Wiener asks Caltrans to examine removal of San Francisco’s Central Freeway

SAN FRANCISCO – State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco has requested Caltrans to review the potential prices of eradicating the Central Freeway and enquired concerning the removing of two different freeways within the metropolis.

In a letter to District 4 director Dina El-Tawansy, Wiener requested if the company could be keen to conduct a examine to guage the elevated roadway’s future. The senator requested if the examine would come with another that will demolish the freeway, which runs via the town’s South of Market, for a floor boulevard.

The senator additionally requested if the company has developed any plans to interchange or rebuild the freeway, the street’s remaining helpful life and upkeep prices.

In a tweet, the senator stated the freeway’s removing “could be an enormous profit to San Francisco.” 

Together with the Central Freeway, Wiener requested Caltrans comparable questions concerning the Bayshore viaduct, a stretch of Freeway 101 and Interstate 80 between seventeenth Road and the foot of the Bay Bridge, together with the Interstate 280 spur between Freeway 101 and the town’s Mission Bay neighborhood.

In his letter, Wiener cited air pollution considerations from the freeways, together with the roads disproportionately impacting marginalized communities. The senator additionally mulled the potential of repurposing the land for different makes use of, together with housing.

“Rebuilding these constructions in place and/or widening the present constructions would perpetuate and intensify lots of the beforehand outlined disastrous outcomes for the neighborhoods by which the viaducts presently exist,” Wiener stated.

“In different phrases, we shouldn’t be investing large sums in these constructions earlier than we consider whether or not we ought to be retaining them within the first place,” the senator went on to say.

Wiener’s letter to the company comes within the wake of the Federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Regulation, which incorporates $1 billion in grants geared toward reconnecting communities divided by transportation infrastructure, resembling freeways.

Constructed within the Fifties, the Central Freeway was a part of a complete plan to construct a number of freeways via the town, which was finally halted after voters started to reject the rising city freeway community. 

Initially stretching to Turk Road, the freeway was broken within the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, as was the Embarcadero Freeway, one other double-deck roadway alongside the town’s waterfront.

Following the quake, each the Embarcadero Freeway and the stretch of the Central Freeway north of Market Road have been demolished. The eliminated portion of the Central Freeway was changed by Octavia Boulevard, a undertaking that included new housing and mixed-use improvement in a neighborhood partitioned by the freeway for many years. In the meantime, the Embarcadero was remodeled right into a boulevard that reconnected the town to its historic waterfront and led to its revitalization.