As neighborhood residents waited in the rain at bus stops or walked and biked under overcast skies, a plan to make safer a 7-mile stretch of the busy Zarzamora Street moved forward.
City Council signed off Thursday on two agreements for the Zarzamora Corridor Pedestrian Improvement Project, the first with VIA Metropolitan Transit, which will contribute funding for the project.
The council also approved a $5 million payment to a contractor that will oversee work, set to start in the coming months.
Years in the making, the project is intended to improve safety and walkability along a Southwest Side corridor long plagued by pedestrian accidents and fatalities.
Between 2016 and 2020, more than a dozen people died and 43 others were seriously injured in auto-pedestrian accidents along Zarzamora, according to numbers provided by the city.
City staff have estimated that proposed safety improvements will reduce those accidents by half.
The project is focused on a stretch of Zarzamora Street from Fredericksburg Road to Southwest Military Highway. It will bring sidewalks, driveway approaches, traffic signal upgrades and striping to the pedestrian-heavy corridor.
The project also includes a dedicated bus lane in both directions from Southwest Military to Nogalitos Street.
From Mistletoe Avenue to West Kings Highway, two bike lanes will be created between the two-lane roadway and the sidewalks.
Despite the wet roads and drizzle around noon on Thursday, a number of area residents and others could be seen making their way through the area on foot, bike or motorized wheelchair to the apartments, shops and vendors along South Zarzamora.
Much of the sidewalks along the roadway appeared cracked and uneven. Industrial trucks and passenger buses made up a big part of the afternoon’s vehicle traffic on roads crossed by train tracks in some places.
VIA bus stops are located at nearly every intersection along Zarzamora, and people waited on the dry benches under the bus shelter or stood in the doorways of nearby businesses and apartment complexes.
One VIA bus shelter is at a Zarzamora intersection where multiple four-lane streets come together at a five-way stop, clearly making crosswalks there a nerve-wracking and hazardous pursuit. Last year, three days before Christmas, a man was struck by a car and killed while using one of those crosswalks.
Thursday, a man at the South Laredo Street bus stop described the situation as “50-50” in terms of how dangerous it could be walking in the area.
Zarzamora is in council districts 1, 4, 5 and 7, west and south of downtown San Antonio, and in an area with high rates of poverty.
“It is very densely populated and a lot of people here don’t have vehicles,” said Susana Segura, who works as program coordinator at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center.
Segura also spends her Sundays driving around the neighborhoods near Zarzamora, serving meals to unsheltered people. She often talks with men and women who say they have been struck and injured by cars and she knows of others being killed.
In 2020, a man Segura had been helping, who was walking to his sister’s place in the Brady Gardens neighborhood to take a shower, was struck by a tractor-trailer while he waited to cross the street. The man lost his leg in the accident.
Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5) said Thursday she welcomed the improvements for her constituents who often take the bus or walk to her office and say they are concerned for their safety and well-being.
VIA Metropolitan Transit, which provides its Prímo service on Zarzamora, will chip in $500,000 for the project. A Prímo route offers comfortable seating, fewer stops and faster service than other types of bus routes.
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Construction is expected to start in spring 2024 and be completed in winter 2025, according to a spokesman for the city’s public works department. Council authorized a payment of $5.3 million to California-based Elecnor Belco for the improvements.
The project is being funded mostly through a federal grant plus $900,000 from the City of San Antonio and $500,000 from VIA.
The project has been on the city’s books for safety improvements since at least 2019. That year, the City of San Antonio, VIA and the National Association of City Transportation Officials targeted Zarzamora as a testing ground for safer, more efficient streets.
“I think people have been asking for help,” Segura said. “But it’s one of the busiest streets — just like Fredericksburg Road, [which] has a lot of pedestrian fatalities and bicycle fatalities, as does Commerce and on Old Highway 90, [where] there was a man that was hit on his bike maybe two weekends ago. He died.”
Disclosure: VIA Metropolitan Transit is a financial supporter of the San Antonio Report. For a full list of our business members, click here.
Correction: This story has been updated to remove a link to a previous story about a different federal grant for the Zarzamora Street improvements project.
