Mariano Cano drives a delivery truck for a living, and he’s seen enough speeding and other unsafe driving on Monterey Road to make him extra cautious when traveling along the busy thoroughfare that runs from downtown San Jose to Gilroy, even if he hasn’t been in a collision.
“There are people that are just flying,” said Cano, 37, who moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles County five years ago for the job. “You’ll be really careful, especially at night, because there are a lot of crazy people. I always see people going crazy. So you’ve got to take precautions.”
Mariano Cano, a delivery driver in San Jose, gets into his truck at the Shell station at the intersection of Curtner Avenue and Monterey Road in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
Monterey Road has the grim distinction of being one of the Bay Area’s most deadly local roads, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis of federal data for 2,200 city and county roads in the nine-county region from 2002 to 2022, the most recent 20-year period for which there is data.
Over that period, 69 people died on Monterey Road. Another San Jose road saw dozens of fatalities: 31 people died on Almaden Expressway.
Other Bay Area roads also stood out for high numbers of traffic deaths over the last 20 years. One hundred twenty-nine people died on El Camino Real in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. Thirty-six people died on Richmond Parkway, 28 people died on San Pablo Avenue in Contra Costa County, 30 lost their lives on San Francisco’s Geary Boulevard and 57 people perished on International Boulevard in Alameda County.
Overall, the analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration records found that fatalities on the thousands of local roads in the nine-county Bay Area reached a 20-year high of 503 in 2022 after having declined from 456 in 2002 to 361 in 2012.
In Santa Clara County, fatalities on Monterey Road and Almaden Expressway worsened over the 20-year period, even though San Jose in 2015 became just the fourth U.S. city to adopt a “Vision Zero” initiative aimed at eliminating traffic deaths and severe injuries. Both streets are listed as priority safety corridors.
Monterey Road’s tragic toll includes a head-on collision between northbound and southbound motorists in December that killed both drivers and an earlier fatal solo accident, both in Morgan Hill. A month earlier, a 35-year-old man driving a Honda ran a red light on the road through Morgan Hill and died after colliding with a Jeep. In February 2024, a 38-year-old woman was fatally struck in a crosswalk on the road in San Jose by a GMC SUV. And in December 2023, a man riding a bicycle in a bike lane died after hitting a fire hydrant while avoiding a turning van on the road in San Jose.
“Monterey Road and Almaden Expressway are both large, fast, high-capacity corridors that were designed to move vehicles quickly,” said Colin Heyne, spokesperson for San Jose’s transportation department. “We know that speeding is the leading cause of fatal and severe injury crashes. Combined with the fact that these streets were originally designed with few pedestrian or bicyclist safety features, they pose safety challenges for all users.”
Monterey Road has been known locally as a dangerous route for years in the 1970s and 1980s the stretch north of Morgan Hill was known as “Blood Alley.” It had its origins in the late 19th century as a former stagecoach route that incorporated parts of El Camino Real, which connected California’s missions and followed a rail line. In the 20th century, it became part of the highway system, and eventually became part of Highway 101, until the freeway was realigned in 1984 and it again became a local road. But that didn’t make it less deadly, and San Jose officials in recent years flagged it as the city’s most dangerous.
Cars drive by at the intersection of Curtner Avenue and Monterey Road in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
The state relinquished control of Monterey Road mainly to the city in 2013, and the road’s design makes safety challenging, Heyne said. Almaden Expressway, owned and operated by Santa Clara County, is intended to quickly move large amounts of traffic across the city, he said.
Most of the accidents on Monterey Road are on the roadway through San Jose rather than its stretch south of the city overseen by Santa Clara County and the city of Morgan Hill, according to the city’s Vision Zero Power dashboard.
“We work to improve safety on these streets through a Safe System Approach, which incorporates multiple tactics and accounts for human mistakes and vulnerability,” Heyne said.
Heyne said a recent safety improvement project on Hillsdale Avenue, which is bounded by Almaden Expressway and Ross Avenue, eliminated an unnecessary travel lane, added protected bike lanes, improved pedestrian crossings and added delineators to the median to concentrate left turns and U-turns to a few strategically chosen locations.
William Riggs, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Management who studies transportation innovation, is not surprised Monterey Road and Almaden Expressway have a significant number of fatalities.
“Both roads you mentioned are higher capacity arterials that cut through residential neighborhoods,” said Riggs, director of the Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative, a mobility research hub, uniting business, policy and academic leaders. “So there are areas where there are lots of opportunities for what we say, multimodal conflict.”
When bicycles, pedestrians and vehicles are in conflict, local transportation must find ways to protect bikes and pedestrians and delineate the rules of the road between different users, Riggs said.
In Contra Costa County, San Pablo Avenue stretches through the cities of Hercules, Pinole, Richmond and San Pablo, and continues into the Berkeley and Oakland area. It’s a major thoroughfare for commuters, businesses and transit users, said Monish Sen, a senior civil engineer for the county.
The county’s transportation division works closely with local, regional and state agencies to implement strategies to reduce or eliminate fatalities and serious injuries, Sen said.
“Efforts include infrastructure improvements, enhanced enforcement measures, public awareness campaigns and data-driven decision-making to address incidents,” Sen said. “Several factors can contribute to higher collision rates, including traffic volume, driver behavior, such as speeding and impairment. Our ongoing safety assessments aim to pinpoint and mitigate these incidents.”
The region’s other high-fatality local roads haven’t seen the same rise in deaths over time as the South Bay’s Monterey Road and Almaden Expressway.
San Pablo Avenue typically had one or two fatalities per year, peaking at four in 2008 and 2020. Geary Boulevard mainly saw one or two deaths annually, with a high of three in 2004, 2007 and 2020. International Boulevard had fluctuating fatalities, reaching a peak of seven in 2017.
In San Jose, Jordan Cortes, 24, who lives near Monterey Road, said he is most concerned about speeding drivers.
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“I feel like everyone’s always in a rush, and it feels like everyone’s been rushing a lot lately these days, and nobody really takes the time to slow down their lives,” Cortes said. “I do see a lot of people always rushing around, not using blinkers and stuff.”
Are city efforts to improve safety working? San Jose data show Monterey Road within the city had a high of four fatalities in 2023, then just one death last year.
“These numbers fluctuate year over year, and it’s important that we look at all our Priority Safety Corridors, as many have sadly been the ‘most dangerous’ depending on the year and the criteria used for ranking,” Heyne said.
San Jose expanded its priority safety corridors in 2023 from 17 to 30 streets to allow more opportunities for safety improvements. Heyne said the city is working to implement a new speed safety camera pilot program that was enabled by a recent state law, Assembly Bill 645.
Residents like Cano and Cortes hope to see better signs and roadway lighting. But Cortes said what really needs to change are motorists’ attitudes.
“Not everything has to be a rush,” Cortes said. “Even if you are in a rush, your life and other people’s lives matter more.”
