On a cold weekend in mid-September, the wind-blasted dunes of San Francisco’s Ocean Seaside loomed over the Nice Freeway — two lanes that run alongside the Pacific coast in both route separated by a median of sand and ice plant succulents. In a bit of the southbound lanes, the Autumn Moon Competition reverberated with a DJ’s tunes. Birds squawked in formation overhead, and squealing youngsters tumbled down the dunes and scribbled the street with chalk. From the highest of the sandy bumps, between clumps of beachgrass, you could possibly see large container ships crusing out of the Golden Gate and into that well-known fog.
The night represented a compromise. Within the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the town of San Francisco closed the Nice Freeway and turned it right into a promenade, a lot as different cities blocked off roads to let folks roam freely and resist the urge to collect indoors. When lockdowns eased and life returned to a brand new type of regular in 2021, the town decreased the closure of the freeway to holidays and weekends, starting each Friday at midday and ending on Mondays at 6 a.m. Drivers bought to maintain a visitors artery in western San Francisco, and pedestrians, rollerbladers, and cyclists bought their weekend enjoyable.
Gabrielle Lurie / San Francisco Chronicle by way of Getty Pictures
Simply off the freeway, Joel Engardio stood atop a small bump of a sand dune, wearing a black jacket and blue denims, and watched his constituents collect round a standard Chinese language lion dance. The Autumn Moon Competition was only a sampling of what Engardio, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, needs to see. When San Franciscans go to the polls on November 5, they’ll vote on Engardio’s Proposition Ok, a bid to completely shut a 2-mile stretch of the Nice Freeway to create 2,000 acres of steady recreation area.
“It’s develop into the third-most-visited park in all of San Francisco, and we haven’t put a dime into it,” stated Engardio, whose district extends inland for 2 dozen blocks from the Nice Freeway. “There’s not one amenity. It’s actually simply closing the gate and simply having a closed street pavement on the weekends.”
If anybody can flip a freeway into very a lot not a freeway, it’s San Francisco, however even in such a deep-blue metropolis, Prop Ok has been a tricky promote. Opponents have waged a marketing campaign to sink the measure, arguing that it will enhance commute occasions and scale back enterprise on aspect streets. Proponents assume that it will result in extra foot and bike visitors and likewise draw in additional vacationers, giving a lift to native companies. And so they say that making the Nice Freeway a park would higher take in the rising sea — some estimates have ranges round San Francisco Bay climbing greater than 6 ft by the tip of the century — and slash the car emissions that contributed to local weather change within the first place.
“It’s on the poll as a result of change is difficult, and folks resist change,” Engardio stated. “Essentially the most open, clear, democratic method to resolve this battle is to go to the poll and let everybody have a say. The coast belongs to everybody, belongs to all San Franciscans — doesn’t belong to at least one automotive, driver, or one bicycle owner, and even one neighborhood.”
What may seem to be a squabble between San Franciscans is in reality emblematic of the battle for the way forward for coastal cities round the USA. Ought to engineers deploy extra pure infrastructure like sand dunes to work with the ocean as a substitute of investing in seawalls that combat in opposition to it? Ought to city planners maintain designing for the car, as American cities have executed for practically a century, or encourage urbanites to stroll or bike? How can we reconcile what nature needs versus what folks need?
San Francisco is about to search out out — and possibly create a roadmap for different cities to comply with.
Michael Brief / San Francisco Chronicle by way of Getty Picture
Two days after the pageant, Heidi Moseson walked a pedestrian path above the Nice Freeway’s northbound lanes. Moseson is vice chairman of the neighborhood nonprofit Mates of Nice Freeway Park, which helped collect sufficient signatures to get Prop Ok on the poll. Sporting a light-weight sweater and wool cap, she has that singular vibe of an Ocean Beacher — not a full-tilt California surfer stereotype, however distinct from the fuddy-duddies that populate tony Nob Hill and Pacific Heights in San Francisco’s core.
It was a late Monday afternoon, so vehicles and bikes rolled by in waves, punctuated by the 9 stoplights and crosswalks that enable pedestrians to cross to the seaside. Throughout lockdown, when autos evaporated from the Nice Freeway, Moseson’s household changed one in every of their vehicles with an e-bike. “This kind of cliched story,” Moseson stated. “It was this actual, lived instance: Typically if you make area for pedestrians and cyclists, some folks change the way in which they get round.”
