Anchorage shifts $3.46 million from Denali Street to a Fairview pedestrian boulevard

Anchorage is dropping a planned walking and biking project on Denali Street and moving $3.46 million of it to Fairview, where a car-oriented street would become a pedestrian boulevard.

The region's transportation policy committee approved the revised project list July 15. The money joins $16.5 million already programmed for the Hyder Pedestrian Boulevard, whose four phases are estimated at about $33.5 million.

Planning documents describe Hyder Street as a corridor built for vehicle throughput that could instead link the Chester Creek and Ship Creek greenbelts at neighborhood scale. The Fairview Community Council has pushed for that conversion, and a Fairview street network study moved up from long-term to short-term so it lines up with the rest of the work.

Denali Street is not off the books. The stretch from Fireweed Lane to Tudor Road stays on the city's Complete Streets table, and staff recommended keeping the Eagle Street segment as a neighborhood greenway. The section between Tudor Road and International Airport Road would need other funding.

Assembly Member Erin Baldwin Day said she was concerned the committee was stripping projects off the bottom of the list wholesale to free about $16 million for Hyder, and offered a substitute that kept most of them. Members also asked whether the reshuffle would delay sidewalks in Fairview. The revised list passed without objection.

The lists are not final. The draft plan returns to the committee before it is posted for public comment, and again afterward.