San Francisco’s Uphill Battle to Rework a Historic Freeway Right into a Park

On a cold weekend in mid-September, the wind-blasted dunes of San Francisco’s Ocean Seaside loomed over the Nice Freeway — two lanes that run alongside the Pacific coast in both route separated by a median of sand and ice plant succulents. In a bit of the southbound lanes, the Autumn Moon Pageant reverberated with a DJ’s tunes. Birds squawked in formation overhead, and squealing kids tumbled down the dunes and scribbled the street with chalk. From the highest of the sandy bumps, between clumps of beachgrass, you can see huge container ships crusing out of the Golden Gate and into that well-known fog.

The night represented a compromise. Within the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the town of San Francisco closed the Nice Freeway and turned it right into a promenade, a lot as different cities blocked off roads to let folks roam freely and resist the urge to collect indoors. When lockdowns eased and life returned to a brand new form of regular in 2021, the town decreased the closure of the freeway to holidays and weekends, starting each Friday at midday and ending on Mondays at 6 a.m. Drivers bought to maintain a visitors artery in western San Francisco, and pedestrians, rollerbladers, and cyclists bought their weekend enjoyable.

Simply off the freeway, Joel Engardio stood atop a small bump of a sand dune, wearing a black jacket and blue denims, and watched his constituents collect round a conventional Chinese language lion dance. The Autumn Moon Pageant was only a sampling of what Engardio, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, desires to see. When San Franciscans go to the polls on November 5, they’ll vote on Engardio’s Proposition K, a bid to completely shut a 2-mile stretch of the Nice Freeway to create 2,000 acres of steady recreation area.

“It’s turn out to be the third-most-visited park in all of San Francisco, and we haven’t put a dime into it,” stated Engardio, whose district extends inland for 2 dozen blocks from the Nice Freeway. “There’s not one amenity. It’s actually simply closing the gate and simply having a closed street pavement on the weekends.”

If anybody can flip a freeway into very a lot not a freeway, it’s San Francisco, however even in such a deep-blue metropolis, Prop Ok has been a tricky promote. Opponents have waged a marketing campaign to sink the measure, arguing that it could improve commute occasions and cut back enterprise on facet streets. Proponents suppose that it could result in extra foot and bike visitors and in addition draw in additional vacationers, giving a lift to native companies. They usually say that making the Nice Freeway a park would higher soak up the rising sea — some estimates have ranges round San Francisco Bay climbing more than 6 feet by the tip of the century — and slash the automobile emissions that contributed to local weather change within the first place.

“It’s on the poll as a result of change is difficult, and other people resist change,” Engardio stated. “Probably the most open, clear, democratic technique to resolve this battle is to go to the poll and let everybody have a say. The coast belongs to everybody, belongs to all San Franciscans — doesn’t belong to at least one automobile, driver, or one bike owner, and even one neighborhood.”

What would possibly look like a squabble between San Franciscans is actually emblematic of the battle for the way forward for coastal cities round the US. Ought to engineers deploy extra pure infrastructure like sand dunes to work with the ocean as a substitute of investing in seawalls that battle in opposition to it? Ought to city planners hold designing for the car, as American cities have performed for almost a century, or encourage urbanites to stroll or bike? How will we reconcile what nature desires versus what folks need?

San Francisco is about to search out out—and perhaps create a roadmap for different cities to observe.

Two days after the competition, Heidi Moseson walked a pedestrian path above the Nice Freeway’s northbound lanes. Moseson is vice chairman of the group nonprofit Pals of Nice Freeway Park, which is selling Prop Ok. Carrying a light-weight sweater and wool cap, she has that singular vibe of an Ocean Beacher — not a full-tilt California surfer stereotype, however distinct from the fuddy-duddies that populate tony Nob Hill and Pacific Heights in San Francisco’s core.

It was a late Monday afternoon, so automobiles and bikes rolled by in waves, punctuated by the 9 stoplights and crosswalks that permit pedestrians to cross to the seaside. Throughout lockdown, when autos evaporated from the Nice Freeway, Moseson’s household changed one among their automobiles with an e-bike. “This type of cliched story,” Moseson stated. “It was this actual, lived instance: Generally if you make area for pedestrians and cyclists, some folks change the way in which they get round.”

