Octavia Boulevard

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Looking south along Octavia Boulevard from Fell Street, where the Central Freeway once was.

Octavia Boulevard is a broad San Francisco, California, street that replaced the Hayes Valley portion of the damaged and disliked two-level Central Freeway. Once a portion of Octavia Street alongside shadowy, fenced-off land beneath the elevated U.S. Route 101 roadway, Octavia Boulevard was redeveloped and redesigned to better use the freeway's right-of-way for additional street space and new housing. The street, which opened in September 2005, is the first multiway boulevard built in the United States since the 1950's.

The boulevard is merely 4 blocks long from Market to Fell Street, containing multiple roadways that separate local and through traffic. On Octavia, homes and businesses located immediately on the street are served by the quieter outer roadways, while lanes leading to and from the rebuilt Central Freeway spur connect faster traffic with the inner roadways. Having replaced a freeway, the boulevard distributes traffic smoothly and evenly throughout the immediate neighborhood, while maintaining the links to the major San Francisco traffic arterials that the old elevated freeway used to connect to directly, including Fell and Oak Streets (which serve the city's western neighborhoods) and Franklin and Gough Streets (which serve northern neighborhoods and the Golden Gate Bridge. A brand new park named Hayes Green was created as part of the boulevard project. It lies on Octavia between Fell and Hayes Street, providing a quiet atmosphere for residents.

North of Hayes Street, Octavia continues as Octavia Street through the Western Addition, Pacific Heights and Marina neighborhoods to Bay Street, at Fort Mason.

The conceptual design for the boulevard was provided by Allan Jacobs and Elizabeth Macdonald.

Other freeway-removal projects in the San Francisco Bay due to seismic stability (or collapse) include the replacement of San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway, the reuse of the collapsed Cypress Structure's right-of-way in neighboring Oakland.