In This Issue

I REMEMBER A clear day back in 1991, when I took the ferry back from a friend's house in Marin and saw the San Francisco waterfront for the first time since the Embarcadero Freeway had been torn down. It was stunning how different the area looked: suddenly, a giant wall of concrete was gone, and there was light and air, and when you got off the ferry and walked toward Market Street, there was a whole different feeling to the city.

It's hard to image now that there ever was an Embarcadero Freeway, and I don't think there's anyone with any sense who would argue that it was wrong to tear it down. Today, anyone who even suggested rebuilding that monstrosity would be properly deemed an urban crackpot.

I thought about that as I read Rachel Brahinsky's story about the battle over the reconstruction of the Central Freeway ramp. The ramp was damaged by the same earthquake that ultimately ended the life of the Embarcadero Freeway, the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, and was torn down last spring. As she writes on page 18, the demolition "opened up views and let light into the surrounding neighborhood in a dramatic way....

The streets were no longer shadowed by cement and car traffic. It felt safer to walk around at night. The air was cleaner. Without the hulking freeway overpass that once crossed over Valencia Street, the neighborhood suddenly seemed livable."

But from the start, there were always plans to rebuild this section of roadway. The city's been fighting over the exact shape of the new highway for years, and a lot of people say the final plan, which will bring the elevated concrete ribbon down to Earth at McCoppin Street and spill 4,200 cars an hour onto Market Street, is the best alternative available. And the Board of Supervisors, which has voted not to block the plan, says it would cost a huge sum to change things at this point.

Maybe so. But we're missing something here. San Francisco is generally better off without freeways. This is an environmentally conscious, transit-first city, and maybe, instead of fighting over this particular ramp, the supervisors and city transportation planners should be developing a long-term plan to abolish almost all the elevated highways that chop up S.F. Ten years after they're gone, we'll all agree it was for the best.