In a section of the southbound lanes, the Autumn Moon Festival reverberated with a DJs tunes.
Birds squawked in formation overhead, and squealing children tumbled down the dunes and scribbled the road with chalk.
The evening represented a compromise.
Great Highway, Ocean Beach, San Francisco.Photo: Alexander Davidovich
Theres not one amenity.
Its literally just closing the gate and just having a closed road pavement on the weekends.
Its on the ballot because change is hard, and people resist change, Engardio said.
How do we reconcile what nature wants versus what people want?
San Francisco is about to find outand maybe create a roadmap for other cities to follow.
Two days after the festival, Heidi Moseson walked a pedestrian path above the Great Highways northbound lanes.
This sort of cliched story, Moseson said.
But then Moseson and other community leaders got to thinking: Why not make the closure permanent?
Lets put it to the voters, Moseson said.
Prop K does not say anything about what a Great Highway park might look like.
It could end up gaining playgrounds, art installations, or an amphitheater.
I think thats on purpose, because I really dont think they plan on building a park.
I think its really just to close this off to cars and use it as an open space.
It was hard to get other opponents to make their case.
This is going to be destructive to the businesses on either end, he said.
Proponents, though, point to a multitude of potential benefits.
In general, parks and open spaces seem to have more benefits than costs, Jacobsen said.
Hints to what could be the Great Highways future are just up the road on JFK Drive.
It failed citywide in a landslide, Engardio said.
All that greenery might create more than just a giant playground for San Francisco, according to researchers.
It turns into a sort of self-reinforcing cycle.
Between 2020 and 2023, spending on bikes and accessories in the United Statesskyrocketed 620 percent.
The densely populated eastern part of the city was virtually obliterated, forcing refugees west toward the Pacific coastline.
It was often the underserved neighborhoods that suffered the most.
So we can just as easily remove them.
Its easy to think that cities arent malleable, that theyre literally set in stone.
Then, nature intervened.
In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the Bay Area.
Across the bay in Oakland, part of a freeway collapsed, killing 42.
Transit ridership rose 15 percent, Kimble notes in her book.
Many other American cities have knocked down the freeways that divided neighborhoods.
Rochester, New York, removed a highway in 2014 and swapped inapartments, trees, and bike lanes.
Portland, Oregon,turned one into a riverfront parkin the 1970s.
If you close a road off to cars, it becomes a place for people potentially lots of people.
But it often takes a fight to get it done.
In 2009, the city closed off part ofTimes Square to cars, eventually making the closure permanent.
In the ensuing years, however, pedestrian injuries fell by40 percent and vehicular accidents by 15 percent.
On its busiest days, Times Square now teems with400,000 pedestrians.
Research shows that car trips decrease when you remove road capacity.
Travel is a good it responds to the law of supply and demand.
And in fact, its much better for low-income households.
For every dollar invested in public transport, a government gets$5 in economic returnsand creates 50,000 jobs.
Conversely, cars are expensive, both for people and for cities.
Its becoming increasingly clear that to properly protect coastal cities,seawalls alone wont cut it.
In Miami, for instance, engineers are buildingartificial mangrove foreststhat mimic how a coastline naturally absorbs storm surges.
Water pooled into dune slacks, which attracted coyotes, birds, and rabbits.
Shrubs and grasses grew, providing habitats for smaller critters like insects.
Out at Ocean Beach, sand blew constantly inland, forming around coastal plants to create vegetated mounds.
More than any other material or natural process, sand made San Francisco.
The Great Highway buttressed by seawalls has kept the dunes in check.
The highways traffic signals would no longer need replacing, saving the city another $4.3 million.
A permanently closed Great Highway would incur its own costs, according to the Controllers report.
When youread the ballot, its shocking how little is in it, Boschetto said.
The only thing that is in it thats really concrete is that its closing it off to private vehicles.
Themile-long sectionthat runs along the San Francisco Zoo is expected to be shuttered by early 2026.
Engineers will replace the road with multiuse trails and a beachfront plaza.
So drivers are already losing access to a chunk of the Great Highway.
Prop K would just extend that closure farther north.
(Boschetto disputes the finding of three additional minutes of travel time.
In 2023, 420,000 visitors walked, ran, and biked the weekend promenade.
That causes blowouts, or troughs of loose sand that more easily spill and blow onto the highway.
Opponents of the measure say those improvements could still happen if the Great Highway stays a highway.
Sand roped off to pedestrians could bloom with the greenery that naturally keeps them anchored.
Foot paths might interlace with dunes.
But while theyre currently a liability for the Great Highway, the dunes could help save it one day.
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