Cities that did decide to tear up urban areas for freeways aren't really any better. Consider places like Los Angeles, Dallas, or Houston.
What makes SF difficult to drive in (from my perspective of only ever being a pedestrian there) is a) extremely hilly terrain, b) the general difficulty of a dense urban environment anywhere, and only a distant third is c) traffic, which is merely an added stressor to the complex choreography that is an urban street.
For SF, not rebuilding the 480 after the '89 earthquake made the Bay side of San Francisco really pleasant and enjoyable place to be. The Embarcadero from Giant's stadium to the Wharf and around to Fort Mason is such a beautiful place to walk/jog/ride, I can't imagine the area with the double-decker highway it used to have.
Wait do you mean? As in, the highways proposed in 1955 weren’t built?
I’m not sure how highways going through SF would make it easier to drive in SF (outside of the highways): wouldn’t that generally increase traffic and conflicts?
So just to clarify, you're thinking that traffic would increase because people would live outside SF and commute in? But don't people who live in SF need to get to work too? In that case, it seems like having giant highways carving up the city is going to make walking / biking to work harder which would cause more people to drive to work. That's what we see in "car-oriented" cities and it leads to an increase in traffic congestion that makes it miserable to drive, in addition to an environment that makes it miserable to do anything else but drive.
Commute through, eg Mill Valley to South San Francisco, or similar. Right now, because there's no freeway that goes through the city, that commute is technically possible, I'm sure there are people that do that, but it's not a fun or easy commute, so people try and live in San Francisco and commute to one or the other. If there was a freeway from the Golden Gate bridge, through the city, instead of Lombard and then Gough, then the Mill Valley - South San Francisco commute would be (more) viable at a cost of increased inter-city traffic. Ie traffic that is in San Francisco, but not doing anything there other than transiting. Which is the so-called "extra" traffic GP refers to.
There's a second Oakland/SF bridge that doesn't exist. Well, I assume it would go to Oakland. It's marked with "???" and just says "Crossing". I presume that hypothetical bridge wouldn't have Yerba Buena Island to connect through, so would be really impressive and long (compared to the Golden Gate and Bay bridges).
At one point it was also planned to be just north of SFO. Have you ever taken I-380 east instead of one of the exits to 101N/S? There's a huge multi-lane road that dwindles to basically an airport access road exit.
Oh man, thanks for those links. TIL. A causeway or something that extends off of Alameda? It's wild to think about what that would have done to the area.
This is a bizarre thing to say when all of those roads exist, more or less, except for the Embarcadero which was removed after it collapsed in the 1989 earthquake (and was a crazy eye sore).
It is certainly true that the taste for elevated highways through cities has waned given the pollution and dust and general unsightliness that it produces. In the 1950s, when cars were all the rage, people were very excited by these things.
> This is a bizarre thing to say when all of those roads exist, more or less
Personally, as an SF resident I would much prefer all the cars to be tunneled or elevated instead of idling in front of my house or blowing loudly through my block. It's a safety issue.
When there's only so much surface area where else are people supposed to build except up and down? That's why we have skyscrapers, and those don't seem to provoke the same vitriol as the roads.
Even the famously-hated Embarcadero Fwy wouldn't have been visible if the plans for the World Trade Center (lol) at Market/Embarcadero hadn't also been canceled:
> Personally, as an SF resident I would much prefer all the cars to be tunneled or elevated instead of idling in front of my house or blowing loudly through my block. It's a safety issue.
This is a false choice though. It would be better to design the city in such a way that we don't need personal automobiles for most trips. Building high-speed roads (elevated or not) through a city tends to have the opposite effect. If you live in SF, just think of the parts of the city that do have high speed roads. Is it pleasant to walk along division street? People choose their mode of transit based on what feels safe and convenient to them.
In the space and money taken up by an elevated highway, we could have low-speed mixed-use streets and an entire separate highway for bikes, and it would be safer and quieter.
Yes, inducing some demand is the point. People have to live somewhere, work somewhere, and until recently generally had to commute between the two. When this happens in your circulatory system it's called a stroke :p
'cause they decided not to build most of the roads: https://www.cahighways.org/maps/1955trafficways.jpg