Bumper Stumper

It was supposed to be traffic Armageddon. Instead, it has become the “Mystery of the Missing Commuters.”

In August, after years of bickering with San Francisco officials and residents, Caltrans closed the Central Freeway in the heart of the city to begin tearing down its earthquake-damaged upper deck.

That meant the 80,000 cars that normally used the roadway to travel in and out of the civic center should have been forced onto already-clogged city streets.

But inexplicably, there were no dire consequences--no gridlock, no endless traffic jams.

In fact, traffic is flowing so well without the freeway that some city officials are suggesting that perhaps it should be torn down and forgotten.

This is not what was supposed to happen.

After the freeway was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, repairs were delayed for years, partly because state transportation officials predicted its closure would bring chaos.

Finally, the California Department of Transportation said the top deck of the freeway was so unsafe that it had to go. As the scheduled closure approached, near-hysteria gripped state and city traffic engineers.

Paul Hensley, Caltrans’ Bay Area director of operations, predicted traffic could be bumper-to-bumper for 45 miles from the city’s center across the Oakland Bay Bridge and deep into East Bay suburbs. Another 45-mile backup could stretch down the peninsula.

Workers who lived outside San Francisco were told to add 30 minutes to two hours to their daily commutes. Caltrans, city officials and local newspapers begged drivers to turn to public transportation, car pooling, bicycles, telecommuting--anything to avoid bringing their cars downtown.

With a $2-million federal grant, the city hired 50 additional traffic police and stationed them at key intersections. Off-street parking was eliminated along alternative routes for a mile around the closed freeway. Hotlines were activated to give commuters alternative route information.

Then came Aug. 25 and instead of Armageddon, the city experienced something closer to the Bermuda Triangle of commuting. The freeway closed and 80,000 cars seemed simply to disappear.

Some San Franciscans swore that traffic flowed a bit easier. Embarrassed Caltrans officials confirmed that observation, noting rush-hour volumes on the Oakland Bay Bridge actually declined by 10,000 cars in the first weeks after the closure.

Stranger yet, ridership on public transportation inched up only slightly. The San Francisco Chronicle dubbed it: “San Francisco’s greatest mystery of 1996.”

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Anti-freeway activists are jubilant about the smooth transition from a city with a Central Freeway to one without. Those who have hated the freeway since it opened have seized the opportunity.

“Caltrans had everybody in the city jumping through hoops, worrying about what would happen without the freeway. This shows it should have been torn down years ago,” said architect Robin Levitt, an activist with the Assn. to Simplify Traffic and Abate Congestion, a citizens group that has long lobbied for the freeway’s demise.

Encouraged by what has taken place, the group is pushing the Board of Supervisors and Mayor Willie Brown to pull the plug on plans to retrofit and reopen the bottom deck of the freeway by Christmas.

City officials say they are seriously considering that option.

“All the concerns that the state Department of Transportation had are not materializing,” said Stuart Sunshine, the mayor’s point man on traffic issues. “So we have to ask, why do we need this freeway?”

If the city can persuade the federal government to keep funding its traffic-mitigation efforts, including the extra traffic police, it may be willing to forgo federal funds to rebuild the freeway, Sunshine said.

Supervisor Sue Bierman, a veteran of San Francisco’s freeway wars, says she soon plans to introduce a resolution asking Caltrans to demolish the entire freeway, not just the top deck.

“There is a theory that, when you remove part of a freeway, the cars just find another place to go, that that is what has happened here,” Bierman said.

For now, Caltrans is sticking to its plan of tearing down the upper deck, and strengthening its lower deck so that it can reopen to westbound traffic this year. Only then, Caltrans officials say, should the city decide the freeway’s fate.

Transportation officials caution that it is far too early to tell whether commuters have permanently changed their driving patterns. Caltrans believes, Hensley said, that some drivers are simply arriving at and leaving from work a little earlier or later than normal while others are staying home and telecommuting. It is not clear, he said, that the changes will last.

And although traffic is flowing, “it is not perfect,” said Greg Bayol, a Caltrans spokesman. Volume, he said, has begun building up again and some commutes, particularly across the Bay Bridge, have been slowing.

“There is a group that does not want the freeway no matter what. There is a group that does want it, and there are the in-betweens,” Bayol said. “This just gives more evidence to bolster each group.”

Bayol says Caltrans’ aggressive pre-closure campaign frightened drivers enough to come up with alternatives before the freeway was off-limits.

Eventually, he said, the drivers may resume their old habits and the predicted tie-ups may materialize.

It is an argument that has long fallen on deaf ears in San Francisco, a city with a history of freeway-bashing.

In the 1950s, the state transportation agency came up with a plan to build a web of superhighways through the city. Engineers recommended building freeways that would link the Oakland Bay Bridge with the Golden Gate Bridge. The Central Freeway was envisioned as a major north-south artery that would move traffic to the Golden Gate Bridge and link up with the proposed Panhandle Freeway.

The Panhandle, which would have replaced Golden Gate Park’s block-wide panhandle with four traffic lanes and slice off part of the park, was the spark that ignited the great freeway revolt.

Across the city, residents rose up in protest against the grand plan. At one point, Bierman said, 10,000 people rallied in Golden Gate Park.

“It was huge,” Bierman said. “Caltrans was very angry with us for not wanting those freeways.”

The Board of Supervisors cast its first vote against the plan in 1959, but it took until 1966 to kill it completely. The lone survivor of the proposal was the Central Freeway.

Once the proposed freeways were dead, San Franciscans started going after the existing ones. For years, they complained that the Embarcadero Freeway, which ran along the city’s waterfront from the Bay Bridge to Fisherman’s Wharf, was an eyesore that made development of the then-seedy area south of Market Street impossible.

The 1989 earthquake so badly damaged the freeway that it was demolished. Despite predictions by Caltrans of a traffic nightmare, the city opted not to replace the Embarcadero.

Today, South of Market is one of San Francisco’s hottest commercial and residential areas. Traffic there is thicker than it once was, but passable, even at peak hours.

Anti-freeway activist Patricia Walkup says she believes tearing down the Central Freeway will do the same for her Hayes Valley neighborhood.

Hayes Valley, an older neighborhood of once-lovely Victorian homes just west of the civic center, is where the Central Freeway dumped its thousands of drivers each day.

“The freeway has been a blight on our neighborhood,” Walkup said. Tearing down the freeway “would be the best thing that ever happened to the neighborhood.”

Meanwhile, a month into the closure, Caltrans still is at a loss to explain what happened to all the drivers. The agency is trying to hunt them down, initiating a telephone survey of 1,200 people whose license plates were photographed on the freeway in the months before the closure.

“What we figured out is that it was actually one guy, driving up and down the freeway 60,000 times a day,” joked Sunshine, the mayor’s traffic expert.