Freeways almost ruined San Francisco 

Are there any unnecessary freeways in your city? Any plans to remove them?

Now imagine if the federal government gave the state $9 for every $1 it spent on a San Francisco subway system.

*continues to build freeways through low density residential neighborhoods in Cities: Skylines*

San Francisco's nimbyism may have saved the city from freeways but they've been causing a serious housing crisis in the city lately. Since there's basically no more room to build outwards in SanFran, the only way to build is up. The problem: there's a zoning law which keeps apartments from being above a certain height. You see, when supply can't meet demand, price goes up.

Lived in SF for 30 years & loved it's walk-ability. I'm originally from Detroit & the freeways destroyed families. My grand aunt once was able to walk a couple of blocks to visit her sister. Then the city tore everything up. The freeways took down 2 streets at a time & destroyed the grid replacing it with a giant ditch with no cross streets. Families now have to have a car just to go some place close. No point of staying in that decaying city.

I hope public transportation will be the easiest. method of travel in the Bay Area one day. A 15 minute drive can become a 1 hour commute just because I live near the wrong bus stop.

Have you heard of South Street in Philadelphia? In the 60s there was a plan to build a freeway along South Street (The border of Center City and South Philly). The freeway was eventually cancelled after protests. But an interesting thing happened; while the freeway was still planned, properties along South Street became very cheap because people feared their demolition was eminent. A lot of these cheap properties were being bought by hippies and the area became the center for the counterculture in the city. Fifty years later it might not be a center of counterculture anymore but it's still a well known tourist destination. All because a freeway was planned, and then cancelled.

Damn, if there was that much push to build freeways in the 1960s I can easily see why America lost out to the car in many cities.

As a San Francisco resident, I will say that now the problem from this activism is that it takes longer to get across town using carpooling and the like than it does to get into town. I live in the western part of the city, and my commute time to the eastern part is longer than my coworkers coming in from Oakland partly because of the unreliability of our Muni system (trains that don't run often enough and fill up too fast) and partly because when attempting to use carpooling or ride sharing services, the trip in the car takes more time than taking the trains when they are running.

I have lived in SF before and after the 1989 quake. The area looks so, so much better with the freeway down. Freeways within cities truly screwed up a lot of cities. Furthermore, perfectly good streetcar systems in LA and Minnesota were torn down because Henry Ford wanted the government to fund freeways, not public transit.

Thanks for this!

Something that'd be interesting would be a video on how to make a city _less_ pleasant to live in. How to build the ultimate slum, in other words.

As terrible as the Loma Prieta earthquake was, the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway beautified San Francisco considerably.

City Beautiful. You think you could take a look at Baltimore's highway infrastructure and show how it sent this city into ruins over the past half-century. I truly believe it contributed to the divide and desolation of the city as a whole.

I binge-watched a ton of your videos last night and now I'm looking into getting involved with my local government and going to public outreach events! I never realized stopping a highway could happen with such a small scale. I also found out looking through a lot of the documents that there are ideas to get rid of or change some highways that run straight through our downtown and divide it which is great!

Great and informative video! Since I drive there on occasion this really explains a lot and why there's no direct route from 101 or 80 to get to the other side of SF on the Golden Gate bridge. Good work!

I love this channel! I was taught something about a city I’ve lived in for 30+ years. Thanks for the in-depth content.

Wow, the state was so deadset on the panhandle freeway where there was so many other better alternatives proposed.

Mass private cars must be the most inefficient way of transport in an urban setting

I like public transportations, esp trains. I think EU and Asia shows how useful train systems are. I feel more free at a city where I can easily travel without having to rent a car or pay for a cab. The same goes for cities I live in. Having to drive everywhere is a pain, not to mention gas, maintenance, and insurance. I find that in driving cities, a lot of people who are not suited for driving are forced to drive because they have no choice. Endangering themselves and others.

