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.