When the lockdown was lifted, the Nice Freeway closure shifted to weekends and holidays solely, with the eventual plan to reopen the street full-time on December 31, 2025. However then Moseson and different neighborhood leaders bought to pondering: Why not make the closure everlasting? San Francisco holds metropolis elections in even years, so this November is the final election to get the problem on the poll earlier than the Nice Freeway reverts to the way it was used earlier than. “Let’s put it to the voters,” Moseson stated. “If we win, it sends a hopefully sturdy sign, and we will cease speaking about this and rehashing this.”
Prop Ok doesn’t say something about what a Nice Freeway park may appear to be. It might find yourself gaining playgrounds, artwork installations, or an amphitheater. The measure simply says that the street should near vehicles and vans and bikes, excepting emergency and different authorities autos. And it wouldn’t shut down the entire 3.5 miles of the Nice Freeway, solely a 2-mile, no-exit stretch.
Nonetheless, opponents assume closing that 2-mile part would create an excessive amount of of a burden for motorists coming from the Richmond District north of the proposed park. “The present invoice strikes from a compromise that enjoys a consensus, to one thing that could be very excessive, simply closing it to vehicles,” stated Matt Boschetto, who’s a candidate for supervisor for the district east of Engardio’s, and likewise behind the committee Nice Freeway for All — No on Ok. “It doesn’t have any plans for the park. I believe that’s on objective, as a result of I actually don’t assume they plan on constructing a park. I believe it’s actually simply to shut this off to vehicles and use it as an open area.”
It was onerous to get different opponents to make their case. Richie Greenberg, who authored the opposition argument in opposition to Prop Ok on the poll, referred Grist to Boschetto for remark. One other group opposing the measure, Open the Nice Freeway, didn’t present remark for this story after repeated requests. The workplace of Connie Chan, the incumbent supervisor for the Richmond District who doesn’t help absolutely closing the freeway to autos, additionally didn’t reply to quite a few requests for remark.
Whereas San Francisco teems with vacationers on the Golden Gate Bridge, in Union Sq., and at Golden Gate Park, the concept with Prop Ok is to lure extra of them out to Ocean Seaside. That might, in flip, stimulate enterprise for the eating places, cafes, and boutiques alongside the freeway’s aspect streets.
To Boschetto, nonetheless, locals would pay the value for a closure of the Nice Freeway, as it will be tougher for the residents of the Richmond and the Sundown districts to maneuver between the 2 neighborhoods. “That is going to be damaging to the companies on both finish,” he stated. (Albert Chow, who opposes the measure as president of the service provider group Folks of Parkside Sundown, didn’t return a number of requests to speak about enterprise house owners’ considerations.)
Jeremiah Boehner, an Military veteran who’s working in opposition to Chan to symbolize the Richmond on the board of supervisors, says that Prop Ok would additionally make it tougher for folks attempting to get to and from the San Francisco VA Medical Middle close to the northwest coast of the town. “You possibly can already see that closing the Nice Freeway early on Fridays has had a terrific destructive influence on visitors,” Boehner stated. “I’ve spoken to individuals who work on the VA and veterans, and it has dramatically elevated their drive occasions.”
Janie Har / AP Photograph
Proponents, although, level to a mess of potential advantages. For the householders residing alongside the Nice Freeway, a park might elevate the worth of their property, stated Mark Jacobsen, an economist who research transportation on the College of California, San Diego. After which there are the bodily and psychological well being advantages — and consequent financial savings on well being care — which are tougher to quantify: fewer folks sitting in vehicles, extra folks getting round by transferring their our bodies. Changing a automotive experience with a motorbike experience reduces not solely planet-warming greenhouse gases, but in addition noise air pollution and the particulate matter that may make metropolis air noxious. “Basically, parks and open areas appear to have extra advantages than prices,” Jacobsen stated.
Hints to what could possibly be the Nice Freeway’s future are simply up the street on JFK Drive. It weaves by way of the whole lot of Golden Gate Park — itself over 1,000 acres of meadows, museums, sports activities fields, lakes, and even a bison paddock — terminating on the Nice Freeway. Throughout the pandemic, the town closed the japanese portion of JFK to non-public autos seven days per week to let San Franciscans stretch their legs. Within the 2022 election, 65 % of voters rejected a proposition that will have reopened this JFK Promenade to autos and required that the Nice Freeway be open to vehicles always. “It failed citywide in a landslide,” Engardio stated.
