![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1948-San-Francisco-Highway-Plan.jpg\")
A 1948 San Francisco Planning Department map proposes 10 freeways to crisscross the city. (Eric Fischer\/Flickr)<\/p>\nSpeaking with KQED morning host Brian Watt, Henderson described the story of this freeway as the result of not only physical engineering but also years of politically motivated decisions throughout the 20th century.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s an excerpt of their conversation, which is edited for brevity and clarity.<\/p>\n
Brian Watt: How much of a big deal is this closure from your vantage point?<\/p>\n
Jason Henderson: Yes, if you think about the geography, the 101 is coming up from the south, and it hits a junction with the Bay Bridge viaduct. They come together, and then, there\u2019s the third leg of what\u2019s called the Central Freeway.<\/p>\n
It has its name because in the early planning stages for freeways in San Francisco, there was this idea of a central freeway that orbited around the urban core of San Francisco \u2014 all these different freeways that were never built.<\/p>\n
A 1948 San Francisco Planning Department map proposes 10 freeways to crisscross the city. (Eric Fischer\/Flickr)<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s get more into this history. How did the Central Freeway get like this in the first place?<\/p>\n
As far back as the mid-1930s, the city of San Francisco, with financial support from the Works Progress Administration from the New Deal, had commissioned studies for a network of elevated roadways that would encircle the core of San Francisco.<\/p>\n
The Bay Bridge had also been completed by the mid and late \u201930s, and it had a touchdown on Fifth [Street] in South of Market, and so there was planning for elevated freeways encircling the core that included using the Bay Bridge viaduct, linking it to the 101.<\/p>\n
World War II interrupted all of that conversation, and then after the war, traffic gradually picked up, and pressure for some revisiting this idea of a kind of an elevated, limited-access highway reemerged. There was postwar planning for elevated freeways encircling the core that included using the Bay Bridge viaduct.<\/p>\n
And as [this] Central Freeway, which radiated off of that Bay Bridge-101 junction, as it extended into denser residential areas, more politically connected residents and officials began to object. So the freeway made it as far as Turk [Street] and Golden Gate [Avenue]. The original stretches of this were built through industrial areas and residential areas with very little political power at the time.<\/p>\n
This is so interesting. What happened in the decades that followed?<\/p>\n
The 1956 Interstate Highway Act accelerated funding for highways, so you had a very contentious, almost decadeslong political debate in San Francisco about a network of freeways crisscrossing the city. Much of it was defeated by 1966.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaking with KQED morning host Brian Watt, Henderson described the story of this freeway as the result of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-271371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-san-francisco","9":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","10":"tag-san-francisco-news","11":"tag-sf","12":"tag-sf-headlines","13":"tag-sf-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}