If the drive along the Corridor feels more crowded than it did a few years ago, that is not a seasonal illusion. Los Cabos grew from about 351,000 residents in 2020 to roughly 469,000 in 2025, an increase of 118,000 people in half a decade, according to figures presented by the municipality’s planning institute, known as IMPLAN (Instituto Municipal de Planeación). That kind of growth does not just show up at the grocery store or the school enrollment line. It shows up on the highway.
IMPLAN director Beatriz González Gibert laid out the numbers and the municipality’s response during a weekly meeting of the Grupo Madrugadores, a Cabo San Lucas business and civic group led by Jesús Flores Romero. The pitch was part infrastructure update, part early warning. Each year of this growth rate, she said, generates demand for about 4,800 new homes, an additional 55 liters per second of drinking water, and 11,800 more vehicles on the road.
That last figure is the one worth sitting with. Baja Sur’s roads were not built for an extra 11,800 cars every single year, and the strain is already visible anywhere two lanes try to carry four lanes’ worth of traffic. The municipality’s own planners now warn that the Transpeninsular Highway, the two-lane artery connecting Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo, could hit saturation levels by 2040 if the connectivity projects on the drawing board do not get built on schedule.
Seven Road Projects Meant to Buy Time
To head that off, IMPLAN presented progress on seven strategic road projects designed to give drivers alternatives to the main highway corridor. The list includes Avenida Estrella and Avenida Choyera, new interconnections at Cerro Colorado and San Carlos, an interurban corridor route, and a bridge at El Zacatal. Together they are meant to spread traffic across more routes rather than funneling everyone onto the same stretch of Transpeninsular asphalt, and to improve connections toward the parts of the municipality growing fastest.
Some of this builds on commitments the municipality has already made. Los Cabos previously outlined plans to invest up to 300 million pesos in mobility projects (roughly $16 million USD at current exchange rates), and the population figures presented this week echo concerns raised in an earlier look at how fast Los Cabos is actually growing. The pattern is consistent: the municipality keeps announcing fixes aimed at a target that keeps moving.
González Gibert also touched on less glamorous but equally necessary work: updating the municipality’s formal planning documents, moving forward on a partial development plan for El Tezal, and sorting out the legal status of 132 beach access points across the municipality that currently lack clear regularization. Grupo Madrugadores members pressed her on drainage, flooding and how much real say residents get in these decisions, concerns she said need to be answered with technical data and public input rather than assumptions.
She credited Mayor Christian Agúndez Gómez with giving IMPLAN a seat at the table for these decisions, framing the coordination between the planning institute and other municipal departments as the difference between projects that get built with a long-term view and ones that simply react to the latest crisis.
None of these seven projects has a confirmed groundbreaking date in what IMPLAN has released so far, and in Baja a presentation to a business group is not the same thing as a signed contract. Still, the 2040 saturation warning gives residents and planners alike a rough deadline to watch. Anyone wondering why the Corridor keeps getting slower now has an official number to blame, and an official promise to hold the municipality to.