When the lockdown was lifted, the Nice Freeway closure shifted to weekends and holidays solely, with the eventual plan to reopen the street full-time on December 31, 2025. However then Moseson and different group leaders bought to considering: Why not make the closure everlasting? San Francisco holds metropolis elections in even years, so this November is the final election to get the difficulty on the poll earlier than the Nice Freeway reverts to the way it was used earlier than. “Let’s put it to the voters,” Moseson stated. “If we win, it sends a hopefully sturdy sign, and we are able to cease speaking about this and rehashing this.”

Prop Ok doesn’t say something about what a Nice Freeway park would possibly seem like. It might find yourself gaining playgrounds, artwork installations, or an amphitheater. The measure simply says that the street should near automobiles and vans and bikes, excepting emergency and different authorities autos. And it wouldn’t shut down the entire 3.5 miles of the Nice Freeway, solely a 2-mile, no-exit stretch.

Nonetheless, opponents suppose closing that 2-mile part would create an excessive amount of of a burden for motorists coming from the Richmond District north of the proposed park. “The present invoice strikes from a compromise that enjoys a consensus, to one thing that may be very excessive, simply closing it to automobiles,” stated Matt Boschetto, who’s a candidate for supervisor for the district east of Engardio’s, and in addition behind the committee Great Highway for All — No on K. “It doesn’t have any plans for the park. I believe that’s on goal, as a result of I actually don’t suppose they plan on constructing a park. I believe it’s actually simply to shut this off to automobiles and use it as an open area.”

It was onerous to get different opponents to make their case. Richie Greenberg, who authored the opposition argument in opposition to Prop Ok on the poll, referred Grist to Boschetto for remark. One other group opposing the measure, Open the Great Highway, didn’t present remark for this story after repeated requests. The workplace of Connie Chan, the incumbent supervisor for the Richmond District who does not support absolutely closing the freeway to autos, additionally didn’t reply to quite a few requests for remark.

Whereas San Francisco teems with vacationers on the Golden Gate Bridge, in Union Sq., and at Golden Gate Park, the concept with Prop Ok is to lure extra of them out to Ocean Seaside. That might, in flip, stimulate enterprise for the eating places, cafes, and boutiques alongside the freeway’s facet streets.

To Boschetto, nevertheless, locals would pay the worth for a closure of the Nice Freeway, as it could be tougher for the residents of the Richmond and the Sundown districts to maneuver between the 2 neighborhoods. “That is going to be damaging to the companies on both finish,” he stated. (Albert Chow, who opposes the measure as president of the service provider group Individuals of Parkside Sundown, didn’t return a number of requests to speak about enterprise house owners’ issues.)

Jeremiah Boehner, an Military veteran who’s working in opposition to Chan to symbolize the Richmond on the board of supervisors, says that Prop Ok would additionally make it more durable for folks making an attempt to get to and from the San Francisco VA Medical Middle close to the northwest coast of the town. “You may already see that closing the Nice Freeway early on Fridays has had an amazing destructive affect on visitors,” Boehner stated. “I’ve spoken to individuals who work on the VA and veterans, and it has dramatically elevated their drive occasions.”

Proponents, although, level to a large number of potential advantages. For the owners dwelling alongside the Nice Freeway, a park might increase the worth of their property, stated Mark Jacobsen, an economist who research transportation on the College of California, San Diego. After which there are the bodily and psychological well being advantages — and consequent financial savings on well being care — which might be more durable to quantify: fewer folks sitting in automobiles, extra folks getting round by transferring their our bodies. Changing a automobile journey with a motorbike journey reduces not solely planet-warming greenhouse gases, but additionally noise air pollution and the particulate matter that may make metropolis air noxious. “Basically, parks and open areas appear to have extra advantages than prices,” Jacobsen stated.

Hints to what could possibly be the Nice Freeway’s future are simply up the street on JFK Drive. It weaves via the whole lot of Golden Gate Park — itself over 1,000 acres of meadows, museums, sports activities fields, lakes, and even a bison paddock — terminating on the Nice Freeway. Throughout the pandemic, the town closed the jap portion of JFK to non-public autos seven days a week to let San Franciscans stretch their legs. Within the 2022 election, 65 percent of voters rejected a proposition that would have reopened this JFK Promenade to autos and required that the Nice Freeway be open to automobiles always. “It failed citywide in a landslide,” Engardio stated.

