Highway 46 is getting new upgrade 68 years after fatal James Dean crash. How has it changed?

Caltrans recently broke ground on a $148 million project that will bring a flyover interchange to the so-called Cholame “Y” crossing where Highways 41 and 46 meet in northern San Luis Obispo County.

The infamous intersection has seen scores of deadly collisions over the decades

Hollywood actor James Dean died in a head-on crash at the treacherous traffic crossing on Sept. 30, 1955. His Porsche Spyder collided with a 1950 Ford driven by Donald Turnupseed, a Cal Poly student who was turning from Highway 46 onto Highway 41.

The inquest documents are still on file in San Luis Obispo.

A CHP collision diagram identifies the Ford make as Tudor but noted James Dean researcher and author Lee Raskin identifies it as a Ford Custom 2-door coupe.

A Japanese businessman built a memorial to Dean at the site in 1977.

Car and highway designs have improved a great deal since then, due in part to relentless nationwide publicity about the issue.

Seat belts, crumple zones, air bags and many more engineering advancements have made collisions that would have been fatal in the 1950s much more survivable in the 21st century.

In the 1950s, the Telegram-Tribune kept an annual running tally of highway-related deaths.

On Monday, Oct. 19, 1953, roughly two years before Dean’s death, the newspaper’s annual death toll stood at 36 — with a pair of deaths recorded within 24 hours on the Saturday before the article was published.

A Camp Roberts soldier died in a 8 a.m. crash on Highway 41 near the Y. Another wreck happened at the intersection at 6 p.m. as a car attempted to turn onto Highway 41 from Highway 46.

On June 27, 1960, the Telegram-Tribune editorial page reprinted an article that outlined some of the history of the road between Famoso and Paso Robles, then known as Highway 466.

Cholame Lateral

Development of U.S. Highway 466 which runs from Paso Robles (usually referred to at that end as Highway 41) to Famoso on U.S. 99 is featured in the May-June issue of the California Highways, published by the state Department of Public Works. The article is written by J.M. Sturgeon, construction engineer, and is titled, “Cholame Lateral.”

This route, it is pointed out, was planned in the earliest days of California’s highway program as an eventual main east-west connection between the south end of the Central Valley and the Central Coast area of California.

“Geography, population development, and the obvious demands of commerce all pointed to the potential of this Cholame lateral for development into a major artery for both commercial and pleasure traffic,” the article states.

“For many years, however, low standard alignment through the hills of the Diablo range, coupled with hazardously narrow roadway widths, kept this potential from becoming an actuality. In the late 1940s and early 1950s traffic surveys indicated that increasing commercial traffic, together with significant increase in the number of private vehicles using the road not only warranted the improvement of the portion of the highway lying within San Luis Obispo County, but made such improvement imperative.

“Since 1953, a series of contracts on 41 and 466 have brought about an almost complete realignment of over 30 miles of this route. The last spurt of activity on these routes was brought about with the aid of federal funds and resulted three contracts being let in 1958. Construction has turned this route into what the division of highways calls “one of the safest and most economical routes to the coast of California.”

While the Cholame route provides an important artery at present between highways 101 and 99, its importance is bound to increase greatly in future years. For one thing, it will tie into the next proposed high speed north-south highway (Interstate 5) eventually to be constructed along the west side of the San Joaquin Valley to take the pressure off 99. It has been reported that right-of-way for this route is already being lined up.

Another boost to this highway would come from the Feather River project (now known as the Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct). The 41-466 routes would carry traffic into a major construction area of the southbound water aqueduct system.