Unbuilt Highways of San Francisco. Click to open. Dark Orange lines are unbuilt highways.

A while ago, as more of a challenge to myself, I drew a couple maps of what New York City would look like if Robert Moses had be able to build his Lower-Manhattan Expressway and Mid-Manhattan Expressway. I’ve been interested in unbuilt highways for a while and usually drew out quick sketches on Google Maps. But that isn’t really enough, no. I want a real map of what these cities would look like. Since my Robert Moses maps I’ve gotten great responses, many people asking me to make similar maps for their cities. I was way ahead of them. Originally I had worked on a city-scale map for New York with all the boroughs but I lost track when I had a hard drive failure and lost some of the work.

Now I’m back in the highway groove. Presented here is the first of a series of unbuilt highway Google Maps: San Francisco. The research wasn’t as in depth as with the New York maps only because since so many of these roads never got off the drawing boards there wasn’t much to go on and I had to imagine much of it (most of the off ramps are purely speculative). But the core idea is still there; what would it look like?

Like in many other cities in America in the 1960s, the people of San Francisco began to question the logic of destroying swaths of their city to build intrusive highways which would only serve people who didn’t even live in the city. The Freeway Revolt spread across the nation and stopped many roads high in the air. Most of the maps and plans have been summed up nicely over at San Francisco Transit Oriented Design. Here are some of the historic maps I used:

1955 Expressway Plan

Built and Unbuilt Highways

San Francisco Freeway Map

I’ve added a few maps of Unbuilt Highways;San Francisco, Washington DC, and Los Angeles, and Subways System Maps for Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco MUNI.

I am also going to figure out a good way to let people embed these maps on their websites. What’s a map good for if you can’t use it, right?

Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia transit maps! I finally got around to doing something with all these transit maps I was making. Unfortunately Google is weird about what maps they allow and don’t allow you to embed on a web page so for the time being I am just posting links to the maps. They are just first drafts but all the lines are there. When I have more time I plan on going through and adding more information to each map. Someone asked me to include stations which is on my to do list but because Google Maps already has stations with information about them for most cities I am going to hold off on this.

San Francisco Transit
Philadelphia Transit
Boston Transit

I have also redrawn the New York & New Jersey Subways map so each line has a nice image in the information box that leads to the line schedule at MTA.info.

Lastly, here is a new map of the MBTA as it should look today with the Green Line and Blue Line extensions marked as in planning and the Indigo Line (Fairmount Branch CR) distinguished as an actual rapid transit line. I heard a story that at a community meeting a few years ago someone in the audience mentioned that the branch was not on the map, which confused the people from the MBTA because it was. What the man really meant was that the line was marked as commuter rail (which is what it is) and not rapid transit. If you want to get people to think about it as rapid transit you needed to show it as a rapid transit line on the map the same as the Red or Orange Lines. This doesn’t mean it will be converted to heavy rail, which is not a good idea since this is the only other route into the city from the southwest other than the Southwest Corridor, but you can change the way people perceive the line just by changing how wide the line is on the map (which is one reason I like maps so much).

View Larger Map

I am also creating a new section for these maps. I plan on also creating system maps with extensions, like the Future MBTA, but for all these other systems.