Now, on any given weekend, you’ll be able to bike west from Haight-Ashbury on the japanese fringe of Golden Gate Park by way of a mile-and-a-half JFK promenade —stuffed with artwork installations, a beer and wine backyard, and pianos for folks to diddle on. Reducing over to a different car-free road, then one other with protected bike lanes, you’ll be able to roll clear to Ocean Seaside and down the Nice Freeway, not often sharing area with a car for greater than 5 miles. If Prop Ok is accredited, that room to roam could be a everlasting function of San Francisco: A Nice Freeway park would join Golden Gate Park and Lake Merced to the south, creating 2,000 acres of contiguous public area.
All that greenery may create greater than only a large playground for San Francisco, in keeping with researchers. Connecting the JFK Promenade and the Nice Freeway might relieve visitors congestion by encouraging folks to bike that miles-long path to get to work as a substitute of driving downtown, stated Jason Mark Henderson, who research city biking at San Francisco State College. Analysis has proven that the extra you enhance infrastructure for folks to commute by bike, the extra they’ll select to bike, slashing their carbon footprint. It turns right into a kind of self-reinforcing cycle.
In New York Metropolis and Washington, D.C., as an illustration, bicycle commuting doubled between 2009 and 2014 thanks to raised infrastructure and bike-share packages. Between 2020 and 2023, spending on bikes and equipment in the USA skyrocketed 620 %. The proliferation of e-bikes — a market anticipated to develop 15.6 % annually by way of 2030 — has drawn in folks hesitant to cycle lengthy distances or up huge hills, or maybe unable to make use of a standard bike due to a incapacity.
“The extra folks expertise one thing like that,” Henderson stated, “the extra they’re going to need it in different components of their neighborhood and different components of their metropolis.”
On April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake shook after which burned San Francisco to the bottom, destroying practically 30,000 buildings. The densely populated japanese a part of the town was just about obliterated, forcing refugees west towards the Pacific shoreline. Finally, the horse-drawn buggy yielded to the car, and to assist drivers navigate Ocean Seaside — a coastal getaway – the town constructed the Nice Freeway in 1929.
Within the ensuing many years, San Francisco, like so many different main American cities, was sliced up by freeways. The most important effort, the Federal-Help Freeway Act, handed in 1956, aimed to exchange unsafe roads and pace up journey between main cities by constructing some 41,000 miles of interstate highways, which labored properly sufficient. Nevertheless it additionally loaded city neighborhoods with air pollution, and typically reduce them off from the remainder of the town. It was usually the underserved neighborhoods that suffered essentially the most.
“We reworked American cities within the Nineteen Fifties and early ‘60s by constructing interstates proper by way of the center of downtown areas,” stated Megan Kimble, writer of the e-book Metropolis Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Way forward for America’s Highways. “So we will simply as simply take away them.”
Lloyd Cluff / Getty Pictures
It’s straightforward to assume that cities aren’t malleable, that they’re actually set in stone. But many years in the past, San Francisco went even additional than cordoning off a street to vehicles: The Embarcadero Freeway went up within the Nineteen Fifties, connecting the Bay Bridge on the town’s japanese shore to the Golden Gate Bridge on its northern one. By no means a preferred stretch of roadway, and at all times an eyesore that towered above the town streets, officers proposed tearing it down within the mid-Eighties, however voters rejected that for worry of accelerating visitors.
Then, nature intervened. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the Bay Space. Throughout the bay in Oakland, a part of a freeway collapsed, killing 42. The Embarcadero Freeway survived, however with severe harm, so it was shut down and, in 1991, torn down.
Within the Embarcadero Freeway’s place grew a bustling boulevard that was nonetheless open to vehicles, however extra pleasant to pedestrians and bicyclists. Transit ridership rose 15 %, Kimble notes in her e-book. At present, the Embarcadero is among the metropolis’s sightseeing jewels, the place the Ferry Constructing and Fisherman’s Wharf entice throngs of vacationers.
Many different American cities have knocked down the freeways that divided neighborhoods. Rochester, New York, eliminated a freeway in 2014 and swapped in residences, timber, and bike lanes. Portland, Oregon, turned one right into a riverfront park within the Nineteen Seventies.
Should you shut a street off to vehicles, it turns into a spot for folks — doubtlessly a lot of folks. Milwaukee’s Park East Freeway, eliminated in 2002, is now dwelling to business and residential buildings, in addition to a stadium for the town’s skilled basketball group, the Milwaukee Bucks.
