Quote:
Originally Posted by Chikinlittle
I believe Metro-One may have been talking about the Embarcadero Freeway which is now a wide boulevard.
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hm, well that's also completely wrong. outside of major events (4th of july, etc), the embarcadero boulevard is only lightly used by automobiles. i'm not finding any comparative numbers online (probably just don't know where to look), but i'll wander down on monday morning to take some rush hour photos, which will give you a sense of how much automobile traffic this area is getting. emphatically not a "larger freeway standard", think of it instead as an out-of-the-way pacific boulevard, with rail (and trees!) in the centre median. imagine that vancouver had gone ahead with the waterfront freeway idea back in the day and then pulled it down some years later, that's what you've got here: sf demolished the freeway and rerouted traffic along 3-4 other arterials and away from the waterfront. bay bridge traffic (which the embarcadero freeway served primarily) actually can't get onto the "larger freeway standard" without an unlikely and inconvenient detour that would actually take them far off from any but embarcadero destinations (which, as outlandish as the suggest once must have seemed, since the freeway disappeared, the waterfront is growing into its own, one of sf's nicest emerging hoods). basically, the point is that the freeway was emphatically
not replaced with a street-level freeway equivalent serving the cbd, and that the intention was that this would definitely not happen. so yeah, not to belabor it, but "larger freeway standard" = no.
as a further sf cbd aside: 1) a vastly more important arterial cbd-serving arterial, market street, literally the spine of the city, is having non-transit/taxi traffic removed going into the cbd (think a burrard bikes lane test run with cars instead), and the test has gone pretty well; 2) geary, the major east/west arterial into the cbd, is to get two lanes lighter with dedicated brt going in (plan is by 2012); van ness, which serves as highway 101 and the major north/south is slated to lose two lanes with brt going in there too.
so i guess it's not just the loony cyclists-uber-alles hippie nimby regime up in the vanistan working to strangle all business in the cbd!
jk.
as for the quebec exchange - jesus, it's a shame it wasn't put up to a more public debate, it would have been nice to have taken a look at what they were envisioning and gotten more voices into the mix.