Something very similar happened here in Toronto, actually. In the '50s a massive plan to build huge amounts of provincial and municipal highways and expressways across the city surfaced. It proved to be wildly unpopular (of course) and in the end, very little of it was built. The most notable example of this was the Spadina Expressway (now known as W.R. Allen Road), which planned to carry traffic off the 401 (continent's busiest highway) and dump it onto Bloor Street downtown. The highway was cancelled after the city (including activist Jane Jacobs) came together to shoot it down. The highway has been partially built but is now a fraction of its planned length. I live right near a site of a proposed east-west expressway, the Scarborough Expressway. Land set aside for it still sits empty today. I'm glad our city wasn't scarred by American-like planning and freeways.

It was amazing when the 15 in northern San Diego was widen and fastrak included. 10 years later ... we’re back at the same place we started. Fastrak gets as congested as the regular freeway.

I like your report. Having the years in the lower corner of the screen click off as you narrated was pretty cool. I think that it is important to preserve history like this for people that need to know what really happened.

You did an impressive job with such a complicated history! Even after the 1989 earthquake had damaged the Embarcadero and Central Freeways, there was so residual opposition to removing them. They’re gone, and you’re correct in connecting the expansion of Muni and BART in SF as the direction the city is going. The first two subways in downtown (BART and Muni Metro) were opened in the 1970s and 1980s, a good decade after the Embarcadero freeway was halted. The new Muni Central Subway, roughly tracing one of the abandoned N-S freeway routes, opens in 2019, and Caltrain electrifies and intensifies its old diesel commuter line to Silicon Valley by 2022. In the final nail to the freeway coffin, BART and Caltrain are now planning another tube to run through Downtown and to connect the Peninsula to the East Bay for both rail systems.

Damn, thanks for making this! Can't imagine having a freeway deleting the Panhandle, it's such a common route I take and thoroughly enjoy! Makes me really appreciate the activists' foresight

Same thing happened here in Amsterdam around the same time. The plan was to build two major freeways through the heart of the city center, which is already relatively small. It actually came to violent protests at some point but the people won and Amsterdam got a beltway instead.

This so why I love visiting San fransico then LA. Less traffic, don’t have to drive and I just take public transportation to travel around the Bay Area. I live in Phoenix a big care centric city plus the weather is amazing and the people are nicer then LA.

Must be the reason Business Insider ranked it the third worst city in america in terms of traffic (published 2/11/18).

Freeways ruined every city, but there are few cities they ruined more than San Francisco. Until the 50s, the Bay Area had one of the best rail infrastructures in the country; streetcars and cable cars that connected the ENTIRE city, the Peninsula Commute train that ran from SF to San Jose (this is what Caltrain used to be), as well as the Key System, which ran from SF, across the Bay Bridge, to the East Bay and Sacramento. You could literally take a train from downtown San Francisco to downtown Sacramento in about two hours! With the rise of freeways in the 50's, most of the cable car and streetcar lines were removed (five streetcar lines were kept ONLY because they used tunnels and hills that buses could not), and the train tracks were removed from the Bay Bridge.

Thanks for san fran freeway story. I clearly remember the embarcadero fway before 89 quake and after. Keeping the city intact made the 15 years living there much better. Access to the bridges due back up local streets though.

A freeway scheme for Vancouver, Canada was shot down decades ago. Freeways were proposed for the northern and southern edges of the icon downtown peninsula. These would have ruined picturesque waterfronts. Motorists are the ones who bemoan the move away from downtown freeways. But efficient transportation systems focus on moving people instead of vehicles. In Vancouver's case mass rapid transit in the shape of the Skytrain network was the option.

Great video! Super informative and easy to follow. You should do a video on the Big Dig in Boston!!

A youtuber that finally puts sources YES

I didn't know all of that history. Great video!

Learn from European cities, they still have freeways, but once you hit the city, the freeways then turn into regular roads and you can use mass transit or just drive on the regular roads to get around. No reason to run a freeway through the middle of the city.

I always wondered why there was a half built freeway over the embarcadero growing up. Now I know. Thanks!

Dude this is an awesome video, learned so much in less than 10 minutes, keep doing it!

topic: Fordham University hastily constructed ugly buildings in the Bronx to prevent Robert Moses from building a highway right through the campus in the 1940s GREAT CHANNEL!

New York City was facing exactly the same situation at exactly the same time and stopped Robert Moses cold. His highways would have cut right across Manhattan and would have been a disaster. So, this wasn't just some SF thing, it was an issue across the country.

