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Freeway Dreams, Nightmares and Revolts
 
by Lennie Roberts

In 1962, at the height of the postwar suburban sprawl, San Mateo County commissioned George Nolte Consulting Civil Engineers to prepare a City-County Highway Plan that would define a system of highways and freeways “to adequately serve San Mateo County in the year 1990.”

The highway plan, proudly presented to a welcoming Board of Supervisors, was based upon an expected 900,000 population by 1990. It’s interesting to imagine what the Peninsula would have looked like if the freeway builders’ dreams had materialized. Dreams? Or more likely nightmares! The resulting plan that proposed to crisscross the county with an ecstasy of new highways and freeways simply boggles the mind.

North South Freeways
By 1990, the plan envisioned no fewer than five north-south multi-lane highway/freeway systems:
   Highway 1 down the coast from Daly City to Santa Cruz
   Skyline Parkway that would extend Skyline Boulevard north through the San Francisco watershed lands
   Junipero Serra Freeway which was under construction
   Bayshore Freeway that was nearly completed
   Bayfront Freeway to be constructed out in the Bay from Candlestick Point in San Francisco south to Palo Alto and beyond

A more appropriate name for Bayfront freeway would be “Bay-Affront,” since it would have involved the filling of many hundreds of acres of open Bay waters between San Francisco and Foster City. One scheme, the Rockefeller Plan, envisioned scraping the top off San Bruno Mountain to provide the necessary fill. South of Foster City, the freeway would cross through sloughs, wetlands, and salt ponds owned by Leslie Salt, assumed to be fair game for future filling and development at the time.

East West Freeways
The proposed east-west freeways were equally audacious:
   Highway 1 down the coast from Daly City to Santa Cruz
   San Bruno Freeway, now called Highway 380, would continue west from Junipero Serra Freeway and connect to Cabrillo Highway where the Shelldance Nursery is located today
   Fassler Avenue and Linda Mar Boulevards in Pacifica would blast the hills and ridges to the east up to Skyline Parkway
   Millbrae Avenue-Granada Route, a new highway, would cut through the watershed and snake down to Cabrillo Highway at the Half Moon Bay Airport
   Highway 92 would become the major freeway connecting the coast to the Bay, notching through Skyline and providing quick access to the extensive holdings of Westinghouse Corporation
   Higgins Purisima Road, just south of Half Moon Bay, would extend east to join Edgewood Road at Skyline
   Froment Road would expand Tunitas Creek Road into a highway
   Willow Freeway, following present-day La Honda Road, would connect Menlo Park to Cabrillo Highway at San Gregorio
   The Southern Crossing, a new Bay bridge, would be built near the San Francisco–San Mateo County line
   Multiple highways and arterials were planned along the Bay to connect it all together

Individual and Collective Revolts
As things turned out, most of this asphaltic nightmare is dead and gone, thanks to many individual and collective revolts that were occurring in San Francisco, Marin, and beyond at about the same time.

Voters in the Bay Area resoundingly defeated the Southern Crossing in 1972. The Willow Freeway met its demise due to activists in Palo Alto and Menlo Park. The rugged geography of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the vision and tenacity of environmental activists, and the exorbitant costs of construction squelched the most egregious projects, including the six-lane Devil’s Slide Bypass.

Establishment of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission in 1965 and the Coastal Commission in 1976, both the result of massive citizen efforts, prevented further attempts to fill the Bay and chop prime agricultural lands into subdivisions.

Looking back, it seems strange that the plan had no transit component! Today, our planning for transportation includes a variety of transit options, albeit still not as robust and reliable as they should be. Our countywide land use plans incorporate firm boundaries to keep urban develop-ment within cities and maintain rural areas as natural, productive farms, forests, and watersheds.

Stay tuned; there is much yet to be done, on both sides of the green line!

Published Spring 2008 in Green Footnotes.

Page last updated May 26, 2008.