The swoosh of traffic on Trainor Gate Road rises and falls with weekday rhythm on the morning of May 26, close to the start of the penultimate day of school in Fairbanks. Cars vary in speed as they pass F Street, which bisects Trainor Gate and links Tanana Middle and Ladd Elementary schools to a residential area that’s home to many students.
Standing at the corner of the two roads, Olivia Lunsford, a transportation planner with Fairbanks Area Surface Transportation Planning, sometimes can’t help but react.
“Wow, look at this one. Wow. So fast,” she says, as an orange Subaru Outback whizzes by. “I don’t have the best poker face. I see someone speeding, and I’m like, ‘What!’”
While she exclaims, students jot down what they see.
Earlier in the morning, just after 7 a.m., Lunsford instructed the group of middle schoolers on how to collect a variety of traffic data at the intersection, something students have done several times throughout the month of May with the help of FAST Planning.
Not all of the children are interested in the task; a couple say they’re participating simply because they’re bored or have nothing better to do. But others take it more seriously – and know full well the location wasn’t chosen at random.
“There was a time when a kid, sadly, got runned over. And I think this is important so no other kid gets to experience that pain,” says sixth-grader Isabella Vang, sitting not far from where that happened just under three years ago.
In September 2023, a Chevy Tahoe struck and seriously injured a 12-year-old student on the crosswalk that traverses Trainor Gate Road, despite the assistance of a crossing guard, Fairbanks police said at the time. (The driver, 45-year-old Tabitha Emerson, pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree assault in 2024 in connection with that incident and a separate pedestrian strike elsewhere in Fairbanks three months prior, state court records show.)
According to Fairbanks Police Department, 18 total collisions at the Trainor Gate and F Street intersection have been reported to the department since 2023, two of which involved injuries. Those figures include vehicle-vehicle, vehicle-cyclist and vehicle-pedestrian collisions, said FPD spokesperson Teal Soden, and the numbers might not capture every incident, since certain minor traffic accidents don’t have to be reported to police.
Safety concerns at the intersection had been on the radar of public officials for some time before a student walking to school wound up in the hospital. A 2012 Safe Routes to Schools analysis said the traffic on Trainor Gate Road created an “obstacle” for children crossing it. The analysis recommended installing a pedestrian-activated flashing beacon at the crosswalk as well as a raised center island “to provide pedestrian refuge.”
Neither of those things happened.
Changes to intersection gained renewed attention this year, when City of Fairbanks Mayor Mindy O’Neall began pushing for more safety controls. In a January letter to FAST Planning, O’Neall wrote that the presence of a crossing guard didn’t prevent the 2023 incident, and that she’s “gravely concerned about the potential for another, worse outcome.”
She urged “FAST Planning to work closely with DOT (Alaska Department of Transportation) and other agencies necessary to identify and install an appropriate traffic safety feature during this summer construction season.”
The students’ effort to gather user data is now one of a handful of activities related to the intersection scheduled to happen this year, and the morning of May 26 is eighth-grader Hamish Brunner’s first time on the job.
He’s focused and methodical. (His favorite school subject is science, after all.) As numbers pop up on a speed gun display mounted on a tripod, Brunner places tickmarks on a sheet fastened to the clipboard in his hands. A couple other clipboards lie nearby, also awaiting the blue ink of his pen.
“There’s a lot of people that have been speeding or not stopping all the way,” he says.
Brunner is stationed behind the large, grey sign for Birchwood Homes, a residential area across the street from Tanana Middle, right outside Fort Wainwright. He’s mostly hidden from drivers, though his head peeks over the top of the sign.
“If they’re looking, they can see me, but other than that, quite hard to spot,” Brunner says.
That’s by design, according to Lunsford. This round of data is meant to show how people behave at the intersection when no one is looking, and it’ll be compared to data other students collected earlier in May, when they were clearly visible.
So, on this day, keeping a low profile is the name of the game. And on the opposite side of Trainor Gate Road, the Tanana Middle School side, sixth-grader Nailah Phillips also records her observations – between sips from a rapidly slimming juicebox, bites of a crumbling breakfast bar and conversations with peers, like Vang.
“I think it’s crazy that we have to do this, especially near a school, because there’s been multiple accidents in this intersection because people don’t know how to follow the road rules,” says Phillips.
She kneels on a tarp laid out in a ditch with her food and drink as she and other students count people on foot, mark down speeds and watch for rolling stops at the stop signs on F Street.
She doesn’t walk to school, she says. She usually gets dropped off, but she’s crossed the road before.
“I was scared because I saw like so many people going past the speed limit and I was like, ‘I don’t want to walk past here,” Phillips says.
There’s a reason the students witness cars zipping down this stretch of Trainor Gate, even though it’s a school zone, where blinking signs indicate when the speed limit drops from 35 mph to 20 mph, according to Corey DiRutigliano, also a transportation planner with FAST Planning. The road design doesn’t deter drivers from going fast, he says, and the current signage just isn’t cutting it.
“It’s between a quarter mile- and half mile-long dead straightaway, runs along railroad tracks. Vehicles get up to a pretty good speed,” he says. “There’s not a lot of what people in the biz would call friction, which means objects close to the road that would make folks slow down.”
That – getting folks to slow down – has for years been a top priority of Heather Johnson, the principal of Tanana Middle School.
“These are our kids. These are our most valuable resources here. And they’re not safe when they’re crossing the street,” she says, looking out at the road and the children near it.
Some things are already in the works. FAST Planning has a pilot project slated for this summer, which includes painting asphalt art at the intersection, and the Alaska Department of Transportation is planning to install speed tables on Trainor Gate Road either this fall or next year, according to department spokesperson Angelica Stabs.
A speed table is “similar to a speed hump, but it includes an elongated flat top designed to help calm traffic while maintaining smoother vehicle movement,” she wrote by email.
But more structural, snow-proof, permanent upgrades to the intersection itself aren’t yet in place. That’s likely to require collaboration between several local, state and federal agencies, including the City of Fairbanks, the Alaska Railroad Corporation, DOT and the military, according to Lunsford. The intersection is at the nexus of what she calls a “right-of-way spaghetti,” or a location where infrastructure powers of the various agencies meet.
Johnson, the principal, won’t be in her post at Tanana Middle when, and if, transportation officials choose to untangle that spaghetti. After almost three decades in education, she retired at the end of the school year, just a few days after Vang, Brunner, Phillips and other students climbed behind a sign and kneeled on a tarp to watch traffic patterns next to where they and their peers go to learn.
But Johnson said one thing she’s not retiring from is the push to ensure kids can make it to school safely.
“That’s a right,” she said. “They deserve that.”