Here’s episode 7 in our podcast series about Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula.
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Ghost Ramps: Interstate 280
Category: Interstate 280
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The Revolt: Interstate 280
Here’s the six podcast episode in the story of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula. This time it’s about the freeway revolt in San Francisco that killed plans for six of seven planned freeways.
Here are the earlier episodes:
Here’s the fifth podcast episode in the story of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula.
Here are the earlier episodes:
Here’s the fourth podcast episode in the story of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula – the bridge over the Stanford Linear Accelerator.
Here are the earlier episodes:
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The Most Beautiful Freeway
I’m writing a book about Interstate 280 — how its route was chosen, and who chose it. I’ve reached the point where I need your help.
Drive Interstate 280 south from San Francisco on a clear morning and the city falls away fast. Eight lanes curve through rolling hills — oaks, grassland, the reservoirs flashing between the ridges. No billboards. No clutter. Just the road, doing exactly what a road is supposed to do, in a landscape that looks like it was arranged for the purpose.
People call it the world’s most beautiful freeway. I’m writing its biography.
Not a coffee-table book of pretty pictures, and not an engineering manual. The question that hooked me is simpler and harder: how did this particular road get to run exactly here? Who decided, who objected, what did it cost, and who paid? Every mile of freeway is an argument that somebody won. I want to know who argued, and what the winning cost.
My model is Michael Wallis’s Route 66 — a main narrative braided with what he called “sideshows”: short detours into the odd, human, funny details that accumulate around any great road. The book opens in Millbrae. Its center of gravity is a chapter I call “The Ridge Bargain,” built around a single question: what did it cost to move four miles of Interstate off a city’s drinking water?
For the last few months I’ve been in the archives — the San Mateo County History Museum, the Caltrans transportation library, the Cañada College archives — and the documents have been generous with dates and votes and contract numbers. I can now tell you, for instance, that the final seven miles of 280 opened on September 7, 1973, at a cost of $21 million.
What the documents can’t give me is people. And that’s why I’m writing this.
The open questions
These are the things I most want to know — the gaps no archive has filled:
- November 1961. Three years after the state adopted the Skyline Boulevard alignment, its engineers suddenly revived an older plan to run the freeway through Millbrae — over El Camino Real, wiping out the Kings Drive-In on Millbrae Avenue. San Bruno said yes; Millbrae held out. Nobody has ever said why the route came back from the dead. Was it engineering? Politics? Leverage? If your parents or grandparents followed San Mateo County politics in those years, I’d like to hear what they said about it at the dinner table.
- The Ridge Bargain. In 1968–69, four miles of Interstate got moved off San Francisco’s watershed. The deal involved the city, the county, the state, and the federal government. But who actually sat at the table? I have agencies; I need names.
- January 1968. The Highway Commission approved a realignment that month. How did Redwood City and Woodside react? Who announced it, and how did the local papers play it? The big-city dailies missed most of this story; the weeklies might not have.
- The scenic highway. The Peninsula stretch of 280 is a designated state scenic highway, which is why you’ll never see a billboard on it — unlike US 101, just to the east. Who pushed for that designation locally, back in the 1960s? Somebody had to, before the easements were signed.
- The construction years. The Crystal Springs section went up between 1970 and 1973 — grading, drainage, watershed protection, three vista points. Did you work on it? Drive past it every day? Photograph it? The union papers covered it; the family albums might have the better pictures.
- The statue. For 49 years, a 26-foot concrete Junipero Serra stood at the Crystal Springs rest area — dedicated in 1976, demolished in 2025. Half a century of graffiti, proposals, and “turn left at the statue” directions. What are your memories of it?
- The road’s own police. The California Highway Patrol has owned this road since before most of it existed. I’m hoping to ride along with them. But first: did you patrol 280, get stopped on it, or know someone who did — back when the limit was 55 and the rest areas were full?
What I’m looking for
Photographs most of all — construction, the corridor before the freeway, the rest areas in their prime, the statue. Then documents: clippings, letters, planning papers, company newsletters, anything in a shoebox. Then memories: what it was like to drive it new, to live next to the fight, to work the job. And introductions: retired Caltrans District 4 engineers, CHP officers, planners, county old-timers, anyone who was in the room.
If you can help, please reach out to me using either the Contact page on this site or directly at scott@loftesness.com
Somebody should try to tell the story of this road. I’ve decided that somebody is me. But I can’t do it alone — and I have a feeling the best material isn’t in any archive. It’s in your scrapbooks, journals, or maybe upstairs in the attic.
Here’s the third podcast episode in the story of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula – the San Mateo Creek (Doran Memorial) Bridge, 1967–1969
Here are the earlier episodes:
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The Proof of Concrete
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.
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The Boulevard: Interstate 280
Episode 2 in our series about the development of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula.
Here’s the first episode.
Enjoy this brief audio podcast about some early history of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula that was generated by Meta Muse AI.
Note: I’ve written here before about Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula. It’s a beautiful drive along an unusually natural and undeveloped section of land. This afternoon I went down a bit of a “rabbit hole” exploring more about the history of how the route the roadway takes was decided. Turns out it’s quite a story. One that’s unlikely to have happened were it being decided in today’s political climate.
Drive north on I-280 past Woodside and the view still startles: a multi-lane interstate running the rim of the San Andreas rift, and west of it an almost unbroken sweep of water, oak, chaparral, and ridge. No subdivisions. No office parks. No golf-course mansions stepping down to the lake. The land above Crystal Springs, and the country around Filoli, looks as if the postwar Peninsula never happened.
It almost did. The emptiness is not an accident of topography. It is the residue of a late-1960s bargain in which local activists pulled the U.S. Department of the Interior into a state highway fight, San Francisco traded development rights on its watershed for a relocated freeway, and federal money became the lever that shoved Interstate 280 east onto the ridge and away from the reservoir. A highway argument became, without much fanfare, a federal conservation instrument.