A man crossing southbound in the crosswalk at 24th Street and Oak Street in Bakersfield was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries Wednesday after a vehicle struck him, and officers found him down in the roadway with severe injuries. The driver stayed at the scene and cooperated with investigators, while the intersection's four-way automated traffic signals appeared to be working properly at the time of the crash.
According to KBAK/BakersfieldNow, Bakersfield Police Department officers were called to the vehicle-pedestrian crash at the intersection, where the vehicle had been traveling eastbound on 24th Street when it struck the man. Police are asking anyone with information about the crash to call the department's traffic division at 661-327-7111.
A Corridor With a Grim History
This is not the first serious crash at 24th and Oak streets. A separate crash at the same intersection in 2024 left a pedestrian dead at the scene, according to KGET 17 News, which reported that police said the pedestrian had been standing in the center divider when a northbound vehicle on Oak Street attempted to turn east onto 24th Street and ran over the divider, striking the person. KGET also reported that a vehicle struck a pedestrian on 24th Street and then hit four other vehicles.
The stretch carries a reputation beyond fatal crashes. Bakersfield police identified 24th Street from Oak Street to F Street as the top location on the department's list of speeding citation hotspots, per bakersfieldnow.com's reporting. Department-wide, BPD reported issuing more than 5,000 speeding citations in 2023 alone, averaging about 13 per day, and recorded 1,440 crashes that year, with 149 attributed mainly to speeding.
Pedestrian Deaths Add Up Citywide
The crash adds to a broader pattern of pedestrian collisions tracked across Bakersfield. The Bakersfield Police Department reported 768 pedestrian-related collisions citywide from 2022 through 2025, including 590 injuries, 96 fatal injuries and 93 severe injuries, the station's report notes. As of Sept. 15 this year, the department had already logged 137 more pedestrian-related collisions in 2026, including 108 injury crashes, 15 fatal collisions and 19 severe-injury crashes.```
Union Avenue topped BPD's 2026 year-to-date list for most pedestrian-related collisions, with 15, while Friday emerged as the most common day for these crashes and 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. as the most common time window. The Bakersfield-Delano metropolitan area has been ranked the third deadliest metro area for pedestrians nationally, with five deaths per 100,000 people, according to a study cited by turnto23.com. Statewide, California pedestrian fatality trends rose from 2016 to 2022 before declining, according to the California Active Transportation Safety Information Pages.
How the City Decides Where to Act
City traffic engineers have described the process for addressing dangerous intersections to bakersfieldnow.com, explaining that they weigh vehicle counts, vehicle speeds, pedestrian and cyclist activity, lighting and police crash data before recommending changes. The city weighs those factors before recommending changes.
The city has tied that approach to Vision Zero, a framework aimed at eliminating traffic deaths through complete-street and multimodal redesigns of existing corridors, per the same bakersfieldnow.com report. Elsewhere in Bakersfield, crosswalk decisions have drawn public pushback before: the City Council approved removing the Alder/A Street and Drake/D Street crosswalks while directing staff to design a replacement crosswalk near Alder/A Street, according to bakersfield.com. Residents at the time warned that removing those crossings would force pedestrians to walk nearly a mile out of their way to reach F Street or Chester Avenue.
