I drive Interstate 280 up the San Francisco Peninsula for my book — a history of how the world’s most beautiful freeway got its route, the people who chose it, the fights they survived — and some mornings the frustration lands all at once: this road is proof that California used to know how to build things, and the proof is fifty years old. The concrete is cracked in places. It hasn’t buckled.
My state created a High-Speed Rail Authority in 1996. Voters approved nearly $10 billion in bonds in 2008 for a system that would run San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and forty minutes. There is real construction in the Central Valley now — guideway, viaducts — and the track-laying is only now beginning. Thirty years in, about $15 billion spent, and no one has ridden a train.
Building was never easy. Interstate 280 went through two full-scale routing wars over the Crystal Springs watershed. Conservationists organized, filed, marched. Courts got involved. The fights were real and consequential, and the road got built anyway.
The difference isn’t that we used to agree. It’s that the system could decide. We used to argue about where the road should go. Now we argue about whether there should be a road.
What the builders had was an apparatus pointed at getting it done. The Collier-Burns Act of 1947 gave California gas-tax money of its own. The 1956 Interstate Act brought the federal 90/10 match. The Division of Highways had engineers — actual state employees who designed roads, not contractors managing consultants managing contractors. The same decade that created the Scenic Highway Program, protecting corridors like 280’s, was the decade that built the corridors. We could protect and build at once.
Then the layers accumulated. CEQA, signed in 1970, is a good law that became a litigation weapon — anyone with a lawyer can stall anything for years. Proposition 13 in 1978 blew up local government finance and pushed every decision upward into a state apparatus less and less capable of deciding. The highway department hollowed out; the engineering went to consultants. Each reform was defensible on its own terms. Together they built a machine whose product is process.
Fukuyama has a word for this: vetocracy. Ruled by veto. “The problem is,” as he puts it, “it’s also a check against good government.” He envies China’s bridges over interior gorges — not the system, the accomplishment. I don’t need to look to China. I can look at the reservoir stretch of 280, threading along the fault line, and see what my own state did when it still could.
I don’t want to romanticize it. Some of what stopped us was worth stopping. In 1959, after petitions signed by 30,000 San Franciscans, the Board of Supervisors canceled seven of ten planned freeways — including one that would have cut through Golden Gate Park — the first freeway revolt in American history. The Embarcadero Freeway got built anyway, a 1.2-mile double-decker stub that walled the city off from its own waterfront, and it stood for thirty-two years as a monument to a bad plan until the 1989 earthquake finished the argument. The people who stopped those roads were right. CEQA has blocked genuinely bad ideas. And 280 had advantages no modern project gets: a federal money waterfall, a weaker litigation environment, a public that mostly wanted the roads.
The tragedy isn’t that we listen more now. It’s that we can’t decide. A system that can hear every objection but resolve none of them isn’t more democratic than the old one. It’s just slower, until the slowness becomes the answer.
I keep coming back to my road. It exists because a state that wanted it found a way through the watersheds, the courtrooms, the opposition. Drive it today and the cut of the road along the hills is still beautiful. The question that won’t leave me alone: would we build it now? The honest answer is no.
The concrete is still there.