Streetsblog San Francisco

The Presidio Parkway/Doyle Drive project will move into the second phase of construction early next year, but planners are already touting a unique public-private partnership, or P3 in their shorthand, which they say forges a new model for delivering massive infrastructure projects for less money and greater financial oversight.

Assuming all the necessary approvals are in place by the end of the year, the Presidio Parkway P3 contract will be awarded to a consortium called Golden Link Partners and will rely on significant foreign investment from two European companies.

As SFCTA executive director Jose Luis Moscovich explained to Streetsblog recently, the P3 is the first of its kind in California and resembles P3s that have worked well in Canada and Europe for years.

“We are well on our way to creating, through the Doyle Drive project, essentially a new paradigm for delivering these big, monster projects in the state,” said Moscovich. “It’s a paradigm where you take into account the entire life-cycle of the project, the design, the construction, the operations and the maintenance. We’re ensuring the project will be well-maintained and there will not be a gap in the maintenance commitment to the project.”

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It may look like a forgotten military landscape, decaying beneath an elevated freeway and overgrown with weeds, but hidden beneath the abandoned buildings and broken pavement, Presidio planners see the potential to regenerate a wetland.

Quartermaster Reach is currently so neglected, most people don't even know it exists. Floating between Lucasfilm's Letterman complex and the Presidio Post Office, some sections have been abandoned for decades. A disused power plant sits at one end and piles of dirt and construction debris mark the northern edge. Once home to Yelamu Ohlone, Mexican settlers commandeered the area's flow of fresh water in the 1700s, the military established a shooting range on the site in the 1800s and paving for Doyle Drive had erased the site's history by the 1930s.

But Doyle Drive may hold the key to the 9.5-acre site's restoration. Nearing the century-mark, the elevated freeway is currently being replaced with a slightly-lower-impact Presidio Parkway. When construction is complete, the landscape underneath the freeway may transform from asphalt to wetland.

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Revised plans for the Main Post of San Francisco’s Presidio national park, which include construction of a contemporary art museum for the collection of billionaire businessman Donald Fisher, are still unsatisfactory, say many preservationists, environmentalists, and neighbors who attended a hearing on the new plans Tuesday night.  Despite the fact that the museum plans have been scaled down since their original release to the public and the National Park Service, they could, in fact, lead to a lawsuit to stop the project from moving forward.

In addition to Fisher’s proposed Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio (the CAMP), the seven-member governing body for the park, the Presidio Board of Trustees, has tentatively approved a Heritage Center in what is now the Officers Club, a 129-room hotel called the Presidio Park Lodge in one of the barracks, and an expansion of the Presidio Theatre, all at the Main Post.  It has already adopted plans for the Walt Disney Family Museum for the Main Post.

According to Presidio Executive Director Craig Middleton, the organizing theme of the altered Main Post will be sustainability, with the use of reclaimed water for landscaping, the improvement of PresidiGo shuttle for transportation around the entire park, the installation of permeable surfaces to reduce runoff, and photovoltaic panels on buildings.


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District 2 Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier represents the Presidio, Cow Hollow, Marina, Pacific Heights and part of the Richmond District. She was originally appointed to her seat by Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2004, and comes from a well-known political family. Her grandfather, Joe Alioto, was mayor from 1968-1976 and her aunt, Angela Alioto, was President of the Board of Supervisors and a candidate for mayor.

In an extensive interview in her City Hall office, Alioto-Pier said the number one transportation issue in her district centers around commuter traffic.

"As a result of being the district that has the honor of being connected to the Golden Gate Bridge, we get a lot of traffic that comes in off of the Golden Gate Bridge," said Alioto-Pier. "It makes for a lot of congestion and a lot of different issues."

While she supports the Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP), and wants more people to ride Muni, she doesn't necessarily feel the City should be encouraging people to get rid of their cars.

"When we look at San Francisco as a transit first city we want the carrot approach more than the stick. We want people to use public transportation and I personally believe that the way we do that is by making it more accessible, by making it run better, not by telling people not to use their cars." 

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Five decades after activists killed plans for a major freeway traveling through San Francisco’s Panhandle, construction companies are lining up for the contract to break ground in August on another major freeway through a park – the Presidio Parkway, which will replace Doyle Drive in the Presidio National Park.

Plans to improve or replace the state-owned road have been in the works since at least the early 1990s.  The San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) is managing the project.  It received approval of its Environmental Impact Report in December 2008, but some issues – and a few detractors – still remain.

“The primary purpose is a seismic safety job and an operational safety job,” said Randy Rentschler, spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), adding that Doyle Drive as it is now rates a two out of 100 on state safety criteria and that it and the Golden Gate Bridge serve as economic links to the North Bay.

The current roadway, which connects the Golden Gate Bridge with San Francisco’s Marina neighborhood, is 68 feet across, and has six lanes, no shoulders, and no median.   In the morning, traffic cones delineate four lanes for the drive into San Francisco.  Workers in the back of trucks move the cones after the morning commute to create more lanes for outbound traffic.

The Presidio Parkway will be at least double the width – over 146 feet at points – and medians will separate the inbound and outbound traffic. The lanes will be 12 feet across, and planners have added one more lane and shoulders.  At two points, the roadway will travel underground through tunnels that are landscaped on the surface.

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