Tag: stanford university

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Interstate 280

The Most Beautiful Freeway

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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?
  7. 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.

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AI AI: Large Language Models

The Allure of Large Language Models: A Personal Connection

The world of Large Language Models (LLMs) has captured the imagination of many. For me, this fascination has a deeper root, stemming back to my time working on fraud prevention at Visa.

Card fraud is an ongoing battle. Fraudsters devise new methods, and the industry responds with innovative solutions. One such threat was the counterfeiting of magnetic stripes on cards. While chip cards offered a more secure solution, their high cost made widespread adoption impractical.

In search of a cost-effective solution, we explored two approaches. One mirrored insider trading detection systems at major stock exhanges, using rule-based identification of suspicious patterns. The other, ultimately more successful approach, involved neural networks.

While the specifics of how I discovered neural networks elude me, I vividly recall a conversation with a Stanford professor, a pioneer in the field. His encouragement spurred us to pursue this technology. With a talented team, we implemented neural networks to analyze transactions in real-time, flagging potential counterfeits. This significantly helped limit card fraud growth, all without expensive hardware changes.

Today, that same neural network technology underpins LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, launched in late 2022. Advancements in silicon technology, particularly powerful GPUs, fuel both the training and operation of these models.

Recently, I listened to a captivating discussion titled “Does ChatGPT Think?” featuring Stephen Wolfram. That conversation triggered me writing this blog post.

Wolfram’s description of LLMs resonated deeply with me:

“So the big achievement and the big surprise is that we can have a system that fluently produces and understands human language… It’s not obvious that it would work, and it’s a kind of scientific discovery that it’s possible to have a thing like ChatGPT that can produce this thing that’s one of our sort of prize features – namely human language.”

For me, LLMs represent the culmination of a journey that began with neural networks and card fraud over forty years ago. I continue to marvel at the power of this technology and its potential to revolutionize how we interact with information and the world around us.

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iPhone 11 Pro Max Palo Alto Photography Stanford

Stone River

While heading to the Anderson Collection at Stanford I stopped by Andy Goldsworthy’s sculpture Stone River which lies in the field just across the street. Built from fragments from Stanford buildings damaged in the 1989 earthquake, it’s beautifully crafted and well worth a visit. All of these images were made with my iPhone 11 Pro Max.

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Black and White Photography Photography - Black & White Photography - Canon 5D Mark II Stanford

The Power of Black and White Photography – An Example

Angel of Grief - Stanford University - 2012

I learned so much about the power of photography in the short time I had with my good friend Chris Gulker before he passed away in late 2010. For most of his work, Chris was dedicated to creating powerful black and white images – and he did so with great passion and flair. His images were almost always of people – and, sometimes, about events with people in them. Late in his life, he began shooting portraits – mostly in color – for InMenlo.com. But his passion remained the black and white photography he loved.

What is it about these images – when they shed the color that we expect? How do they become even more “powerful” – when losing that colorful dimension?

In my experience, going to monochrome is a fascinating way to explore images – first looking at them as originally shot in color – and then moving them to monochrome, shedding the influence of the color, and just getting down to their essence – of light and shadow.

This image of the Angel of Grief is an example. It’s a classic piece of memorial statuary located near the Stanford family tomb on the Stanford University campus. It’s tucked away in an out of the way place that you come across while walking. It’s so striking when you see it – a memorial to Henry Lathrop, brother to Jane Stanford, based on an 1894 sculpture by William Wetmore Story.

Late in May, I took Lily for a walk through this area – including the Arizona Cactus Garden and the Stanford memorial. I had along my Canon 5D Mark II with the 135mm f/2.0L lens. The late afternoon light was streaming in from the upper right of the image. A powerful sculpture – in powerful light.