Central Freeway

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Map showing the freeway as it once existed (purple sections have been removed)

The Central Freeway is a roughly one-mile (1.6 km) elevated freeway in San Francisco, California, running west from Interstate 80, which is signed as U.S. Route 101 and Interstate 80. It has a speed limit of 50 miles per hour (80 km/h) in both directions all the way to the I-80 - U.S. Route 101 interchange. It was originally intended to continue north to Lombard Street (west of the crooked section of the street) and connect to a freeway running from there to the Golden Gate Bridge, but construction was halted after the Freeway Revolt in the 1950s and the freeway never extended north past Turk Street.

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake led to the closure and later demolition of the section between Turk Street and Fell Street. Several years later, the upper deck between Oak and Mission Streets was demolished, making the freeway a single level off-ramp. In 2003, the freeway was further truncated back to Mission Street to be rebuilt—controversially—past Mission Street to end at Market Street. The new one-level structure is twice as wide as the original two-level viaduct, routing freeway traffic onto Octavia Boulevard, an expansion of Octavia Street between Market and Fell Street. The boulevard reconnects the freeway with Fell and Oak Streets. The entire project was completedin September 2005. As the corridor is once again intact, the routing of U.S. Route 101 has reverted to the Central Freeway after post-Loma Prieta years of bypassing the freeway via 7th Street and Interstate 80, although 101 separates from the freeway at South Van Ness Avenue. All on ramps for the central freeway now show trailblazers for both I-80 and US-101.