With a body count of 14 deaths of pedestrians in the roadways of Anchorage this year alone, the Anchorage Assembly is being asked by Mayor Suzanne LaFrance and Assemblyman Randy Sulte to reverse its walk-anywhere approach and reinstate an ordinance pertaining to jaywalking, which has become a nightmare for drivers and deadly for those who wander into the roadways.
In August of 2023, the Anchorage Assembly passed an ordinance prompted by Assembly Daniel Volland, which made jaywalking a legal option in most places.
As the law stands now, it is up to the pedestrian to decide when and where it is safe to cross a street. Drivers say that people in Anchorage now wander in front of their cars all over the city, and they report many close calls on social media. 14 pedestrian deaths (and another in a parking lot) and even more injuries in 2024 — surpasses the entire state record for one year. That prompted LaFrance and Sulte to on Tuesday file the proposed reinstatement of fines for those crossing outside of marked crosswalks.
“The prohibition of pedestrians crossing the roadway outside of a marked or unmarked crosswalk sets a community and legal expectation that everyone, drivers and pedestrians alike, must take personal responsibility for their safety on the roads,” the ordinance says.
The 2023 ordinance was passed without consulting Anchorage police, who disagreed with the approach that “anything goes” in roadways would result in a better quality of life in Anchorage. In reality, police rarely enforced a jaywalking ticket-able offense, but the law encouraged people to use crosswalks.
Yet the woke majority of the Assembly decided that Anchorage jaywalking laws were racist and must go. Even this new ordinance echoes that belief system, saying “Municipality acknowledges that enforcement of pedestrian behavior laws can result in a disproportionate impact on people of color and unhoused individuals.” By impact, they apparently mean getting run over when people are stumbling into traffic.
The new ordinance says that a “preliminary review” suggests 11 of the pedestrian deaths occurred on a major roadway and outside of a marked or unmarked crosswalk, with the other three occurring within an unmarked crosswalk.
“Pedestrian safety is connected to individual and societal expectations and behaviors, deterrents, infrastructure improvements, and public education,” the new ordinance says. “Pedestrian safety is a complex issue, and with many different tactics to increase safety being simultaneously implemented through Vision Zero, using data to determine the efficacy of a single tactic can be difficult.”
The proposed ordinance requires police to track encounters and citations related to pedestrian contacts, injuries, and deaths, and any other relevant data to help inform the Assembly about the efficacy of jaywalking laws and to report back to the Assembly in 2026.
The ordinance was introduced Tuesday and will go through the public comment process before being voted on at a later time, possibly after a few more “Assembly equity deaths” occur on the streets of Anchorage.
The Assembly in September also considered adding back lighting to streets to improve visibility, without acknowledging that most of the pedestrian deaths are occurring during daylight hours, many of them in summer. The Assembly also considered but ultimately decided against a special driving law for a section of downtown Anchorage that prohibited a right turn on a red light.
