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TRANSACTIONS NEWSLETTER ONLINE

November/December 2006

Grand Award: San Francisco Street Renaissance

Co-Winner: Octavia Boulevard/Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association

Octavia
Octavia Boulevard replaced a double-deck freeway, and through clever design serves as both a thoroughfare and quiet neighborhood street. (Photo: Noah Berger)

As traffic exits Highway 101 in San Francisco and flows across Market Street onto the new Octavia Boulevard, motorists suddenly realize they are passing through a genuine neighborhood — a cheerful mix of colorful buildings bordering a human-scale, four-lane street lined with poplar and elm trees and old-fashioned lampposts.

Such a friendly welcome to this part of San Francisco was not always so. For decades, historic Hayes Valley was marred by a double-deck freeway that left sad, shadowed buildings, empty lots and crime in its wake — and sliced the neighborhood in half.

Today, the five-block-long Octavia Boulevard is a triumph of urban transportation planning that works both as a high-speed thoroughfare and a quiet pedestrian street. Completed in September 2005, Octavia Boulevard also marks another victory in San Francisco’s historic and ongoing “freeway revolt.” The success of the roadway is due to 16 years of hard work, relentless determination and imagination on the part of neighborhood residents, urban planners, elected officials, and San Francisco Department of Public Works planners and engineers — as well as to an unplanned natural catastrophe.

The “boulevard battle” began in 1989 when the Loma Prieta earthquake knocked out a portion of the double-deck Central Freeway that extended from Highway 101 across Market and north across Hayes Valley, with ramps at Gough, Franklin, Fell and Oak streets. In 1992, three years after the earthquake, Caltrans razed the most damaged portion of the freeway, from the Fell and Oak streets ramps north. That same year, the Board of Supervisors made it city policy not to rebuild any new above-ground ramps for the freeway north of Fell Street.

Hayes
A new park, named for neighborhood activist Patricia Walkup, provides a welcome oasis of open space. (Photo: Noah Berger)

With a good part of the ugly freeway vanished from overhead, Hayes Valley residents could see the light, and little by little their neighborhood began to rejuvenate. Caltrans, however, had determined that the rest of the freeway was worth saving, and in 1996 began tearing down the remaining double-deck roadway, in anticipation of rebuilding a safer single deck. At the same time, a city task force proposed a street-level boulevard to replace the five blocks of freeway north of Market. Hayes Valley residents recognized a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to regain their neighborhood and supported the boulevard concept.

In 1997, residents on the west side of San Francisco put an initiative on the city ballot to rebuild the Central Freeway. They argued that a boulevard would cause massive traffic backups at Market Street and effectively cut off access to the Haight, Sunset and Richmond districts. The measure narrowly won, but freeway proponents underestimated the determination of Hayes Valley residents. In 1998, the boulevard supporters collected 18,000 signatures and put their own initiative on the ballot. It, too, won. In 1999, both sides put measures before the voters. This time, the boulevard won, and the freeway supporters conceded. Three years later, in 2002, Caltrans demolished the remaining part of the Central Freeway, and the freeway fight was finally over.

According to Paul Olsen, president of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, “We wanted to give people back a part of San Francisco and find a better way of moving traffic.”

The concept for Octavia Boulevard was the work of two University of California, Berkeley, planning professors, Allan Jacobs and Elizabeth Macdonald. Their design, modeled after the boulevards of Paris and other European cities, is intended to meet the needs of crosstown drivers as well as local traffic.

The boulevard connects Highway 101 with the city and allows through traffic to flow with little interference. Four central lanes of fast-moving traffic — two in each direction — are divided by a planted median. On either side of the central roadway — and separated from it by additional landscaped medians — are more intimately scaled narrow streets for local traffic that buffer residents from the through traffic. Several vacant lots along Octavia that once were part of the freeway right-of-way are planned by the city as sites for some 900 units of transit-oriented housing.

At the end of Octavia, where westbound through traffic turns left onto Fell Street, a new block-long park extends between Fell and Hayes streets. Named in honor of the late Patricia Walkup, founder of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, this grassy park is a gathering place for locals and a welcome oasis of open space.
— Marjorie Blackwell


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