The Alaska Department of Transportation is planning major changes to the stretch of the Seward Highway between Anchorage and Girdwood. State officials say the project will make important improvements on a dangerous stretch of road. But the plan is raising the hackles of some Anchorage policy makers, who say it’s the wrong fix in the wrong place.
Anchorage Assembly member Daniel Volland is one of them.
“I'm still unconvinced that a highway widening project is going to create more safety,” he said.
Volland is part of the Anchorage Metropolitan Area Transportation Solutions, a multi-agency organization that votes on Anchorage-area traffic projects. At a recent meeting, he said there are many roads just within the downtown district he represents that are much more deadly than that stretch of the Seward Highway.
“I don't understand the prioritization – what seems to be the strong prioritization on this project coming from DOT,” he said.
Critics like Volland say at best, the state will be embarking on a long, expensive project, which won’t significantly improve safety. At worst, the changes could make the road less safe, they say.
The project is expected to take up to 20 years and cost nearly $1.5 billion. DOT officials say it would be mostly federally funded, although the state has spent millions on the design process that cannot be federally reimbursed.
The Alaska Department of Transportation is planning the Safer Seward Highway project for roughly 20 miles of the road between Anchorage and Girdwood, from milepost 118 at Rabbit Creek to milepost 98.5 at Bird Flats. Right now, most of that stretch is a two lane highway, with Chugach State Park on one side, and Turnagain Arm on the other.
The plan is to widen the road to four lanes, and straighten it out in places. But critics point out there’s a lot of data that shows people drive faster on wider, straighter roads. And that’s a problem, according to Heidi Simon, with Smart Growth America in Washington D.C.
“You cannot design for speed and safety at the same time,” she said.
Simon has worked with traffic engineers on transportation safety for more than a decade. She said it’s a simple formula: Higher speeds increase the likelihood that an accident will be deadly.
“We know that speed is one of the biggest contributing factors to whether someone's going to walk away from a crash with their life,” she said.
The speed limit is currently 55 along the corridor, and the draft plan doesn’t change that. But the speed limit doesn’t matter, Simon said. It’s the way the road feels to people that determines how fast they drive, not the posted speed limit.
The new design would also include wider shoulders, which Simon said will increase the feeling of an open freeway, encouraging speeding. But the fact that the four lanes will be divided by a median should help, she said.
DOT’s Lauren Little is leading the Safer Seward project. She said she’s confident the four lane divided design will make the highway safer.
“It just provides that margin for people to all get what they need out of this highway without running into each other,” she said.
Right now, she said, drivers don’t have space to recover if they start to leave the road.
“If you make a mistake out there, you're running into the ocean, you're running into a rock, or you're running into another car,” she said.
The median would prevent head-on collisions, she says. DOT collected data from 2017 to 2021, and found that three of the four fatal accidents in the corridor were head-on.
Little said she doesn’t believe widening the road will encourage people to drive faster.
“We're already seeing people speeding,” she said. “The people that want to go 80 are going to go 80.”
Little said DOT used predictive modeling to show the proposed plan would decrease crashes by roughly two-thirds.
But Rabbit Creek Community Council board member Nancy Pease thinks DOT is using bad data to justify its plan. In notes from public testimony at a Jan. 14, 2026 Safer Seward Highway open house, she said that the safety and traffic capacity studies are flawed and deceptive, and that there were many missing details on the design, and therefore the impacts.
Assembly member Erin Baldwin Day is also part of AMATS, the committee that votes on Anchorage-area traffic projects. She agrees with Pease. DOT cherry-picked the numbers they used to plan the project, she said.
“The data and the assumptions around this project are fundamentally flawed, and therefore anything that comes out of that is going to be problematic for the community,” she said.
And she said while DOT’s plan focuses on head-on collisions, DOT’s own data shows that more than twice as many accidents happen when vehicles slide off the road.
DOT’s data also shows most crashes, and the most severe crashes, happen in the winter, she said, but the project has been designed for summer traffic volumes and driving behaviors.
And Baldwin Day said state planners admitted that DOT didn’t use consistent criteria when considering possible alternative plans.
Baldwin Day said that while that stretch of the Seward Highway does need safety improvements, DOT’s proposal is the wrong plan.
“This project, as it is presently envisioned, is a boondoggle waiting to happen,” she said.
She said she doesn’t understand why DOT engineers would choose a design that goes against basic traffic safety principles.
“There are so many things that just don't make sense, and so if you're perplexed, if you're confused, if you're wondering like what on earth is going on here – really valid response,” she said.
The city’s Planning and Zoning Commission had similar concerns last fall. In an unusual move, board members voted unanimously to send the project back to DOT for further work, saying, among other things, “The project team needs to respond with math and with data.”
Baldwin Day said she doesn’t understand why DOT is prioritizing this 20-mile stretch of the Seward Highway in the first place. She points to DOT’s own ranking of the state’s most dangerous roads. The corridor doesn’t even crack the top 50, she said.
In Anchorage alone, she said, there are nearly two dozen roads that are more dangerous than the 20 mile stretch on Seward Highway. Those include the sites of two recent fatal crashes: 36th Street and Northern Lights Boulevard.
Baldwin Day said she’s repeatedly asked DOT officials for clarifications, but she hasn’t been satisfied with the responses.
DOT’s Lauren Little said she knows people are confused.
“We need to do a better job of helping people understand how we got here, and in understanding if there are components that we missed,” she said.
The project is moving forward after the Anchorage mayor’s office cast the deciding vote at an AMATS meeting in mid-July.
Assembly members will discuss community feedback about the Safer Seward Highway Project at the Aug. 4 Assembly agenda.
