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.