Now, on any given weekend, you possibly can bike west from Haight-Ashbury on the jap fringe of Golden Gate Park via a mile-and-a-half JFK promenade —filled with artwork installations, a beer and wine backyard, and pianos for folks to diddle on. Chopping over to a different car-free road, then one other with protected bike lanes, you possibly can roll clear to Ocean Seaside and down the Nice Freeway, hardly ever sharing area with a automobile for greater than 5 miles. If Prop Ok is permitted, that room to roam can be a everlasting characteristic of San Francisco: A Nice Freeway park would join Golden Gate Park and Lake Merced to the south, creating 2,000 acres of contiguous public area.

All that greenery would possibly create greater than only a large playground for San Francisco, in keeping with researchers. Connecting the JFK Promenade and the Nice Freeway might relieve visitors congestion by encouraging folks to bike that miles-long path to get to work as a substitute of driving downtown, stated Jason Mark Henderson, who research city biking at San Francisco State College. Analysis has proven that the extra you enhance infrastructure for folks to commute by bike, the more they’ll choose to bike, slashing their carbon footprint. It turns right into a type of self-reinforcing cycle.

In New York Metropolis and Washington, D.C., as an illustration, bicycle commuting doubled between 2009 and 2014 thanks to higher infrastructure and bike-share applications. Between 2020 and 2023, spending on bikes and equipment in the US skyrocketed 620 percent. The proliferation of e-bikes — a market anticipated to develop 15.6 percent each year via 2030 — has drawn in folks hesitant to cycle lengthy distances or up massive hills, or maybe unable to make use of a conventional bike due to a incapacity.

“The extra folks expertise one thing like that,” Henderson stated, “the extra they’re going to need it in different components of their group and different components of their metropolis.”

On April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake shook after which burned San Francisco to the bottom, destroying almost 30,000 buildings. The densely populated jap a part of the town was just about obliterated, forcing refugees west towards the Pacific shoreline. Finally, the horse-drawn buggy yielded to the car, and to assist drivers navigate Ocean Seaside — a coastal getaway – the town constructed the Nice Freeway in 1929.

Within the ensuing many years, San Francisco, like so many different main American cities, was sliced up by freeways. The biggest effort, the Federal-Aid Highway Act, handed in 1956, aimed to switch unsafe roads and pace up journey between main cities by constructing some 41,000 miles of interstate highways, which labored effectively sufficient. However it additionally loaded city neighborhoods with air pollution, and generally reduce them off from the remainder of the town. It was typically the underserved neighborhoods that suffered probably the most.

“We reworked American cities within the Fifties and early ‘60s by constructing interstates proper via the guts of downtown areas,” stated Megan Kimble, creator of the e book City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Way forward for America’s Highways. “So we are able to simply as simply take away them.”

It’s straightforward to suppose that cities aren’t malleable, that they’re actually set in stone. But many years in the past, San Francisco went even additional than cordoning off a street to automobiles: The Embarcadero Freeway went up within the Fifties, connecting the Bay Bridge on the town’s jap shore to the Golden Gate Bridge on its northern one. By no means a preferred stretch of roadway, and all the time an eyesore that towered above the town streets, officers proposed tearing it down within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, however voters rejected that for worry of accelerating visitors.

Then, nature intervened. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the Bay Space. Throughout the bay in Oakland, a part of a freeway collapsed, killing 42. The Embarcadero Freeway survived, however with critical harm, so it was shut down and, in 1991, torn down.

Within the Embarcadero Freeway’s place grew a bustling boulevard that was nonetheless open to automobiles, however extra pleasant to pedestrians and bicyclists. Transit ridership rose 15 p.c, Kimble notes in her e book. Right now, the Embarcadero is without doubt one of the metropolis’s sightseeing jewels, the place the Ferry Constructing and Fisherman’s Wharf appeal to throngs of vacationers.

Many different American cities have knocked down the freeways that divided neighborhoods. Rochester, New York, eliminated a freeway in 2014 and swapped in apartments, trees, and bike lanes. Portland, Oregon, turned one into a riverfront park within the Nineteen Seventies.

In the event you shut a street off to automobiles, it turns into a spot for folks — probably numerous folks. Milwaukee’s Park East Freeway, eliminated in 2002, is now dwelling to commercial and residential buildings, in addition to a stadium for the town’s skilled basketball group, the Milwaukee Bucks.