Nevertheless it usually takes a combat to get it executed. As New York Metropolis’s transportation commissioner from 2007 to 2013, Janette Sadik-Khan launched into a quest to make the metropolis safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. In 2009, the town closed off a part of Instances Sq. to vehicles, ultimately making the closure everlasting. The transfer was controversial on the time, with taxi cab firms and a few companies complaining that it will drive folks away and make visitors worse. Within the ensuing years, nonetheless, pedestrian accidents fell by 40 % and vehicular accidents by 15 %. On its busiest days, Instances Sq. now teems with 400,000 pedestrians.
In response to consultants, the information is evident: Eradicating lanes makes roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists, and visitors truly decreases. “What you see in metropolis after metropolis throughout the nation is that if you take away a serious roadway, journey patterns measurably change,” Kimble stated. “Analysis exhibits that automotive journeys lower if you take away street capability. Journey is an effective — it responds to the legislation of provide and demand.”
Nonetheless, even in progressive American cities, and even with the pandemic creating unique areas for cyclists and pedestrians, the automotive stays a basic function of city life. In June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, killed a long-in-the-works congestion pricing system, which might have charged drivers a toll to enter Decrease Manhattan. Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on a lot, however in a rustic the place greater than 90 % of households have not less than one car, they positive do agree that vehicles are a precedence.
“It’s so ingrained into the concept of American prosperity that each American ought to have a automotive and be capable to drive wherever they need, at any time when they need,” Kimble stated. “Even when so many different international locations, so many different cities, present that transit can create a lot of financial prosperity. And actually, it’s significantly better for low-income households.” For each greenback invested in public transport, a authorities will get $5 in financial returns and creates 50,000 jobs.
Conversely, vehicles are costly, each for folks and for cities. State and native governments spend greater than $200 billion annually on the development, operation, and upkeep of highways and roads. Kimble notes that the common household in car-centric Houston, Texas, spends practically a fifth of their $60,000 family earnings on transportation.
Simply as vehicles are costly for households, freeways are costly for cities, notably these alongside a quickly eroding shoreline. It’s changing into more and more clear that to correctly defend coastal cities, seawalls alone received’t reduce it. For one, a rising ocean tends to eat away on the sand beneath a wall, destabilizing it. In Miami, as an illustration, engineers are constructing synthetic mangrove forests that mimic how a shoreline naturally absorbs storm surges.
Earlier than pavement crept throughout its panorama, San Francisco was sand — and extra sand, and a few extra sand — stretching clear throughout the peninsula. Water pooled into “dune slacks,” which attracted coyotes, birds, and rabbits. Shrubs and grasses grew, offering habitats for smaller critters like bugs. The sands continually shifted, “cell dunes” that have been onerous to construct homes on within the early days of San Francisco.
Loren Elliott / Getty Pictures
Out at Ocean Seaside, sand blew continually inland, forming round coastal vegetation to create vegetated mounds. Cellular dunes right here would transmogrify, trapping wind-blown sand within the vegetation, then erode away, then develop as soon as extra. Greater than some other materials or pure course of, sand made San Francisco. “It was much more dynamic kind of ecosystem than what we have now out at Ocean Seaside right now,” stated Ellen Aircraft, a senior scientist on the San Francisco Estuary Institute, which printed a report final 12 months recommending administration choices for the world’s dunes that might work with or with out the passage of Prop Ok.
That’s as a result of right now, Ocean Seaside is imprisoned by the constructed setting. The Nice Freeway — buttressed by seawalls — has stored the dunes in examine. That paved street is like armor, Aircraft stated: “much more inflexible infrastructure to carry the shoreline in place, which prevented all of that migration of the dunes.”
As it’s, the Nice Freeway butts up so tightly in opposition to the dunes that sand spills onto the street, so tractors need to periodically scrape piled-up sand from the pavement. Sand buildup will get so unhealthy that since 2020, the town has needed to shut the Nice Freeway as much as 65 occasions a 12 months, typically for a number of days in a row.
That prices the town some huge cash. A report launched in August by the San Francisco’s Controller’s Workplace (the town’s chief monetary officer and auditor) estimated that if Prop Ok have been accredited, it will save the federal government about $1.5 million in one-time capital challenge prices, and a further $350,000 to $700,000 annually in upkeep and operational prices, together with sand elimination and roadway upkeep. The freeway’s visitors indicators would now not want changing, saving the town one other $4.3 million.
