Commentary: the Bay Area Needs its Own “Arroyo Fest”
From SF.Streestblog.org
What San Francisco and Oakland can learn from Los Angeles… yes, Los Angeles
By Roger Rudick
Los Angeles closed seven miles of the Arroyo Seco Parkway for one Sunday last month and let people use it for cycling, walking, and just having a good time. From our sister publication, Streetsblog Los Angeles:
…tens of thousands of Angelenos did the unthinkable: enjoyed spending time on a freeway. Arroyo Fest 2023 removed cars from about seven miles of the 110 Freeway, known as the Arroyo Seco Parkway. Instead, the freeway was filled with people on foot, on bike, on skates, on scooters.
San Francisco, of course, has Sunday Streets, one of the earliest and most successful and celebrated examples of a temporary conversion of car space for other uses. The Bay Area also boasts the annual “Niles Canyon Stroll & Roll,” which removes cars from a stretch of highway 84.
San Francisco has its Marathon closures. And the Golden Gate Bridge was famously closed to traffic in 1987 for its 50th anniversary. But there’s no equivalent to “Arroyo Fest,” where the city closes a freeway for pure recreation.
The two places to do it seem screamingly obvious.
The first is the stub of the Central Freeway and 101. The city is already talking about removing or undergrounding these freeways, which are in need of seismic retrofits or removal. The other is I-980 in Oakland. 980 is one of the top candidates for removal on the Federal government’s “Reconnecting Communities” program.
