Freeway without a Future: San Francisco’s 280

Yet another proposal to remove an elevated freeway:

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The idea of removing the northern section of Highway 280 near Mission Bay is gaining  more traction as planners look for ideal ways to usher in high-speed rail and transit-oriented development in the city’s core.

Here’s a key statement from Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe:

“Freeways don’t belong in cities,” she said. “They’re enormous barriers, and cars getting on and off them at high speeds pose the greatest risks to pedestrians.

Folks knew that in Hayes Valley, and they took down the Central Freeway and helped knit San Francisco’s urban fabric back together.”

The great error of the Interstate system was the extension of intercity freeways into the heart of urban centres, requiring the demolition, displacement and separation of existing neighbourhoods, typically built around an electric-streetcar network.

It was said that President Eisenhower, who approved the Interstate system, never intended them to enter into cities, only to join them up, rather like the German autobahn.  But the urban Congressmen wanted their share of the Highway Trust Fund moneys and insisted on 4,000 miles of ‘Yellow Book’ additions – which eventually destroyed some of their own communities.

That is what makes Vancouver so distinctive: the freeways come to our borders and decant their traffic on to the grid, regulated by intersection signals – thus limiting the overall amount of traffic that can enter and providing both an incentive and competitive advantage for rapid transit.

… which is another reason for removal in the San Francisco case:

 Long a dream of livable streets advocates, the possible removal of the inner portion of I-280 is being studied by the CA High-Speed Rail Authority at the urging of San Francisco officials, who also see it as a way to open up engineering options for a more direct rail alignment toward the Transbay Center, and to free up land for development that could help fund the project.