However it typically takes a battle to get it performed. As New York Metropolis’s transportation commissioner from 2007 to 2013, Janette Sadik-Khan embarked on a quest to make the metropolis safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. In 2009, the town closed off a part of Times Square to cars, ultimately making the closure everlasting. The transfer was controversial on the time, with taxi cab corporations and a few companies complaining that it could drive folks away and make visitors worse. Within the ensuing years, nevertheless, pedestrian accidents fell by 40 percent and vehicular accidents by 15 percent. On its busiest days, Occasions Sq. now teems with 400,000 pedestrians.

In line with consultants, the data is clear: Eradicating lanes makes roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists, and visitors truly decreases. “What you see in metropolis after metropolis throughout the nation is that if you take away a significant roadway, journey patterns measurably change,” Kimble stated. “Analysis reveals that automobile journeys lower if you take away street capability. Journey is an efficient — it responds to the regulation of provide and demand.”

Nonetheless, even in progressive American cities, and even with the pandemic creating unique areas for cyclists and pedestrians, the automobile stays a basic characteristic of city life. In June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, killed a long-in-the-works congestion pricing system, which might have charged drivers a toll to enter Decrease Manhattan. Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on a lot, however in a rustic the place more than 90 percent of households have a minimum of one automobile, they certain do agree that automobiles are a precedence.

“It’s so ingrained into the concept of American prosperity that each American ought to have a automobile and have the ability to drive wherever they need, at any time when they need,” Kimble stated. “Even when so many different international locations, so many different cities, present that transit can create numerous financial prosperity. And in reality, it’s significantly better for low-income households.” For each greenback invested in public transport, a authorities will get $5 in economic returns and creates 50,000 jobs.

Conversely, automobiles are costly, each for folks and for cities. State and native governments spend greater than $200 billion each year on the development, operation, and upkeep of highways and roads. Kimble notes that the common household in car-centric Houston, Texas, spends almost a fifth of their $60,000 family revenue on transportation.

Simply as automobiles are costly for households, freeways are costly for cities, notably these alongside a quickly eroding shoreline. It’s turning into more and more clear that to correctly shield coastal cities, seawalls alone won’t cut it. For one, a rising ocean tends to eat away on the sand beneath a wall, destabilizing it. In Miami, as an illustration, engineers are constructing artificial mangrove forests that mimic how a shoreline naturally absorbs storm surges.

Earlier than pavement crept throughout its panorama, San Francisco was sand — and extra sand, and a few extra sand — stretching clear throughout the peninsula. Water pooled into “dune slacks,” which attracted coyotes, birds, and rabbits. Shrubs and grasses grew, offering habitats for smaller critters like bugs. The sands always shifted, “cell dunes” that have been onerous to construct homes on within the early days of San Francisco.

Out at Ocean Seaside, sand blew always inland, forming round coastal vegetation to create vegetated mounds. Cellular dunes right here would transmogrify, trapping wind-blown sand within the vegetation, then erode away, then develop as soon as extra. Greater than some other materials or pure course of, sand made San Francisco. “It was much more dynamic sort of ecosystem than what we now have out at Ocean Seaside at this time,” stated Ellen Airplane, a senior scientist on the San Francisco Estuary Institute, which printed a report final yr recommending administration choices for the world’s dunes that might work with or with out the passage of Prop Ok.

That’s as a result of at this time, Ocean Seaside is imprisoned by the constructed atmosphere. The Nice Freeway — buttressed by seawalls — has stored the dunes in verify. That paved street is like armor, Airplane stated: “much more inflexible infrastructure to carry the shoreline in place, which prevented all of that migration of the dunes.”

As it’s, the Nice Freeway butts up so tightly in opposition to the dunes that sand spills onto the street, so tractors must periodically scrape piled-up sand from the pavement. Sand buildup will get so dangerous that since 2020, the town has needed to shut the Nice Freeway up to 65 times a year, generally for a number of days in a row.
That prices the town some huge cash. A report launched in August by the San Francisco’s Controller’s Workplace (the town’s chief monetary officer and auditor) estimated that if Prop Ok have been permitted, it could save the federal government about $1.5 million in one-time capital challenge prices, and a further $350,000 to $700,000 annually in upkeep and operational prices, together with sand removing and roadway upkeep. The freeway’s visitors indicators would not want changing, saving the town one other $4.3 million.