Loren Elliott / Getty Pictures
A completely closed Nice Freeway would incur its personal prices, in keeping with the Controller’s report. That would come with elevated trash pickup and ranger patrols, in addition to new visitors indicators and retrofits to different streets to accommodate diverted visitors. A park would additionally want staff to clear the sand off paths, Moseson stated, however nowhere close to the frequency {that a} street requires to make sure security.
Nevertheless it’s unclear precisely what new infrastructure the town would wish to handle, as a result of the poll measure doesn’t lay out a grasp plan for the park, a undeniable fact that considerations Prop Ok’s critics.
“Whenever you learn the poll, it’s surprising how little is in it,” Boschetto stated. “The one factor that’s in it that’s actually concrete is that it’s closing it off to non-public autos. So it doesn’t have any plans for a park, it doesn’t have any sources for funding, which is fairly surprising.”
The town authorities has a plan for the southernmost a part of the Nice Freeway that’s already shedding its battle in opposition to rising seas and extreme erosion. The mile-long part that runs alongside the San Francisco Zoo is predicted to be shuttered by early 2026. Engineers will exchange the street with multiuse trails and a beachfront plaza. That’s largely to guard a wastewater remedy facility subsequent to the zoo from coastal erosion, but in addition to revive the close by dunes in order that they are going to act as a buffer in opposition to sea degree rise.
Courtesy of Sure on Ok
So drivers are already shedding entry to a piece of the Nice Freeway. Prop Ok would simply lengthen that closure farther north. A latest report from two metropolis companies estimates that closing the freeway throughout peak-hour weekdays — like when crews have to take away sand — and rerouting visitors at the moment provides roughly three minutes of driving time. The companies say that visitors doubtless diverts to a six-lane boulevard a mile to the east, although opponents of Prop Ok say it truly spills into smaller aspect streets, rising congestion. The report additional notes that common each day visitors on the Nice Freeway is down 38 % from pre-COVID ranges of 18,000 vehicles, because the white-collar staff of western San Francisco decide to make money working from home. (Boschetto disputes the discovering of three extra minutes of journey time. Residents of the Richmond district, he stated, “will inform you that’s patently false from their very own firsthand expertise.”)
Fewer persons are driving the Nice Freeway today, and extra persons are flocking to the world on weekends when streets get blocked off. In 2023, 420,000 guests walked, ran, and biked the weekend promenade. Final October alone, 10,400 folks attended a neighborhood Halloween occasion, and an annual enjoyable run introduced one other 10,000. “I believe the pandemic in actually troublesome methods confirmed that all of us can change,” Moseson stated, “actually, can change in a single day, how we do issues and the way we get round.”
Lea Suzuki/ The San Francisco Chronicle by way of Getty Pictures
Whether or not or not Prop Ok passes, San Francisco has to take care of seas consuming away at Ocean Seaside, and winds shoving sand inland. Aircraft’s report from the San Francisco Estuary Institute suggests transplanting native grasses into the dunes, which might maintain tight to the sand — a transfer the town could make even when the proposition fails. The report additionally recommends retaining folks off the dunes, as trampling can kill the vegetation that maintain the dunes collectively. That causes “blowouts,” or troughs of free sand that extra simply spill and blow onto the freeway.
Opponents of the measure say these enhancements might nonetheless occur if the Nice Freeway stays a freeway. “I believe at the moment, the utility of the street outweighs a lot greater than the utility of the park,” Boschetto stated. “So if we will have options which are environmentally pleasant, that keep that space — particularly producing extra native vegetation, particularly defending and conserving the wildlife there — that to me is a large win-win.”
To supporters, a park creates the chance to be a bit extra versatile, permitting the dunes to creep inland and blend the pure world with human infrastructure. Sand roped off to pedestrians might bloom with the greenery that naturally retains them anchored. Foot paths may interlace with dunes. “We’re not giving [the dunes] as a lot as they need,” Moseson stated, “however it will enable sufficient area to do some kind of dramatic modifications that might assist, even when I wouldn’t recreate the unique situations.”
San Francisco, like so many different coastal cities, is contending with the start phases of inevitability: Sea ranges will solely go up from right here, infrastructure be damned. However whereas they’re at the moment a legal responsibility for the Nice Freeway, the dunes might assist reserve it at some point. Because the rising sea approaches, maybe the street will nonetheless be full of vehicles — not less than on the times it might probably keep open. Or possibly the world might be stuffed with artwork installations and benches in a 2-mile-long park established in November 2024.
