But the sad part is that many people here (including many politicians) in the city still support this kind of constructions today, alleging that “São Paulo is a city for work! If you want green, go the highways with your cara and go to the beach or to the countryside. And if you don’t have a car, f**k you! You’re a poor loser and don’t deserve a decent life!”

The website shows how the Leftist Luddite mentality of San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area has made
it hopelessly congested and unaffordable for a typical working class person to live in, and has stifled commerce. Truck shipments of goods and commercial services can't move on a light rail streetcar, or even a BART train.

It was obvious by the late-1950s that freeways and urban areas didn't mix. Give some credit to the San Franciscans who had the vision to oppose them, even if they didn't necessarily articulate 2009 ideals at the time.

Currently the City often tries to ignore such situations because they fear liability in recognizing the danger. the reason this sounds all of about totally backwards is because it is, and is another outgrowth of traffic engineering and the seperation between what is happening on paper and what is really happening on the street and what the community wants.

another thing that was taken out of the the Bike Plan is the development of an inspection system to find such situations and address them instead of ignoring them. in doing this you overcome traffic engineering/highway design with the simple reasoning that moving people safely is at times more important than moving x number of cars per minute.

this isn't removing the superstructures but it is a start and it it also developing a different way of percieving the street. almost sixty years and lord knows how many billions of dollars was put into developing the idea that car movements should take precedence at all costs. there has been a lot of work in recent decades in planning and advocacy but this work often does not address the underlying issues in this manner. the currently proposed los replacement measure which may or may not ever go anywhere doesn't directly address extremely dangerous situations. because as I said the City tends to ignore these places.

to undo highway design you have to develop a new way of doing things and develop the rational for how to do it. we have seen what ignoring things and not developing a different type of thought has brought. a lot of people want the same things they want safe streets. its just about developing ways to reach that goal. the bike network will certainly help, but that is just the begining. that's just what was envisioned in 1997 and hasn't been attained yet because of ignoring the work that needs to be done.

As I remember, that was a compromise: environmentalists wanted to demolish the Central Freeway south of Market also, but couldn't get everything they wanted. It is not too late to demolish more of the Central Freeway.

Yes, that would be costly, but looking at what that highway does to the surrounding land I have to wonder if it was really the cheaper option in the long run.

This was an opportunity to re-assert the local legislature and the community's right to keep its people safe and determine how things moved on its streets. Because ultimately that should have never happened and allowing it to happen was a mistake on the part of advocates. This is why it is important to expand advocacy beyond letter writing and packing meetings. Just minor details there caused such a huge mess. Then failing to help the City see some alternative or other way of proceeding intensified the problem.

Now, hopefully, the bike network, orginally planned in 1997, will be more complete, but I think that advocates, citizens should take note of this and try to avoid the same mistakes in the future. CEQA problems were originally identified in the late 90's. The SFBC actually worked to take such issues out of the Bike Plan and convinced the Planning Department to not do environmental review. I think this was done because they didn't want to work through the problem, which really isn't that big of a deal certainly not three years and millions of dollars worth of a problem.

This has alot to say about public process. First, private advocacy groups should not work to privatize public plans and exclude the ideas of other citizens. Second, organized advocacy groups really need to put more resources towards, figuring things out. The City agencies are often not equipped to do this, or are not doing it in an advanced way. If all the speech is advocacy and planning then such issues are often not resolved until they create some epic disaster.

Because the freeways now linger on the surface streets, some of the most dangerous situations in the City are where surface freeway designs interact with regular streets, places often not on the bike network. There are ways to address such problems but it takes work and it particularly takes paying attention to the laws and policies that effect street design and using this information to make the streets different. In some places in the City we are talking about systematic, repeat problems that are often ignored. I think that advocacy that restricts speech just sort of ignores these issues perpetuates the problems.

With no public planning process and the funded advocates' staff busy with advocating that consists largely of meetings and letter writing, this is likely to continue.

Especially in a city that is 85% built out, the solutions to the evolution of the built urban environment are going to be political, likely suboptimal, but with broader buy-in than the East German model where the technocrats bestow their thinking on communities, whether our NIMBY asses like what they're doing to our communities or not.

TOD without the commensurate investment in Transportation is another of these modernist impulses, where the cleanliness of a theory needn't be perturbed by the functional realities on the ground.

-marc

Also, While I acknowledge the consciousness behind you're statement about where the freeways where built, I do not think that the the Excelsior was a largely minority neighborhood. The freeways where built largley near what once was industrial land.

So sure, the freeways weren't planned by Satan or satanists, but they were organized and planned by people who believed strongly that what was good for General Motors was good for the U.S. Luckily a lot of San Franciscans didn't believe that, and along with such well known counter-thinkers as Lewis Mumford, created a contrary social movement that was not automatically in favor of "progress," and was not cowed by civic elites who took it for granted that their cement-pouring plans were inevitable and superior...

I've read plenty about the "revolt" and it's definitely interesting. What's missing though is an analysis of the "why" about freeway planning (and its cousin, urban renewal/redevelopment/etc), esp. as it relates to the mood of the nation and its leaders in the immediate post war era.

It's easy for us, with our 60 years of hindsight to cluck our tounges and opine on just how "horrible" freeways were/are, and how terrible much post war redevelopment turned out (Case Study being the destruction of the Fillmore and the mistreatment of its population, for one).

That said, think back to what the country had gone though - a long, sustained economic depression, followed by a world war that made significant impacts on people's lives and sowed the seeds for social movements that were to come later. It's not hard to understand why people, esp. leaders in that post war prosperity and newfound status as a superpower, would want to rid themselves of reminders of the hardship of the past, and would want (a car, suburban house, etc etc etc).

I'm not saying these were the wisest decisions, nor do I believe they turned out particularly well, and we can write many books about that. But I do think it's important to realize that these plans were not the work of Satan - they were the work of people who, in their way really believed in a vision of a properous nation and were convinced this is the way to go.

Again, before anyone flames me , I'm not saying I agree with it (read carefully) but I am saying it's worth someone studying.

As this standard eventually became incorporated into CEQA environmental review as a percieved "impact" the stage was set for much mangling of environmental review and a huge waste of resources as such consideration stopped the undoing or repairing the all-car re-design. The origins of highway design can be found in the first Highway Capacity Manual (available in the collection at the main branch of the public library). This first of the still governing text of traffic engineerings sets it all out and is of course published by the good roads burea, or some agency along those lines which is composed of you guessed it, oil rubber and automobile interests.

Even more interesting than all of this, is what is embodied in the LOS standard and the manual as in the idea of a traffic engineer or someone who tells the community how things should move on the street. Prior to this there were private roads or the legislature governed the way things moved. A contemtporary outgrowth of the "expert" idea is even found in contemporary transportation planners. At times, their need to see things though the eyes of engineering and the legislature's deference to them as "experts" obstructs any real change.

This is further exacerbated by non-profits who often restrict their advocacy to public relations type speech. So you end up with a situation where the experts are studying studies about studying studies and the non-rofits are advocating that they study more and faster. Such is the situation in SF, now.

Instead of resolving the issues at hand studying them just perpetuates the idea that there actually are any issues. As in the Bike plan EIR disaster. Sure it's almost done and hoepfully something will happen but did the City in doing one and failing to othwerwise defend its decisions just sanction a skewed and backwards system. Will the next Bike Plan require EIR and take eight years to complete, etc.

This is what comes form not understanding the history or working through the issues and not looking outside of the current perceptions of what the street is, or what it could be.