Yes, the traffic on 19th Avenue is awful. A pleasant detour around that mess is to take Geary Street down to the Great Highway past the Cliff House and just enjoy the ride along Ocean Beach. If you do a constant 35 mph all the lights on Great Highway will turn green as you get to them. A beautiful, relaxing drive that skips all the stress of 19th Avenue. (Just wanted to offer a solution instead of complaining all the time :)

Phoenix almost barely had freeways. The I-17 was only finished in the 70s, and the I-10 skyway proposal vas voted down in 1973. However, freeway construction was expedited when the valley had a massive boom in the 80s. That was the push to finish the I-10, though not as a skyway, and a bunch of more suburban freeways (mainly the loop freeways, the State Routes 101, 202, and 303).

San Francisco: *NO TO FREEWAYS!! My city, Winnipeg: We would love to have some of that...

I always wondered when you would make a video on this.

Neighboring Oakland had a similar viaduct called the Cypress Viaduct, but that got destroyed in the '89 earthquake.

Awesome video! Power to the People! A friend's dad (4th generation San Franciscan) once mentioned that freeways didn't really go through the city, but that's all I knew of the story. I didn't even know there was a story. It's cool to learn the whole story.

boston puts their freeways underground, it’s great

Reminds me of Winnipeg. A North American city with both zero freeways and bad public transit

Vancouver faced a similar situation in the 1960s. A myth has grown that resistance from local residents killed the freeways. The real reason is that governments ran out of money.

Wendover supported this video? GO SAM!!!

I don't think this paints the entire story. We are now struggling as a city every day to bear the cost of removing these freeway plans. Any plans to travel from east to west in the city, as many people withIN the city have to do, are a logistical nightmare. Public transport has been woefully inadequate to suit those that live in areas like the sunset, richmond, or other western districts, and are completely unfeasible for those living there that need to access further cities. 19th avenue, where the western freeway would have gone is now one of the tightest bottlenecks in the city if you are trying to head north. SF NIMBYism may have preserved neighborhoods, but it screwed over the ability to get anywhere in the city for the foreseeable future.

It’s great that San Francisco has avoided the fate of the most American cities. The main ways of transportation in a city are public transport and bikes. Building highways is not a resolution for the transportation problem, it just encourages people to use cars more often and or buy new cars. Eventually the roads are overloaded again. The real solution is developing public transportation and bike infrastructure. Great video :)

that shit would've been over my house

Something similar happened in London. It was known as Ringways, and Jay Foreman made a really good video on it.

My old neighborhood (CUF) in Cincinnati was nearly sliced through by a cross-town freeway in the 1960s. It would’ve gone right down the block I used to live on. Thankfully, the plans for the William Howard Taft Freeway, along with several other freeways on the north and west sides of the city, were all cancelled. The destructiveness of freeways still affected Cincinnati though, as the historic West End and Kenyon-Barr were destroyed, and thousands of people, many of them ethnic minorities, were displaced.

New Subscriber here...this sounds very familiar to my hometown of Milwaukee...any chance you either did a video on those freeway revolts or would put one out in the future?

After looking at a map of the area now for the first time, can anyone explain why there’s a gigantic airport in the middle of San Jose next door?

You should do a video on all the LA freeways that were fought and later were not built.

I actually think that having freeways through the cities benefits the American cities because unlike in Europe, the majority of Americans live in suburbs. Not to mention that people prefer to live in a house with a backyard than a apartment highrise. To put into perspective, while chicago's population is 2 million, it's suburbs have a total 7 million people, almost 4 times the city population

Still waiting for that video explaining the different types of transportation.

This channel is so good!

You should do a video about the fight to keep a freeway out of New Orleans’s French Quarter!

Only in America: Lets move to the suburbs and then ruined the cities we just abandoned by making them build mega transit projects to make my commute easier (and in the meantime set rules that dont allow people darker than us to move to the suburbs)

Love your channel!

