Central Freeway - History

History

The 1948 Transportation Plan for San Francisco, prepared by De Leuw, Cather and Company, included the Central Freeway. This elevated roadway would begin at the Bayshore Freeway - the approach to the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge - near Division Street and head west and north around the periphery of downtown San Francisco. This portion would include junctions with the Mission Freeway (south and southwest along Mission Street to Daly City) at the southwest corner and the Panhandle Freeway (west through the Panhandle into Golden Gate Park) along the west side. After swinging northeast and back north to the east side of Van Ness Avenue (continuing as a double-decked structure between Van Ness Ave. and Polk Street), a pair of ramps would split to the east, taking downtown traffic to and from the one-way pair of Bush and Pine Streets. At Clay Street, the freeway would descend to meet the rising terrain, ending at Broadway just east of Van Ness Avenue as a single level depressed roadway. A short tunnel would curve northwest to a portal in Van Ness Avenue north of Broadway, taking traffic onto Van Ness Avenue towards the Golden Gate Bridge. Along with the Embarcadero and Broadway Tunnel, which were listed for rebuilding as ground-level expressways rather than the freeway (Embarcadero Freeway) that was later partially built and demolished, the Central Freeway would have provided a full traffic distributor loop around downtown.

The route was also included in the 1955 city master plan, by then extending north beyond the former Broadway terminus to the proposed Golden Gate Freeway near Lombard Street. The first piece, connecting the Bayshore Freeway with Mission Street, opened March 1, 1955, at about the same time as the Bayshore. The part of the Central Freeway to the one-way pair of Golden Gate Avenue and Turk Street opened in April 1959, and became part of U.S. Route 101 (and Legislative Route 2) via this one-way pair to the old route on Van Ness Avenue. In January of that year, as one of the opening events in the freeway revolts, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed Resolution 45-59, removing the remainder of the Central Freeway and most other proposed freeways from the city's highway plan. Interstate 80, which had been assigned to the Central Freeway southeast of the proposed Panhandle Freeway, was truncated by the Federal Highway Administration in August 1965 and by the state in 1968.

There was a plan promulgated in February 1962 to relieve traffic congestion on the Golden Gate Bridge by constructing a San Francisco-Tiburon Bridge from Van Ness Ave. at Aquatic Park in San Francisco north across the Golden Gate Strait to Tiburon to connect with the Redwood Highway, which would have been anchored on Angel Island. Had this bridge actually been constructed, it would have probably been eventually necessary to construct the proposed northern section of the Central Freeway from Turk Street north to Aquatic Park in order to adequately funnel traffic to it.

The freeway created urban blight in the Hayes Valley neighborhood that it passed through. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the northern part of the elevated roadway, and in 1992 Caltrans removed the freeway north of Fell Street. That year the Board of Supervisors banned any new freeway construction north of Market Street; a city task force recommended its replacement with a surface boulevard in 1995. Caltrans closed the double-deck freeway north of Mission Street for rebuilding in late 1996. A fight began between the primarily Chinese American residents of western San Francisco (the Richmond District and the Sunset District), who favored the Caltrans plan to rebuild it because it provided easy access for prospective customers to get to their businesses in the Richmond and Sunset districts, and the primarily White and African American Hayes Valley local residents, who regarded the freeway as urban blight, and were supported by Mayor Willie Brown. Caltrans reopened the northbound (lower) deck to Fell Street in 1997, and several initiatives were passed to remove the lower deck. The final compromise took a two-way freeway down to ground level at Market Street, where Octavia Boulevard - a widened Octavia Street on the former freeway right-of-way — would continue to Fell Street. The completed project opened on September 9, 2005, and has been seen generally as a success. However, the South of Market neighborhood actually got a wider freeway, closer to ground level, in the space where the double-decked road had been.