Before San Francisco’s contentious Upper Great Highway closed for good, the internet was flooded with maligned homages to one of the city’s most problematic roads.
After years of maligned rallies, propositions, and protests against closing the two-mile stretch of road, San Francisco has finally closed it as it begins transitioning into a large public park.
On Friday morning, cars traveled down the two-mile stretch of road for the last time before officially closing off to private vehicles as crews descended to turn it into the city’s newest park.
The park, itself, will become the largest “pedestrianization” — the act of reclaiming and revilizing spaces used for vehicles back to pedestrian-forward spaces — in the state’s history.
This is the largest pedestrianization project in California history,” Tamara Barak Aparton, with the SF Recreation and Park Department said in a release. By 10 a.m., park rangers had locked the gates to the road portion, which stretched between Lincoln Avenue and Sloat Boulevard, effectively using the San Francisco Zoo as one bookmark end.
Before the road was shut off, droves of drivers and pro-car-culturistas flooded social media with maligned tributes to the road. And in predictable nauseating fashion, waves of aerial footage meant to evoke some sort of favorable nostalgia washed over social media. Even (predictable) local news outlets ran with this idea: highlighting this stretch of the Great Highway as, somehow, a now driverless corridor people will dearly miss.
But mind you, there’s a reason why this particular stretch of roadway was among the areas that became off-limits to cars when SFMTA’s Slow Streets Program began in April 2020.
The Great Highway was flawed from its inception. Built in 1929, the four-lane divided road was in a perpetual state of disarray and, ironically, undrivable. Its proximity to Ocean Beach meant mounds of sand would accumulate on lanes hugging the windy beach. Lane closures that lasted days, sometimes weeks, were common; sand piled so high that pedestrian crosswalk buttons would occasionally be covers or thereabout — a fitting bit of symbolism; the reason for the highway’s unusually high cluster of traffic lights was a result of pedestrians frequently injured or killed trying to cross the area, as was the case when an elderly woman was fatally struck near the now-closed roadway and became the 24th pedestrian death last year; snowy plovers, a near-threatened species of shorebird that are regularly seen along Ocean Beach, are vulnerable to vehicle collisions because of their natural inclination to run, rather than fly, as a first means to escape harm.
Over the next coming weeks, the Upper Great Highway will undergo a metamorphosis unseen in any place, at any time in San Francisco. Or the state. On April 12th, the designated grand opening for the Great Highway Park, San Franciscans will get a first-row seat to the pedestrian renaissance that’s, quite literally, reshaping how urban areas allocate finite space — putting people and communities before car culture and unnecessary roadways.
We don’t need any more drone-shot homage to the latter subjects. However, if someone would like to film slow-mo of snowy plovers running up and down ocean beaches, unencumbered by noisy automobiles and their emissions.
Feature image: Courtesy of Reddit
It’s about time someone called out these entitled motorists who can say with a straight face. Cruising the Great Highway was one of their happiest moments. Speaks volumes about America 🇺🇸 boring priorities
Obnoxious title and content. Who are you to tell anyone how to feel about their memories? Just because mean others feel the same way. Being able to drive along our coastal gem meant something to most on the westside. Always uplifting when the Ocean is in sight. I know it’s hard for an uncreative mind to find things to write about, but maybe give it a try without giving the middle finger to those who care.