When you think of freeway removal, San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway along the city’s waterfront immediately comes to mind. Structurally unfit after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the elevated freeway was removed and replaced with a surface boulevard, opening up the waterfront to the city.
There is, however, a lesser known freeway removal project that has had an equally beneficial impact on the city’s urban fabric: the demolition of the Central Freeway (US 101) and the subsequent liberation of the Hayes Valley neighbourhood. (An historical timeline here.)
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San Francisco’s Central Freeway was a concrete double-deck structure originally terminating at the intersection of Franklin Street and Golden Gate Avenue. Like the Embarcadero, the elevated roadway, after significant earthquake damage, was removed in sections, reducing its reach into the city by terminating it at Market Street. Once the oppressive infrastructure was gone, the daylighting revealed an exciting amount of urban space to reclaim – and the placemaking and programming began from there.
First up was the retrofitting of Octavia Boulevard, the street trapped beneath the shadows of the Central Freeway. City Officials redeveloped the roadway as an urban parkway with a unique cross section: a four-lane dual carriageway with two side streets separated with four rows of columnar street trees compartmentalizing each transport corridor. The outer slower speed residential streets are also designated with sharrows to facilitate cycle traffic.
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While still acting as an arterial to move traffic, Octavia Boulevard stops at Fell Street, giving way to urban redevelopment, placemaking activities and tactical urbanism. A small but well-used pocket park, Patricia’s Green, serves as the front lawn and gathering space for the neighbourhood, featuring a playground and new art exhibits every six months..
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Where Hayes Street meets Octavia, the leftover space that was revealed when the Central Freeway was torn down became a significant activity node, with coffee, ice cream and bike-rental kiosks fashioned out of shipping containers..
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There’s even an outdoor beer garden (Biergarten) that was sadly closed the Monday I visited, but you can see the great use of tactical urbanism here.
Hayes Valley has predictably become a hipster hangout with great energy resonating out in all directions. Hayes Street appears to becoming trendier and trendier.
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Meanwhile the gritty lane feel of Linden Street offers a more hipster vibe and is home to the famous Blue Bottle Coffee.
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All in all, a great urban experiment on reclaiming once-derelict space from the clutches of Motordom – a fun place to visit and be part of the “scene”.
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Lessons for Vancouver:
1. Time to put our arterials on road diets. Remove lanes, narrow lanes, add trees and cycling infrastructure, build complete streets. The traffic will find another path.
2. Encourage more tactical urbanism. Surface parking and empty lots can be quickly repurposed and programmed to great effect, adding vitality and energy to neighbourhoods.
3. Can we do an outdoor beer garden or wine tasting room in this city?
I’ve wondered why there are so few (no?) beer gardens in this city. They require so very little space and set up: some wooden picnic tables and some kegs. Maybe a tent for the rain. $500 at Rona and you’re a publican.Yet so far this modest arrangement is beyond the region’s capacity.
How about a tunnel, such as in Boston (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig) or in Duesseldorf ( see here: https://www.google.ca/search?q=düsseldorf+rheinufertunnel) for required throughfares .., say from W-Van to Richmond/airport/Surrey ?
i.e. tunnel under W-Georgia, Burrard & Granville.
Why is Robson still open for cars ? Why is this not a pedestrian zone from stadium to Stanley Park ?
People need to move. As such we need urban living rooms outdoors, shopping areas without cars AND throughfares !
it is not one or the other !
That is why the proposed bus based transit plan is weak. It just gives us more buses. Most critical B line served routes today need a subway to free up urban space above for living, walking, biking & shopping.
Re: Boston’s Big Dig. At ~$18 billion Canadian you could finish the Metro rapid transit network including to the North Shore, fund a half dozen light rail lines, build commuter rail to Hope and Whistler, purchase thousands more buses, establish more ferry commuter routes, add 1,000 km of bike lanes and still have enough left over to operate the transit system for many years.
Transit is a far better investment than roads in many ways. Note that the 18 m diameter TBM used for Seattle’s Big Dig got stuck and is currently being extracted. That tunnel would replace the waterfront freeway and would move an astronomical 35,000 cars a day … maybe half of the people the Canada Line moves using twin 6 m tunnels at far less cost to build.
We need to move people, not cars.
So, where is the people moving plan for folks in W-Van, N-Van, UBC, Jericho, along Hastings , Kerrisdale or Delta ?
Buses are for folks not valuing their time. Do city planners or politicians not understand that time has value ?
Take a car and use 30 minutes , a bus and use 45-60 or a subway in 15.
That is why the wobbly bus based transit plan will not decongest.
BART is SF Bay Area has made a huge difference in commenting especially from East Bay but still not great to Marin County.
Giving credit where it is due, Allan B. Jacobs of “Great Streets” fame and his partner in CityWorks, Elizabeth MacDonald, led the design process for this major urban intervention.
Another lesson for Vancouver, which we did fairly tentatively on parts of Pacific Boulevard in the early 2000s, is the use of multiway boulevards where streets are overly wide.
A major outcome for a land-poor city like SF was the reclaiming of excess road property for development.
Hi Frank – Thanks for the great insight on Jacobs and crew, I didn’t know who was directly behind the design and was hoping someone could elaborate on the story. I think Pacific Blvd would work well if the streetcar eventually travels down it reducing the scale of the corridor, but I think its actually turned out OK in its current form. One thing that I find baffling is the sidewalk in the median, even though its framed by trees it still feels a bit unsafe and you feel out of place walking down the middle of a busy arterial.
I think the median sidewalk is intended to eventually serve the streetcar patrons.
I’m surprised that the most of the vacant lots still exist where the freeway was. I wonder what’s slowing redevelopment.
Good Question. Its really just the corner of Octavia and Hayes that’s left, If I can recall the lot across the street is being developed now.