A completely closed Nice Freeway would incur its personal prices, in keeping with the Controller’s report. That would come with elevated trash pickup and ranger patrols, in addition to new visitors indicators and retrofits to different streets to accommodate diverted visitors. A park would additionally want staff to clear the sand off paths, Moseson stated, however nowhere close to the frequency {that a} street requires to make sure security.

However it’s unclear precisely what new infrastructure the town would wish to handle, as a result of the poll measure doesn’t lay out a grasp plan for the park, a proven fact that issues Prop Ok’s critics.

“Once you read the ballot, it’s surprising how little is in it,” Boschetto stated. “The one factor that’s in it that’s actually concrete is that it’s closing it off to non-public autos. So it doesn’t have any plans for a park, it doesn’t have any sources for funding, which is fairly surprising.”

Town authorities has a plan for the southernmost a part of the Nice Freeway that’s already dropping its battle in opposition to rising seas and extreme erosion. The mile-long section that runs alongside the San Francisco Zoo is anticipated to be shuttered by early 2026. Engineers will change the street with multiuse trails and a beachfront plaza. That’s largely to guard a wastewater remedy facility subsequent to the zoo from coastal erosion, but additionally to revive the close by dunes in order that they may act as a buffer in opposition to sea degree rise.

So drivers are already dropping entry to a bit of the Nice Freeway. Prop Ok would simply lengthen that closure farther north. A current report from two metropolis businesses estimates that closing the freeway throughout peak-hour weekdays — like when crews have to take away sand — and rerouting visitors presently provides roughly three minutes of driving time. The businesses say that visitors probably diverts to a six-lane boulevard a mile to the east, although opponents of Prop Ok say it truly spills into smaller facet streets, growing congestion. The report additional notes that common each day visitors on the Nice Freeway is down 38 p.c from pre-COVID ranges of 18,000 cars, because the white-collar staff of western San Francisco decide to earn a living from home. (Boschetto disputes the discovering of three extra minutes of journey time. Residents of the Richmond district, he stated, “will let you know that’s patently false from their very own firsthand expertise.”)

Fewer persons are driving the Nice Freeway nowadays, and extra persons are flocking to the world on weekends when streets get blocked off. In 2023, 420,000 guests walked, ran, and biked the weekend promenade. Final October alone, 10,400 folks attended a group Halloween occasion, and an annual enjoyable run introduced one other 10,000. “I believe the pandemic in actually troublesome methods confirmed that all of us can change,” Moseson stated, “actually, can change in a single day, how we do issues and the way we get round.”

Whether or not or not Prop Ok passes, San Francisco has to cope with seas eating away at Ocean Beach, and winds shoving sand inland. Airplane’s report from the San Francisco Estuary Institute suggests transplanting native grasses into the dunes, which might maintain tight to the sand — a transfer the town could make even when the proposition fails. The report additionally recommends holding folks off the dunes, as trampling can kill the vegetation that maintain the dunes collectively. That causes “blowouts,” or troughs of unfastened sand that extra simply spill and blow onto the freeway.

Opponents of the measure say these enhancements might nonetheless occur if the Nice Freeway stays a freeway. “I believe presently, the utility of the street outweighs a lot greater than the utility of the park,” Boschetto stated. “So if we are able to have options which might be environmentally pleasant, that keep that space — particularly producing extra native vegetation, particularly defending and conserving the wildlife there — that to me is an enormous win-win.”

To supporters, a park creates the chance to be a bit extra versatile, permitting the dunes to creep inland and blend the pure world with human infrastructure. Sand roped off to pedestrians might bloom with the greenery that naturally retains them anchored. Foot paths would possibly interlace with dunes. “We’re not giving [the dunes] as a lot as they need,” Moseson stated, “however it could permit sufficient area to do some type of dramatic adjustments that might assist, even when I wouldn’t recreate the unique situations.”

San Francisco, like so many different coastal cities, is contending with the start phases of inevitability: Sea ranges will solely go up from right here, infrastructure be damned. However whereas they’re presently a legal responsibility for the Nice Freeway, the dunes might assist put it aside at some point. Because the rising sea approaches, maybe the street will nonetheless be stuffed with automobiles — a minimum of on the times it could keep open. Or perhaps the world can be filled with artwork installations and benches in a 2-mile-long park established in November 2024.

An earlier model of this story misstated the position of the nonprofit Pals of Nice Freeway Park in getting Prop Ok earlier than voters. This text initially appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, impartial media group devoted to telling tales of local weather options and a simply future. Be taught extra at Grist.org.