Awesome video, I learned a good bit!👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

Well, I lived and drove here before the Embarcadero & the tail of the Central freeway were torn down. They were heinous ugly to see and to drive on, BUT Traffic has become appalling since they were removed- it was merely horrendous before the quake, and the City isn't all that much larger now than then. I refuse to go anywhere near the areas once served by the Embarcadero on a Friday afternoon. Or anytime there is a ball game in town. 19th ave [the western freeway] is a parking lot that takes 20 to 30 minutes to drive a little under 5 miles for much of the day. All that needless exhaust pollution from thousands of idling cars is happening right in front of people's homes!! That corridor needs a tunnel, that is the only way that level of congestion will ever be addressed.

Here’s how I see the criticism: Everybody wants their own route through the city to the places they want to go to be quick and easy. But the catch is that, for others, it will be an obstruction, or will destroy their neighborhood, while doing nothing for their transportation needs. Congestion is inherent in a large city. Adding traffic lanes never reduces congestion generally. When you have a growing population, any traffic lane you build quickly fills up until the congestion is the same as everywhere else. That is because of the atomic nature of individual vehicles. Cars are like molecules in a liquid - they flow to fill the available space. A good example is the road which bypasses Portland on the west, connecting US 26 to I-5 south of Portland. I have used that shortcut many times. Often, traffic comes to a dead stop.

You know what’s unfortunate back then San Francisco used to be a tough working class city with a unique identity back then nowadays it’s a post modernist wasteland that is been overrun by rich techies who know nothing about the city and a massive homeless problem. The location is breathtaking but the people in the city are what made it great and all those people from a century ago are long gone

Look at the transit lines now in San Francisco. Instead of Freeways, what are essentially secondary roads now guide cars through the city. Route 1 on 19th Street through Golden Gate Park, where Route 1 is barely noticeable when people walk beneath it, onto Funston Ave to Golden Gate Bridge. Route 101 through Van Ness Avenue to Lombard Street to Golden Gate Bridge. Routes 280 and 80 funneling traffic through Embarcadero. While the aesthetic mess of elevated highways are avoided, the use of secondary roads oftentime means pedestrians crossing those roads take life in hand. Collapse of the Embarcadero Freeway was an urban planning godsend opening a city area that had been an urban dead zone opened to city revitalization of the 6 mile water-front including a stadium for the San Francisco Giants baseball team attracting tourist dollars to the improvement of the city economy. In conclusion, denying the construction of Freeways in the city, preserved the character and personality and soul of the city.

Love this Channel. I think it has huge potential. Remember me guys, i was here before the hype!

our metropolitan area (Metro Manila) has really bad city planning but there are pocket of it that are beautiful

Fun Fact: Amsterdam and to a lesser extent, the Randstad area of the Netherlands, almost ended up like California in the 1970s. It took over 40 years to reverse the damage and look at it today. Making a city livable is doable.

Thank you for sharing.

Getting across or into San Francisco is terrible today. Getting to the Golden gate bridge takes over 30 minutes. The western freeway would have been great, even if it was stop+go

I think the unfortunate thing is that many cities simply can't afford to remove freeways. It is unfortunate as well since the people have become so accustomed to it that they do not realize how bad having a freeway ram right through downtown is.

This video explains a lot! Thank you for making it. I couldn’t imagine a concrete network in today’s SF.

In Basel a motorway crosses the river Rein more or less in the City center. However, at the waterfront the motorway is in a tunnel below a residential street. The Bridge over the Rein itself is extraordinary as it is a two-storied bridge, with the residential street on top. The lower deck containing the motorway is glazed protecting the scenery from noise pollution.

San Francisco is honestly so much more beautiful than Los Angeles, and a lot of that is thanks to the lack of freeways.

I say that those designs are good, Just replace them with cycle lanes, Subways, and a beautiful Boulevard with wide sidewalks and plentiful trees and easy crossings like at Santana Row san Jose.

Great informative video!

I live in DC area and lack of freeways created some of the worst traffic in the country

What if the US Invested in mass transit instead of freeways?

whats also fascinating is the story of portlands freeway activism in the 80's

I love your videos! Keep it up!

great content, just subbed. I like how clearly you address the history and you don't romanticize the african american experience as it is an important part of american history.

I’m crazy because I think freeway bridges like that are beautiful.

Good thing they stopped those darn freeways. San Francisco would've gone to shit otherwise. There would've been homeless people everywhere, needles littering the streets, insane home price-. Oh wait...

