Roadway improvements to infamous "Blood Alley" months away from completion
Less than a thousand feet from where James Dean died in a head-on collision 69 years ago, construction is ramping up on vital safety improvements along a notorious stretch of California highway.
The State Route 46 Corridor Improvement Project, which began in 2005 and has since widened nearly 40 miles of highway, is entering the home stretch, Caltrans officials said Thursday. The three remaining projects — the Cholame Segment, Wye Segment and Antelope Grade Segment — are all that remain.
The first two, which entered construction in fiscal 2022-23, incorporate a series of bridges, underpasses and 9.7 miles of road expanded into four-lane expressways. Together they cost about $279 million to construct.
The third phase, the Antelope Grade Segment, is only partially funded and would not begin construction until 2027.
Arguably the crown jewel of the projects involves the replacement of the Y-shaped junction of Highways 41 and 46 in Cholame, with a flyover interchange to prevent crashes.
The elevated interchange would carry drivers over Highway 46 and merge them onto Highway 41 without the need to enter oncoming traffic. At least 60 people have died at the intersection over the decades, said Ahron Hakimi, a regional transportation planner and Executive Director of the Kern Council of Governments. Today, the interchange has three times the state average for traffic fatalities, according to Caltrans data, despite small-scale improvements in the 1960s and 1990s.
These improvements, he said, would make the notorious roadway “significantly safer.”
“The contractor is making remarkable progress,” Hakimi said.
While much of the roadway under construction is in the northeast corner of San Luis Obispo County, it’s used heavily as a weekend thoroughfare for Kern and Fresno families headed west to the ocean and weary drivers returning home from the beach.
It’s a deceptively straight and smooth roadway, the fastest route for several millions Central Valley residents to get to places like Pismo Beach, Morro Bay or Montaña de Oro State Park. On either side, the road is surrounded by a postcard landscape of desert California: Cows meander in the foothills, tractors harvest grain on the valley floor and a creek runs along the side.
The area is known as the site where 24-year-old Dean died in a head-on crash on Sept. 30, 1955, when his Porsche Spyder barreled into a two-door Ford truck, whose driver was turning left onto Highway 41. The incident, along with others that followed, earned this interchange the moniker "Blood Alley."
“Finally now after almost 70 years, we’re going to fix that,” said Nicholas Heisdorf, the District 5 program manager for Caltrans.
While the Cholame segment is expected to be completed by the fall, conservative estimates place the Wye Segment at a 2026 finish, with Heisdorf saying the flyover should be done by the end of this year.
