Smart Growth America is working with the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities (AKDOT&PF) to bring the Complete Streets approach to the 49th state. I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Alaska in my first month on the Thriving Communities team, where I joined colleagues and collaborators to participate in several events aimed at advancing street safety measures in Anchorage and Bethel.
In our collaboration with AKDOT&PF, we are conducting workshops and open houses in five locations across Alaska in February and March. During these events, we learn from state staff, city staff, community members, and others about local infrastructure design, construction, and maintenance. We also provide information about Complete Street strategies and practice applying this approach together using upcoming street reconstruction projects as examples.
We will use what we learned during our visit, other conversations with state staff and community members, and a concurrent document review, to make recommendations to AKDOT&PF on how to best design and implement a statewide Complete Streets policy. As the start of my time with SGA, this trip highlighted for me the importance of creativity in location-specific solutions. Every place has its unique climate and transportation challenges, but every place can learn from others and work together to keep people connected.
Anchorage
The day before the Anchorage workshops, I took some time to explore the historic downtown. With the goal of getting to the waterfront, I carefully penguin-walked on the icy sidewalks. The routes were narrow, made narrower by the snow covering half of the walk, and right next to a fast road. What could have been a 20 minute walk took about 40 as I carefully made my way around the snow and ice, stopping to take photos of everything interesting along the way: murals, snow-covered landscaping outside the museum, unique signage, and even a gentleman on a bike who let me take his picture (“really?!” he said when I asked). I got to Captain Cook Monument, overlooking the water, and a sign there showed I would have been able to see Denali if the sky was clear. Trying not to slide down the hill to Elderberry Park, I made it to the coastal trail, where I ran into only one other person: a skier taking advantage of the wide path on a Sunday afternoon.
The trails that ring the city are impressive, especially with their proximity to rail, shipping, and other industrial areas. I like that even with the city’s role as an essential part of Alaska’s trade routes, Anchorage still carves out space for people to enjoy the outdoors without having to drive past the city limits. At the same time, the people I saw walking and biking in the city were carving space for themselves, using what room they could find on the icy sidewalks. We heard a lot in the workshops about the challenges of winter maintenance and snow removal, but navigating the city on foot, and seeing how many other people do so as well, was a reminder of how essential that maintenance is.
The workshop included a walk audit, where we all bundled up and walked two blocks over, to experience the walking conditions of Ingra Street and Gambell Street, state highway routes that split a neighborhood. We carefully navigated the snow and ice on the sidewalk, which pushed us uncomfortably close to an even busier road than what I’d walked along the day before. Stopping at the quiet Hyde Street intersection, part of a bike boulevard network, the community representatives described their visions for calming traffic to reconnect the neighborhood on either side of the highway. The next day of the workshop, we used maps of the area we had walked to redesign the streets and intersections to address the safety issues we’d seen and felt in the walk audit. Rather than a formal design process, this exercise was for participants to practice applying the Complete Streets strategies we’d discussed on the first day to an environment we’d all experienced together. We then used this example to dig more deeply into the barriers that currently prevent these ideas from being implemented, and to inform our recommendations to the state.
Bethel
As wintry as I found Anchorage, it did not prepare me for how Bethel’s climate impacts all forms of transportation. Without sidewalks or a clearly demarcated place to walk, I avoided solo exploring, but the team and I drove around a bit to get a sense of the place before the workshops. We drove on the parts of the road that were clearly for cars–there were clear parallel lines without snow where tires had marked a path. People walked along the side of the road, carefully staying out of the way of those worn treads, but with no formal separation from the vehicles. We saw ATVs (“four-wheelers”) and snowmobiles (“snowmachines”) driving on the road and parking in most lots–what I had thought of as a recreational vehicle was a regular and essential mode.
The workshops and open house in Bethel illuminated the challenges of all of these forms of mobility sharing the same road, especially in winter. People walk on the roadside, four-wheelers use the driving lanes, snowmachines cross between intersections, and buses and the water truck make frequent stops along the road. Even in the state with the lowest population density in the US, the various modes of transportation must be carefully navigated and thoughtfully made safe.
In the winter, when the Kuskokwim River freezes, another form of travel is created: the snow is plowed, the path is marked, and vehicles can take the ice road from Kasigluk to Aniak. Villages help with maintaining the road and marking the path, using different materials of markers depending on what is affordable, with different colors indicating which route to use. The most special part of this trip to Alaska was driving the ice road and, thanks to the hospitality of Eric Evon and Henry Combs from the Association of Village Council Presidents, learning about the villages between Bethel and Napakiak.The ice road is the most dramatic example of all of the creativity needed for transportation and infrastructure in Bethel. As the landscape changes throughout the year, freezing and thawing, new routes are revealed and new modes are needed to maintain the connections across this region. There is potential for these seasonal and temporary approaches to infrastructure to inform practices in the lower 48 as well.
These challenges require collaboration and creativity, which we saw a lot of in the workshops. Participants brought up issues such as insufficient lighting and poor drainage, and were ready with a plethora of ideas, including roundabouts at major intersections, a separate trail for four-wheelers, and turnouts for bus access. Less structural ideas included reconfiguring the school bus route and placing temporary concrete barriers in the wide shoulder of the road for pedestrian safety in the summer. The exercise where we reimagined the highway reconstruction project for pedestrian safety put these ideas to paper, and the possibilities generated will hopefully be a resource for AKDOT&PF when the official design process begins. The specificity of these challenges, and the seasonality of some of the proposals, will definitely inform our recommendations as we make sure to incorporate the needs of rural Alaska to adopting Complete Streets.
Smart Growth America is currently wrapping up the final workshops and open houses in other parts of Alaska, learning about the local and regional strategies as well as the statewide challenges to transportation. We look forward to seeing further progress for Complete Streets across the state. On a personal level, getting to meet kind people doing good work is one of the best parts of a role like this. I am grateful to have had this opportunity and so excited for what is next.
Raveena John is the new Senior Program Associate for our Thriving Communities team. Learn more about Raveena and her role here.