F I R S TP R E V824NEXTLAST

The San Francisco Freeway Revolt
Hidden behind a wrought iron fence in Pacific Heights is this hard-to-find and harder-to-photograph small monument to the San Francisco Freeway Revolt. In 1955 the San Francisco Chronicle published a map of the city's Trafficways Plan to construct a series of ten freeways through the city. The plan called for a Mission Freeway, a Crosstown Freeway, a Central Freeway, a Western Freeway, a Park Presidio Freeway, and a Golden Gate Freeway. The public was outraged, opposition swelled against the traffic plan and it became one of the most heated issues of the 1950s.

Finally, in 1959, the Board of Supervisors voted to cancel seven of ten planned freeways. In the 1960s huge protests stopped the extension of the Embarcadero Freeway to the Golden Gate Bridge and brought about the cancellation of the planned freeway through Golden Gate Park. When the much despised Embarcadero Freeway was finally torn down following the 1989 Lomo Prieta earthquake, the last of the 1955 Trafficways Plan freeways were gone.

As a result San Francisco was the only major U.S. city that lost freeway miles between 1990 and 2005. For the nostalgic concrete fan, traces of unfinished freeways can still be seen on San Jose Avenue in the Mission and on Park Presidio Boulevard.
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