrians across the street more quickly. The city also reduced the speed limit to 20 miles per hour from 25 mph citywide in 2022.

A hallmark of Hoboken’s Vision Zero work has been the steady pace of improvements. The city tries to make small safety upgrades every time it repaves a street, rather than putting all its energy into transforming the most dangerous high-traffic areas, says Ryan Sharp, Hoboken’s director of transportation and parking.

Or look at Helsinki, Finland, a city that shares a lot more with Anchorage than people might think. Long, dark winters. Snow and ice. And yet, people walking, biking, and taking transit year-round. Helsinki recently went an entire year with zero traffic deaths. By this point, you probably have an idea of how they did it, right?

"A lot of factors contributed to this, but speed limits are one of the most important," Roni Utriainen, a traffic engineer with the city’s Urban Environment Division, told the media organization. More than half of Helsinki's streets now have a speed limit of 30 km/h (about 18 -19 mph).

In addition to lowering the speed limit, several other factors contributed to the city’s accomplishment in making its streets safer, he added. These include: better street design and infrastructure, improved vehicle technology for both cars and other personal transport options, increased cooperation with traffic police, better traffic education, and more traffic cameras and automated enforcement systems.

For example, the city made investments in its infrastructure, upgrading and improving the design of crosswalks and intersections to better protect pedestrians and cyclists.

The throughline in both places is simple: They stopped pretending that traffic deaths are inevitable. They treated them as a design failure, not a personal one. They accepted that human error is unavoidable, and that the job of a transportation system is to prevent those errors from turning deadly. And if Anchorage's transportation leaders did the same, we could join the ranks of vibrant, livable cities with safe streets for everyone.