Highway 25—the two-lane road that snakes from Gilroy to Hollister—has long been known for fatal, head-on collisions and car pile-ups. Fatalities this week renewed at least one Hollister resident’s desire to widen the road.
Hamdy Abbass lives in Hollister but commutes along Highway 25 to his job in Gilroy. He wants to see the route become a four-lane highway. Abbass was a co-founder of “Stay Alive on 25,” a grassroots campaign that started in response to a series of fatalities on the road in 2000. Now, he wants to resurrect the efforts.
“It is dangerous, if we don’t pay attention,” he said. “Every one of us count. And I hate to see somebody die.”
The “Stay Alive on 25” group collected more than 23,000 signatures in support of safety improvements, which its members ultimately delivered to locally elected state leaders and a representative with the governor’s office.
Currently, an environmental document is in progress that looks at the impact of widening the highway to four lanes and making it an expressway, said Mary Gilbert, the interim executive director of the Council of San Benito County Governments. Making the route an expressway would mean fewer access points, she explained.
The council is also looking into a plan for an interim project that would widen the existing route while keeping it a highway, Gilbert said. Officials are currently soliciting engineering firms to make that design, she said.
This week, two Hollister residents died just a day apart in accidents that closed the highway. Motorcycle rider Armando Gonzalez, 37, of Hollister, was hit in a head-on collision, ejected into a field and died at the scene Sunday evening, according to the California Highway Patrol. The following day, Hollister resident Omar Carino Mendez, 33, was killed in a seven-vehicle pileup involving a big rig.
Despite the recent fatalities, timing for expanding the highway or making it an expressway is uncertain.
“I can’t really speculate on that because it just really comes down to having the funding available,” Gilbert said. “So what we’re trying to be able to do is to be poised to use whatever funding we’d be able to get.”
Even adding safety improvements to the highway is not a cheap process. Local governments funneled bout $10 million into adding rumble strips along edges of the lanes, closing driveway access points to the highway and placing 4.75 miles of concrete median barriers, according to Gilbert and Free Lance archives. That work was completed in 2010, about 10 years after the initial efforts, which were in response to so many fatalities.
The next steps would be even more costly. It would cost $67 million for the first phase of the proposed four-lane expressway’s construction, which would add a lane to both sides of the road from San Felipe Road to Hudner Lane, Gilbert told the Free Lance as she reviewed the 2014 Regional Transportation Plan.
The second phase would cost $181 to add a lane to each side of the route from Hudner Lane to the county line, the interim executive director said.
“Right now, the state money is just not there for the project,” Gilbert said. “Nor does it look like it will be there any time in the next five to 10 years.”
Still, COG continues to pursue sources of funding for the project and to make preparations so it is ready to use money, if it becomes available, she said.
