8 lives lost: Deadly start to the year on San Jose roads
Trend continues: Fatalities last year shattered records
A single candle burned last week at the intersection of Almaden Expressway and Foxworthy Avenue in South San Jose to memorialize two of the latest casualties in the largest, most tragic run of traffic deaths the Bay Area has seen in years.
Eight people died on San Jose’s roads in the first three weeks of 2022, including six pedestrians and a bicyclist. In that same time period, San Francisco had only one roadway death and Oakland three.
The candle burned for Gerald Garcia, 38, and Christopher Alvarez, 49, both killed on Jan. 18 as they tried to cross six lanes of traffic after sundown — becoming the city’s sixth and seventh traffic fatalities already this year.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Garcia’s cousin, Rochelle Valentine. From a gray van in a gas station parking lot, she struggled to understand what happened in the moments after he left a Walgreens and stepped into the street. “All it takes is one second. He didn’t deserve to go like that.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has marked a major step backward for traffic safety in the Bay Area’s largest city, which in 2020 invested $7 million toward eliminating traffic deaths and prides itself as being among the first in the country to pledge to end roadway fatalities.
It is no one-month trend. Sixty people were killed on San Jose streets in 2021, including 23 pedestrians — among the worst years in decades — and the grim tally grew last week when another person died from injuries suffered in an accident last year.
San Jose is not alone in confronting increasingly deadly roads. Traffic-safety advocates around the country are grappling with a surge in lethal collisions
in large part due to a pendulum swing in travel patterns brought on by the pandemic, as drivers and pedestrians became accustomed to speeding on empty roads and crossing deserted streets.
“It’s just not a good decision to cross an expressway outside a crosswalk,” said Christian Camarillo, a spokesperson for the San Jose police. “We’re not trying to victim blame. These are just facts.”
A closer examination of deadly crashes in major Bay Area cities shows that a majority occur on a small fraction of those cities’ roads and disproportionately impact communities of color. In Oakland, which on a per-capita basis is more dangerous than both San Jose and San Francisco, the most fatal and serious crashes occur on 6% of the city’s roadways, including International Boulevard and Bancroft Avenue, according to city studies.
In San Jose, an analysis by the Bay Area News Group of traffic fatalities in 2021 found that nearly 20% of roadway deaths occurred on just two corridors — Monterey Road and Tully Road — and half of the lives lost came on the city’s six-lane expressways that bring cars at high speeds through residential and retail districts. These roads, which are the backbone of vehicle travel in the city, face calls for better pedestrian protections
and — often to the distress of motorists — fewer lanes and lower speed limits.
All six of the pedestrians killed this year were crossing the street outside the crosswalk, and police say there needs to be better adherence to existing crosswalks. But pedestrian-safety advocates say this reflects flaws in roadway design — such as long stretches between marked intersections and crossings — not pedestrian behavior.
“We have to invest in design changes. That is what we know works,” said Shiloh Ballard, executive director of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. “You design narrower lanes so that people have to go slower.”
Among the Bay Area’s three largest cities, San Jose has been an outlier throughout the pandemic. While fatalities surged in Oakland and increased slightly in San Francisco during 2020, San Jose saw a significant drop in traffic deaths of nearly 20% as streets emptied.
Then in 2021, San Jose’s fatalities roared back to 61 victims as Oakland and San Francisco’s death count backtracked to 30 and 27, respectively. Walking remained among the most dangerous forms of navigating the Bay Area’s three largest cities, with pedestrians making up 37% of people killed in 2021.
In San Jose, unhoused people made up around a fifth of the
city’s traffic deaths.
Among them was Vanessa Arce, a 37-year-old mother to five children, who lived alone on the streets. She had come to San Jose in November 2019 looking to be closer to family. In April she was hit in her wheelchair by a Mercedes coupe while using the crosswalk at the city’s deadliest intersection — Monterey Road and Curtner Avenue in South San Jose — where crashes killed three people last year.
Arce’s death is among 14 fatal hit-and-run cases in the city last year, 12 of which remain open, according to San Jose police.
The day after Arce’s death, her mother, Felipa Pineda, searched for her at a homeless encampment unaware that she had died. “Usually when I went to look for her, if I didn’t see her, I could feel her,” said Pineda. “This time when I went, it felt empty.”
Right away, her mother started pushing the city to install a chainlink fence in the median area near the intersection to force people to use the crosswalk and the addition of traffic cameras. But those changes, which were unanimously approved by the City Council, have been beset by delays.
“They sit there in the City Council meetings and talk about making streets safer, but there’s no action,” said Pineda, who smudges sage on a shrine to her daughter every day.
Jesse Mintz-Roth, who heads Vision Zero — San Jose’s effort to eliminate traffic fatalities — said the delay in installing a chain-link fence near the intersection is because the city had to order fencing that it didn’t have “on hand.” A plan to install traffic cameras, which record and capture license plates, also needs to go through a lengthy process to assuage privacy concerns.
San Jose has embarked on a two-pronged approach aimed at changing driver behavior through public-education campaigns and investing in infrastructure, such as improved crosswalk visibility and street lighting along Senter Road. Tully Road is slated to see wider improvements, including curb extensions that slow turning speeds at two intersections, in the summer of 2023.
Still, Vignesh Swaminathan, a transportation consultant who helped design downtown San Jose’s network of protected bike lanes, criticized the city for being unwilling to address its most deadly intersections, all located out of the downtown core.
Buzz Henson was not optimistic that there will be much improvement to the stretch of Monterey Road where he was panhandling recently. Seven people died in car wrecks on the road last year.
“This is blood alley,” he said, “it’s been that way forever.”