A woman died Sunday night after being struck by a vehicle while she was walking along a highway on San Antonio's East Side, according to San Antonio police. The crash remains under active investigation, and authorities have not yet released the woman's identity or said whether the driver stayed at the scene.
Police reported that the woman was struck while walking on the highway, and that she died from her injuries, according to WOAI. Few other details have been made public so far, leaving open questions about exactly how the collision unfolded and what led the woman to be walking along the roadway in the first place.
A Pattern of Freeway Deaths Across San Antonio
This is not an isolated case. Hoodline reported just two days earlier that a woman was critically hurt running across I-10 near Wurzbach when a Camry rear-ended an Audi. Back in June, a 60-year-old man was fatally struck in a nighttime collision on a Loop 410 access road on the city's Southeast Side, and in February, a woman died after trying to cross the IH-10 median overnight.
San Antonio recorded 54 pedestrian deaths and four bicyclist deaths in 2025, part of a year in which total traffic fatalities in the city topped 100, according to data from the San Antonio Transportation Department cited by KSAT. The toll has made pedestrian safety a recurring concern for city officials working to reduce crashes on the busiest corridors.
Why State Highways Are Especially Dangerous
Roughly 60% of San Antonio's pedestrian crashes occur on state-managed Texas Department of Transportation roadways — including Interstate 10, Interstate 35, and U.S. 90 — rather than on city-controlled streets, per the San Antonio Report. These state highways often lack basic pedestrian infrastructure such as crosswalks and sidewalks, a structural gap that leaves municipal safety programs with limited reach along the fastest, most dangerous corridors.
State traffic regulations bar pedestrians from walking or running along the limited-access main lanes of interstates and major freeways, since those roads are designed exclusively for motor vehicles. Texas Transportation Code § 550.021 also requires drivers involved in a collision causing serious injury or death to immediately stop, remain at the scene, and render aid — a legal obligation that applies statewide regardless of who is deemed at fault.
Across the eight-county San Antonio metro area, pedestrian-involved crashes have consistently exceeded 1,000 per year between 2016 and 2025, with 93% of them occurring within Bexar County, according to the San Antonio Express-News, citing TxDOT's Crash Records Information System. Statewide, TxDOT reported 768 pedestrian traffic fatalities in 2024, placing Texas among the states with the highest total pedestrian deaths in the country.
City's Vision Zero Push Meets Its Limits
San Antonio was the first Texas city to adopt a formal Vision Zero action plan, and its 2024 version designated high-crash arterial streets and highway corridors as High Injury Networks to prioritize safety upgrades like concrete medians and signal improvements. In November 2025, the city's Transportation Department also launched the federally funded “Keep Crossings SAfe” awareness campaign, placing life-sized silhouettes near high-risk corridors to warn drivers and pedestrians alike.
Still, multi-lane interstates managed by TxDOT remain outside direct municipal control, creating friction between the city's safety goals and the realities of state highway design. The tension helps explain why fatal crashes keep occurring on freeways even as local engineering and awareness efforts expand elsewhere in the city.
The East Side has seen other recent vehicular tragedies as well. On August 11, a 52-year-old man died after becoming pinned between vehicles in a separate East Side incident, according to a report from Carabin Shaw, underscoring the broader vehicular safety hazards facing the area beyond highway pedestrian crashes specifically.
San Antonio police have not said whether charges are expected in Sunday night's crash, and the investigation into the woman's death continues. Anyone with information is encouraged to cooperate with SAPD's Traffic Investigation Detail as the case moves forward.
