A Seward Highway Safety Meeting
By Soren Wuerth
TNews Editor
The sign-in table for a "safer Seward Highway" meeting held Wednesday in Girdwood was like a merch booth at a music festival.
A representative from HDR, a private environmental consulting firm, handed out Cotopaxi Fanny Packs, blue stress balls, and Nalgene water bottles.
"No, please, take one," said the young woman at the door. "We've got plenty."
Chris Hughes explains Powerpoint slides during an HDR presentation. (Photo by Soren Wuerth)
Just inside, six pizzas covered a counter and a bowl of candy stood on a table with blank comment sheets and other handouts.
Signs lined both walls displayed maps with sections of the highway (McHugh Creek, Potter Marsh, and so on) highway design options (separated two lane, three and four lanes), breakdown displays of accidents and other informational graphics.
Soon about 20 people sat down while HDR consultants stood at the perimeter of the Community Center room.
Taking turns, four HDR consultants gave an overview that included a timeline, various highway construction alternatives, the purpose for the project, and the safety concerns that prompted what could be a billion-dollar investment.
Sunset along Turnagain Arm. (Photo by Soren Wuerth)
The project considers cutting into the mountainside and filling areas alongside Turnagain Arm from Mile post 98, just south of Bird, to 118 the Rabbit Creek interchange just north of Potter Marsh.
Depending on the alternative, up to two more lanes would be added in the name of safety.
In 2006 the segment of the Seward highway from Rabbit Creek Rd to Bird was designated a "safety corridor" due to an elevated number of crashes.
Over the years, safety measures were carried out, such as expanding turnout lanes, putting up rock mesh or adding centerline rumble strips, "... small projects that don't increase the footprint a lot but try reduce the number of crashes," said Chris Hughes of HDR.
"Another piece of that is the double traffic fines that everybody sees," Hughes said.
A state Department of Transportation flyer said these improvements--along with increased law enforcement, faster emergency response times and educational efforts--have reduced serious crashes by 40 percent. Fatal crashes, however, have remained elevated compared to other highways in the state.
Safety improvements had been planned for just Windy Corner (milepost 105-107), but expanded after a 2020 environmental review to encompass nearly the entire winding 20 miles from Bird to Potter.
Hughes showed a heat map of 30 years of crashes, red clusters along the entire stretch of road. In the past five years, there have been five fatal crashes on the highway, according to the DOT.
The DOT's website on the project opens with the question, "Why?", then offers hypothetical situations: the inconvenience of waiting for a traffic accident to clear, dodging rocks on the road, having to "slam on the breaks because a driver decided to pull off the road at the last minute to look for sheep or beluga whales."
Environmental consulting firm HDR had pizzas on hand for meeting participants. (Photo by Soren Wuerth)
Its narrative also mentions people illegally crossing railroad tracks to visit Beluga Point, stating the railroad "documented almost 1,000 trespassing pedestrian crossings in a day."
"In 2022," it goes on to say, "one person died walking along the railroad tracks near Bird Point."
Despite a drop in the number of serious crashes since safety measures were taken in 2006, the highway isn't safe enough to warrant a change in its designation as a safety corridor.
"After 17 years of this being a dedicated safety corridor, we're not really seeing a change in numbers without doing something major, more of reconstruction-type project where you're really going to see significant changes," Hughes said.
He said, despite what some may think, crashes don't happen more in the summer.
"January and February are the two highest months for crashes, actually," Hughes said. "July is the third highest."
DOT is trying to remove the highway's designation as a safety corridor and, once construction ends on other safety corridors--the Parks and Sterling highways and Knik/Goose Bay road--the Seward Highway segment along Turnagain Arm will be the only remaining highway with a Safety Corridor designation.
Over the years, traffic volume on the highway has steadily increased, according to a DOT safety audit, to more than 10,000 vehicles per day on average.
The audit says that fatalities have actually dropped since the safety corridor was imposed, along a 30 mile stretch, from an average of 8.9 fatalities per year to 5.24.
"Fatal crashes are [a] very small data sample in each corridor, each year," the report states. "They can be a volatile indicator of performance. Combining fatal and serious injury crashes is recommended ..."
In every design, there is a bike path envisioned.
As the highway is the only access to the Kenai Peninsula, another consideration is that the highway is reliably open to move traffic in the event of a crash, Hughes said.
Neither DOT, on its webpage, nor HDR spokespeople at the meeting, explicitly said raising the speed limit was a factor at play in its decision to begin planning, but different models allow for an increase on some stretches.
Moving the highway, and railroad, further into Turnagain Arm would require permits and cramped worked conditions, like filling only during low tide, since it would invade beluga whale habitat. Excavating the mountainside would be expensive and compromise the scenic value of the corridor.
But these and other impacts will be studied over coming months, with more public hearings, before an environmental assessment is ultimate produced in, HDR's representative said, about a year.
The DOT is in the process of revising its prioritization of statewide projects and, though federal funding is available, state funding will also be required, particularly for maintenance of a highway that could double the lane miles between Girdwood and Rabbit Creek Rd.
“There will have to be compromises and there will be impacts," Hughes said.