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This is Octavia Boulevard.
It's four blocks right at the end of Central Freeway
in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco.
Here's what Octavia Boulevard looked like in 1987,
a couple years before the Loma Prieta earthquake
damaged the freeway,
and the section was closed for good in 1992.
There's quite a difference.
Replacing an ugly, elevated highway with a boulevard
is obviously an improvement.
The neighborhood has thrived.
There are a couple of ways
you can design a road that replaces a highway.
You can make a super wide busy street
like the one in Seattle I covered in a video last year.
That's basically a suburban arterial
running through a dense city,
or in the case of San Francisco right here,
you can take a page from Paris,
and install a multi-way Boulevard.
This street has two lanes
of thru traffic in each direction,
flows on each side by a local access street
with parallel parking.
Bikes are encouraged to ride
on the quiet streets.
There is a central median with trees,
and median separating the local streets
from the thru streets,
also planted with trees.
The effect is quite nice.
The trees make the street almost feel like a park,
and help make the wide space feel narrower.
It strikes a balance between
providing space for traffic
that was previously on the elevated highway,
while also providing
quieter streets for nearby neighbors.
This balance is crucial
because it can be the compromise
that results in a highway tear down
that satisfies all parties.
Despite some of these advantages,
multi-way boulevards are still fairly rare
outside of a few cities.
Octavia Boulevard was the first new one built
in the United States in 50 years,
but their combination of local and arterial streets,
means they could be a versatile tool
in the transportation planner's toolbox.
They could even help us replace suburban arterials
and make them less horrible.
Let's discuss the benefits and drawbacks
of this very unique street type
after the bike bell.
(bell rings)
Let's start by talking about what boulevards are exactly.
There's no official definition of one,
and the name often gets thrown around
to add a little grandeur to an otherwise dull street.
But there are a few different kinds of streets
most commonly referred to as boulevards.
The first is a simple Boulevard Street.
It's a wide street with tree lined sidewalks.
It's like a regular street got an upgrade.
Next up is the center, median boulevard
which as the name suggests,
has a green median with trees running down the middle,
separating car lanes.
They're typically also trees
along the sidewalks making for a nice tree canopy.
Sometimes the center median
is wide enough to have a path.
Finally, you have the multi-way boulevard,
like I mentioned,
you have a central roadway for thru traffic,
flanked by two smaller roadways
for local access and parking.
The smaller roadways are set off
from the main street by a median
with you guessed it, trees.
The fact that I have to describe
what a multi-way boulevard is,
should be enough evidence to prove
that they aren't popular or common,
but why is that the case?
It may be in part because of a transportation
planning term called "functional classification."
It's the way traffic engineers
divide up different kinds of streets.
Each classification is a different way
to balance mobility needs
as well as access to adjacent properties.
On one end of the scale,
you have local streets
like cul-de-sacs and loops.
They have many driveways to provide access
to every property along the street,
but traffic moves slow.
It's high access, low mobility.
Next up is the Collector Street,
which is sort of a middle ground.
It may offer some access to adjacent properties,
but its primary function is to provide mobility,
and connect all of those local streets
to the nearby arterial.
Arterials are the third classification.
They move cars fast,
and have limited driveways and access points.
Often, driveways will be consolidated,
and intersections with collectors
will be spaced out to ensure
the smooth flow of car travel.
And of course, highways are at the top
of the functional classification system.
They only allow access to motor vehicles,
and highway exits are spaced far apart.
They offer no direct access
to any properties along their route.
You may notice by now
that boulevards aren't in
the functional classification system.
It's in part because they sort of
break this nice linear system.
Multi-way boulevards offer direct local access,
and collector or arterial like mobility.
But the traditional functional
classification system supports the tree-like
road network structure found in the suburbs.
Arterials are the trunks,
collectors are the branches,
and the local streets are the twigs.
This hierarchy reinforces sprawling land use patterns,
makes it difficult to get
from one neighborhood to the next,
and creates real traffic problems.
But boulevards can serve as a local, collector,
or arterial street all at the same time
depending on configuration,
and they're a better,
more urban way of moving traffic quickly
than the typical arterial.
