San Francisco freeway proposals

[flowmotion]

This may have made its rounds already, but this Flickr user has a trove of high resolution images of unbuilt San Francisco freeway proposals:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157622139053795/

The first thing that strikes me is how awful these are. Not just because the highways are crammed into Golden Gate Park, North Beach, the Marina, and so on. But mainly because the designs are terribly substandard, with closely-spaced interchanges, narrow 4 lane routes, and sharp curves all over the place. They would have been a traffic nightmare and probably not a whole lot better than the surface streets.

The only one I really like is the long Central Freeway tunnel extending from near Civic Center to the Presidio. I wonder if the civic leaders had been less foolhardy and proposed something more sensible, they might have been far more successful in having at least some of these routes constructed.

The Flickr site also has an interesting album of various SF subway proposals.

[TheStranger]

Keep in mind that most of the proposals came about in the late 1940s and early 1950s, so what we consider "substandard" today would be about average with what existed then...

[vdeane]

And it's still average with what we have in the northeast.