The only problem that I have with San Francisco not having more freeways is that the city did not do a good job in making transit alternatives to long stop-go-stop-go driving thru neighborhoods. The current Muni and BART routes are not enough. Even if the city just adds a subway line under Geary between the Financial District and the coast thru Richmond (or even an overhead rail or overhead Bus Rapid Transit line for cheaper cost), it would really improve transit in the city....although still lacking.

Great video. What happened in San Francisco is an inspiration. Meanwhile Sydney is in an underground tollway building frenzy. Adopting a failed transport mode from 70 years ago. You couldn't make this stuff up. It's not the car companies that own Sydney because Australia doesn't make cars any more, it's the tollroad operators that own the city and prevent much needed new public transport rail lines from being built. Melbourne meanwhile has more sense. They cancelled the Eastwest motorway when the previous government got voted out over the issue and now have a plan to build a huge ring railway system to interconnect all radial suburban rail lines.

I am from the sf area love your videos, I wish the tunnels were built traffic is horrible in SF especially on those corridors they had planned to bulit, van ness and 19th especially, you should do a video on the Bart system there is alot of history of public dispute over that system that is flawed yet over achieving and a life saver at the same time. One of my favorite things about the bay area. I wish it wasn't so expensive and hard took build, if the original 1950 (s) master plan would've come through it would be so amazing. I am glad we have that instead of a freeway mess, especially since the automobile might be obsolete in 30-40 years and the road/freeway infrastructure is so expensive but I'm sure BART will still be running and hopefully better then

The simplest solution was to just build the damn tunnel.

I live between the 101 and 280. Even though they are eight and nine city blocks away, it gets so loud at night.

Vancouver BC is soon to demolition the viaducts, the initial components to a highway system that was to cut up the beautiful downtown we have today. Sadly the construction of the viaducts at the time did displace the established black neighborhood in Vancouver that included Jimi Hendrix grandmother.

San Francisco was ruined by a lot of other things too.

Too bad in 50+ years we never got the underground freeways. The transit is needed even if we don't want to see it. Today, 19th Ave is a nightmare and completely unmaintained by the city and state.

I remember as a kid the unfinished highway between the bay bridge and fisherman's wharf. To little to understand anything about it then it was finally tore down.

One of your better videos, I think it is critical to link urban planning to the social and economic realities and bottom up movements.

Ah the days when the gratest generation and their parrents where still alive...

Do a video on High Line park.

Where did you get all these road plans and sketches?

London, England not Ontario, has a number of abandoned road plans. There is a Road in West London where housing was demolished for a road widening scheme which was cancelled. The last time I saw it, about ten years ago from the Oxford Tube bus to Oxford the empty space was mainly still there, but had been blocked by a couple of new buildings, a petrol station and a shop I think from memory. I don’t know if it’s still the same today. London is approached by the M1 motorway from the North and the M23 from the South. Neither goes as far as it was intended they should. When I come down the M1 on the coach from Yorkshire it ends very suddenly near Brent Cross Shopping Centre, and was never built beyond there. I’m not sure how much further it was intended to go. Just a few minutes bus ride from where I live is a wide concrete bridge over the road which is sometimes used to store equipment during roadworks. This was to be part of a Junction on the M23 which was never completed. There’s also a few metres of what would have been a slip road. There are some flats in South London which were built alongside where the motorway would have gone. In the ‘60s there was a ‘motorway box’ scheme involving four orbital motorways around London. Only the outermost of these was built, basically around the edge of Greater London as the M25. The others were abandoned in the early ‘70s after only a couple of very short sections had been built. One in East London was opened as a motorway but later changed to being a normal road. This was the only section of Motorway on which I ever drove during the few years that I had a car, and I vowed never to do so again. The other short section still exists, but I’m not sure if it’s still a motorway or not. The first section of Motorway in the UK, the Preston Bypass in Lancashire didn’t open until around 1959; we’re a small country and had more urgent things to spend money on after the war, and most people didn’t have cars in the ‘60s. Only about ten years later the idea of mass demolition in cities to build urban motorways was out of favour, so few were built. Most of our motorway network is in open countryside. Most travel towns and cities is on older, slower roads.