Just look at Paris.
Boulevards also predate
the functional classification system
and are an important part of our urban history.
Paris was building them in the 1840s
through the turn of the century.
A lesser known network,
but just as interesting is the Brooklyn Parkway network.
They were designed by Olmsted and Vox,
the landscape architects of Central Park,
the para designed Prospect Park in Brooklyn,
and meant for boulevards to bring Brooklynites
into that park in a linear, verdant landscape.
They called their boulevards "parkways"
which meant something different to them
than the parkways of today,
which are basically heavily landscaped
limited access highways.
Their parkways were designed
to be only 20 feet narrower
than the Schulze in Paris,
and they include a main thoroughfare and access roads.
The medians between the main roads
and access roads were particularly wide,
and included pedestrian walkways.
They really were meant to be linear parks,
but the introduction of the car
slowly eroded their bucolic character.
Today, Eastern Parkway,
a great example of the street type,
is one of the most dangerous roads in Brooklyn.
Cars go too fast on the Central Avenue,
and the entire street may be too wide for its own good.
Contemporary designers have proposed
adding cobble stones,
speed tables, and other traffic calming devices
to slow traffic.
They've also proposed reducing on street parking,
and shortening crossing distances for pedestrians.
This highlights one of the key weaknesses
for multi-way boulevards.
They dedicated an awful lot of space for cars.
The widest street in the world,
The Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires
is a multi-way boulevard,
and it's kind of a nightmare.
Pedestrians have to cross in five stages,
and traffic is often bad
even with all those lanes.
Combining arterial street traffic
with local traffic
might be better than a freeway,
but the scale of Buenos Aires only just.
Scale and design remain important factors
when designing a quality boulevard.
Could a multi-way boulevard
be the answer to the awful suburban arterial street
in the same way there are answers
to replacing freeways?
Instead of designing streets like this,
what if we mandated new suburban arterials
to look like this?
Instead of a patchwork of strip mall parking lots,
you have well integrated angled parking
accessible by local street.
This is a more civilized version
of connecting parking lots.
Municipalities can then also require
strip malls and fast food restaurants
to actually address the sidewalk
instead of being surrounded by a moat of parking.
The arterial needs of these streets
can still be met by the central lanes
of the multi-way boulevard.
Add in some trees,
and you have a really appealing public realm
that can still achieve the mobility goals of a city.
Retrofitting existing suburban arterials
is harder than building a new one from scratch
though not necessarily impossible.
But the problem is,
parking lots already exist
and they're privately owned.
That makes them harder,
if not impossible to integrate them
into the overall roadway design.
Retrofitting arterials in cities
instead of suburbs might be easier.
The land uses around these streets
are already up against the right of way,
not separated by parking lots.
Multi-way boulevards could also be
an especially good fit for some main streets,
particularly those that double state highways.
This is particularly common
for smaller cities that grew up
along a major thoroughfare.
These streets often have to balance
statewide mobility goals,
aka moving cars fast,
with trying to support a vibrant downtown
and create a sense of space and unique identity.
A multi-way boulevard can continue
to function as a highway
while providing a more peaceful experience
for businesses along the way.
And main streets are often wide enough to accommodate
a multi-way boulevard.
Boulevards can provide a way
out of our hierarchical thinking about urban roadways.
They can replace highways and arterials
and create a better experience for all users,
particularly uses along the boulevard.
They are appropriate in urban and suburban contexts.
They can potentially form the backbone
of a non-hierarchical roadway system.
Luckily, Octavia Boulevard has inspired interest
in this roadway type.
For example, Palm Canyon Drive
in Cathedral City, California
has a one-sided boulevard,
and has plans to add a true multi-way boulevard.
For more inspiration,
you'll wanna check out my full length video
on the history of Paris's boulevards.
They were were developed by Napoleon III
I and his trustee administrator houseman,
and they completely changed the character
of one of the most famous cities in the world.
This is truly one of the best videos I've ever done,
and it's available over on Nebula.
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that you can't get anywhere else,
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And my video on Paris' boulevards
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that will chronicle major urban projects through history,
like Shanghai's Metro System or New York's Central Park.
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