Pedestrian and bicycle crash hotspots in San Antonio

If a driver hit you while you were walking or riding a bike in San Antonio, you were not in a rare situation. In 2024 the city recorded roughly 917 crashes involving people on foot or on bikes, and 66 of those people were killed. That was the highest crash count in three years.¹

The city has finally started naming the streets where this happens. In late 2025 the Transportation Department published a public High-Injury Network Dashboard built from Texas Department of Transportation crash records for 2018 through 2022.²³ It ranks the corridors carrying the most fatal and severe crashes, and the list is very specific.

The corridors carrying the most severe crashes

Culebra Road sits at the top. The dashboard logs 116 severe or fatal crashes along Culebra alone.³ Behind it come Bandera Road with 38, Roosevelt Avenue with 37, Southeast Military Drive with 34, and Southwest Military Drive with 31.³ Culebra crosses the West Side, and Roosevelt and both Military Drives run through the South Side.

None of these are quiet streets. They are wide, fast arterials with long gaps between signals, the kind of road where crossing on foot means covering several lanes with no protection.

The city has money to fix some of them. In 2025 the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded San Antonio a $4.4 million Safe Streets and Roads for All grant aimed at ten High-Injury Network corridors.⁴ The list, with its exact segments, reads like a map of the danger. It includes Zarzamora Street from Fredericksburg Road to SW Military Drive, Marbach Road and Fredericksburg Road from Interstate 10 to Flores Street, Castroville Road from Highway 90 to 19th Street, and Flores Street from I-10 to Blanco Road.⁴ The rest fall along Pleasanton Road and Moursund Boulevard, Perrin Beitel, Blanco Road up to Loop 1604, General McMullen Drive, and W.W. White Road from Loop 410 to Southeast Military Drive.⁴

A few fixes are already in the ground. On W.W. White Road the city built a mid-block crosswalk with warning beacons between Lavender Lane and Lord Road, and new mid-block crossings and median work are going in where Blanco Road meets West Avenue.⁵ The public campaign attached to the grant is called Keep Crossings SAfe, or Cruza SAno y SAlvo.⁵⁴

Why so many crashes are on the highways

Here is a detail that changes how you read the map. About 60% of pedestrian crashes in San Antonio happen outside the city's own jurisdiction, on TxDOT-controlled roadways like U.S. Highway 90, Interstate 10, and Interstate 35.¹ The city dashboard and the safety grant only reach city streets, so a big share of the deadliest crashes belong to the state to fix.

That gap matters because highways are where the darkness problem is worst. Across the country, 76.9% of pedestrians killed in 2023 died after dark, and more than 80% of pedestrian deaths on freeways, interstates, and principal arterial roads happened after dark.⁶ San Antonio's frontage roads and access ramps fit that pattern.

The trend is going the wrong way

The recent local numbers are hard to read any other way. In its 2023 tally for the San Antonio district, TxDOT counted 606 crashes involving pedestrians, 67 of them fatal, plus 94 serious pedestrian injuries.⁷ Set against five years earlier, pedestrian deaths were up 18% and serious injuries up 21%, even though total crashes fell 4%.⁷ Statewide, pedestrians are about 1% of the people in Texas crashes but 19% of everyone killed on the road.⁷

Step back and the metro looks worse over time, not better. Smart Growth America's 2026 Dangerous by Design report counted 408 pedestrian deaths in the San Antonio metro from 2020 through 2024, up from 328 in the five years before, ranking the metro 24th of the 101 largest in the country.⁸ Texas as a whole recorded 3,865 pedestrian deaths over that same 2020 to 2024 window.⁸

Where cyclists get hit

Bicycle crashes cluster differently than pedestrian crashes. A peer-reviewed analysis of TxDOT crash records from 2014 through 2018 found 1,528 bicycle-vehicle crashes in San Antonio, which killed 16 riders and left 105 with incapacitating injuries.⁹ Bike crashes were under 1% of all crashes but nearly 4% of the fatal and incapacitating ones.⁹

The densest cluster is downtown. East Houston Street at North St. Mary's Street was among the worst intersections in the city, with 10 bicycle crashes in the study period, and East Market Street at North Alamo Street was close behind.⁹ The most severe crashes, though, tended to happen outside the core, near spots like North New Braunfels Avenue at Hays Street and Guadalupe Street at South Hamilton Street.⁹ Roughly half of all bike crashes happened at intersections, and about one in five happened between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., when the injuries ran more severe.⁹

The toll has climbed since then. Bexar County lost three cyclists to drivers in 2020, seven in 2021, and nine in 2022.¹⁰ Across the eight-county metro, there have been 55 fatal cycling crashes and 266 serious-injury crashes since 2013.¹⁰ Some of those deaths made the corridor problem personal. Bike shop owner Tito Bradshaw was killed on the 1900 block of East Houston Street in 2019, and Broadway is still a road riders flag as dangerous.¹⁰

What this means if you were hit

San Antonio set up its Vision Zero program in 2015 and adopted its first action plan in 2024.³ The city can now point to the exact corridors where people die. That does nothing for the person who was already hit.

If a driver struck you on Culebra, on one of the Military Drives, downtown near St. Mary's, or on a highway frontage road, the location is part of your story. The crash report, the street's own record on the city dashboard, and the lighting and design of the spot can all matter when an insurer tries to pin the crash on you. If you are staring down medical bills and a claim, you can find an attorney who handles pedestrian and bicycle cases.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. San Antonio Report, "Deadly weekend for pedestrians crossing streets in San Antonio." https://sanantonioreport.org/deadly-weekend-for-pedestrians-crossing-streets-in-san-antonio/

2. City of San Antonio Transportation Department, High-Injury Network Dashboard. https://cosagis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/4f93c195971a44d28e6e5b069d673c38

3. KSAT, "New public dashboard highlights San Antonio's most fatal, severe crash hotspots" (Dec. 4, 2025). https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2025/12/04/new-public-dashboard-highlights-san-antonios-most-fatal-severe-crash-hotspots/

4. City of San Antonio, "Keep Crossings SAfe / Cruza SAno y SAlvo" (SASpeakUp). https://saspeakup.com/keepcrossingssafe

5. San Antonio Report, "San Antonio targets high-injury corridors with new safety campaign." https://sanantonioreport.org/san-antonio-targets-3-high-risk-deadly-corridors-for-new-pedestrian-safety-campaign/

6. Governors Highway Safety Association, Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2024 Preliminary Data. https://www.ghsa.org/resource-hub/pedestrian-traffic-fatalities-2024-data

7. KSAT, "TxDOT: Pedestrian crashes and deaths increase over fall, winter months" (Oct. 31, 2024). https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2024/10/31/txdot-pedestrian-crashes-and-deaths-increase-over-fall-winter-months/

8. Smart Growth America, Dangerous by Design 2026, state and metro rankings. https://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/signature-reports/dangerous-by-design/2026-dbd-rankings/

9. "Analysis of Bicycle-Motor Vehicle Crashes in San Antonio, Texas" (peer-reviewed study, PubMed Central). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8431750/

10. San Antonio Report, "San Antonio's growth adds congestion, danger for local cyclists." https://sanantonioreport.org/san-antonio-traffic-danger-bicycle-plan/