Edward Keenan on the Gardiner issue,

In 1986, San Francisco residents voted in a heated referendum to keep their elevated Embarcadero Freeway. Three years later, an earthquake made the highway impassable, so down it came, to be replaced by a boulevard. A quarter century later, Edward Keenan

SAN FRANCISCO— Standing next to the historic Ferry Building on the Embarcadero boulevard along San Francisco Bay, Dave Osgood recalls when his father brought him here as a boy. Once upon a time, this had been the second-busiest transit passenger terminal in the world, the hub of a bustling waterfront port district next to downtown. By then, it was virtually abandoned, but his father wanted to give him the historic tour.

“It was pretty much deserted. There was one little window open on the side of the building, where some state employees picked up their pay packets, or something. My father told him why he’d brought me down, and the guy just said, ‘Take him somewhere else. There’s nothing down here anymore.’ ”

What had changed was that in the 1960s, an elevated double-decker expressway had been built over the road, carrying commuters from Oakland coming across the Bay Bridge into downtown and Chinatown. By the 1970s they were merely standing under a highway, a pedestrian wasteland of boarded-up buildings and parking lots populated almost exclusively by homeless squatters.

It’s difficult to imagine that scene now, standing here.

Today, the restored Ferry Building is a bustling artisanal food market, crowded on a weekday with tourists, joggers and lunching businesspeople sipping fancy coffee and gazing out at the hills across the water. And the Embarcadero is a grand avenue, lined with palm trees and parkland. Old streetcars (including one painted maroon and yellow and bearing TTC logos) run in a right-of-way beside six lanes of car traffic and green bike lanes. Broad promenades host historical markers between restaurant patios running through some of the fastestgrowing neighbourhoods of the city.

The highway is long gone, and I cannot find anyone who misses it.

In fact, while I am in San Francisco in mid-May, news reports say Mayor Ed Lee is preparing a proposal to tear down another elevated expressway because of the success of the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway and the Central Freeway 25 years ago. Osgood, my guide and a local neighbourhood activist who in the past served as vice-chair of the city’s neighbourhood advisory committee, tells me that the new proposal is likely to be very controversial. The inland freeway doesn’t bother people as much as the one here that once cut off the waterfront.

Of course, once upon a time, the idea of tearing down the Embarcadero Freeway was controversial, too. So much so that in 1986, voters worried about traffic implications decided in a referendum not to tear the highway down. But then the major Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 tore it down anyway.

A 2012 report called the Life and Death of Urban Highways by two transportation think-tanks, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and EMBARQ, tells what happened after the earthquake made the highway impassable.

“There was a temporary increase in traffic congestion. Soon thereafter, many drivers switched to transit . . . and the local street grid absorbed a large portion of the remaining traffic. Once skeptics saw that the city was not gridlocked without the freeway, it was easier to build support for the proposed boulevard.”

While the removal of the highway didn’t generate dramatic increases in traffic, the completion of the new grade-level boulevard did have other dramatic effects. Property values increased by 300 per cent, according to the report, and development explosion is still reverberating.

Osgood, who now lives in a mixeduse apartment building in the Rincon Hill neighbourhood on the route of the former highway, shows me the grand headquarters of the Gap, constructed in the exact spot where the road used to curve onto the waterfront. Thousands of new condo units have been or are being built along the route south of Market St., along with millions of square feet of offices and hundreds of thousands of feet of retail space. More than 20 cranes are visible on construction sites along the route today.

Up on Folsom St., where construction is bustling on the old route, a 27-year-old police officer told me she’d never heard of the freeway I was asking about. A grey-haired man in a hard hat and construction vest standing with her seemed puzzled when I suggested we were standing right where the overpasses once ran. It’s just boom town now.

From the close-up perspective of a local activist, Osgood doesn’t gloss over the cautionary lessons of the development boom: he spends a lot of time outlining missed opportunities where prime pieces of public land are handed over to developers with friends at city hall, where local zoning laws are disregarded, where transit users have been shortchanged. He advises that any mas- sive redevelopment needs to be handled carefully to avoid corruption and opportunity costs from ad hoc project planning.

But when I ask him if there’s still any debate — among commuters, say, or talk radio callers — about rebuilding the freeway, or at least people insisting it was a mistake to remove it, he seems momentarily stunned.

“No. Nobody would ever . . .” He looks at me sideways, as if I’ve asked a snarky trick question. “I don’t think I’ve even ever thought about it.”

People didn’t want to take it down. But once it was gone and they saw the alternative, the highway became a rapidly fading memory. The thought of rebuilding it on the Embarcadero now seems absurd — simply unthinkable. Monday: The Chicago model

Just a quarter century ago, a two-level highway ran parallel to the historic ferry building in San Francisco. After the 1989 earthquake, the Embarcadero was reimagined as a grand waterfront boulevard.

Years of study — and even more years of debate — about the fate of the Gardiner Expressway’s eastern portion will end next week when city council decides what to do with the iconic piece of road at its meeting beginning June 10. As the arguments reach their climax, Edward Keenan looks at the options, the experience of other cities and what either choice might mean for a new neighbourhood in the east end of downtown.

PARIS, FRANCE The Pompidou Expressway along the banks of the Seine River carried 70,000 cars per day into and out of the city. Beginning in 2002, the city began closing the road during summer months to set up a “Paris Plage” (or “beach”) filled with pedestrian and seating areas, sand and refreshments stalls. In 2012, Paris began to permanently covert the expressway into 15 hectares of parkland.

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN Originally planned as part of a larger highway network, the 1.5-kilometre Park East Freeway spur on the waterfront was underused when the city decided to remove it in 2002 and replace it with a boulevard. In the five years after its removal, land values rose 180 per cent.

PORTLAND, OREGON In the late 1960s, the Harbour Dr. expressway on the waterfront was removed in favour of a 15-hectare park. Since its removal, property values in the waterfront urban renewal area have increased more than 10 per cent a year, while traffic volume has decreased.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA The four-lane elevated Cheonggyechon Expressway carried an estimated 1.5 million vehicles per day before it was shut down in 2003. The new “greenway” that replaced it resurfaced a buried river and encouraged construction of parkland.