Central Freeway
Encyclopedia : C : CE : CEN : Central Freeway
The Central Freeway is a roughly one-mile elevated freeway in San Francisco, California, running west from Interstate 80, which is signed as U.S. Route 101 and Interstate 80. It has a speed limit of 50 miles per hour in both directions all the way to the I-80 - U.S. Route 101 interchange. It was originally intended to continue north to Lombard Street (west of the crooked section of the street) and connect to a freeway running from there to the Golden Gate Bridge, but construction was halted after the Freeway Revolt in the 1950s and the freeway never extended north past Turk Street.
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake led to the closure and later demolishing of the section between Turk Street and Fell Street and, in 2003, the freeway was further truncated back to Mission Street. The freeway was rebuilt—[controversially]—past Mission Street to end at Market Street. The new structure, one-level and twice as wide as the original two-level viaduct, routes freeway traffic onto Octavia Boulevard, an expansion of Octavia Street between Market and Hayes Street that reconnected the freeway with Fell and Oak Streets. The entire project was [completed]in September 2005. As the corridor is once again intact, the routing of U.S. Route 101 has reverted to the Central Freeway after post-Loma Prieta years of bypassing the freeway via 7th Street and Interstate 80, although 101 separates from the freeway at South Van Ness Avenue. All on ramps for the central freeway now show trailblazers for both I-80 and US-101.
External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.