What Makes Greatness?

What Makes a Great City?
Created: 09 March 2001

Wake up, San Francisco. You're about to lose your greatness.

I've been giving this a lot of thought lately. I've lived in a lot of neat places. I've been to a lot of great cities. And I've noticed what seperates the "good" cities from the "great" ones. And it's a strange thing. It's in the infrastructure.

See, all great cities have one thing in common: really big infrastructure. Or at least, some element of their infrastructure is built to such a scale that is just... well, insane.

Let's take transportation infrastructure. New York and Los Angeles are excellent examples. Both are "great" cities, and both have a transportation infrastructure that is built to such a grand scale as to seem almost obscene.

First, let's take the New York Subway system. It's really hard to describe the New York subway to anybody who hasn't ever been on it. Huge dosen't even begin to describe the awesome scope of the subway network. There are large cities that don't even have bus networks that complicated. There are HUNDREDS of subway stations underneath the streets of New York, connected by nearly a thousand miles of track. The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority employs enough people to populate a small midwestern city. Many of the stations, some of which are nearing 100 years of age, are works of art in themselves: art deco tiles, steel framework supporting streets above in a masterwork of civil engineering. Wow.

Los Angeles is has no less impressive of a transportation infrastructure. The Los Angeles area's freeway system has more Interstate-grade highway miles in it than 16 STATES have. Two of the freeways, the Pasadena Freeway and the Hollywood Freeway, were built before the word "freeway" was even in the common vocabulary (the Pasadena Freeway's real name is actually the "Arroyo Seco Parkway"). Portions of the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways are the largest freeways (in lanes) in the world. The Santa Monica Freeway carries the largest quantity of traffic of any superhighway in the world. Five interchanges in the Los Angeles area are on the world's top ten list (so you know: The "Four Level", the East LA Interchange, The Harbor Junction, The Sepulveda Interchange, and the Orange Crush. The El Toro Y is number 11, the Antelope Valley Freeway interchange is 13.) LA is one great big freeway. You can count the freeways in the San Francisco are on one hand. Here's a list of LA freeways: The Hollywood Freeway, the Simi Valley Freeway, the Ventura Freeway, The San Diego Freeway, the Foothill Freeway, the Golden State Freeway, the Antelope Valley Freeway, the Pasadena Freeway, the Harbor Freeway, the Santa Monica Freeway, the Glenn Anderson "Century" Freeway, the Terminal Island Freeway, the Long Beach Freeway, the Pomona Freeway, The San Gabriel Freeway, the San Bernadino Freeway, the Artesia Freeway, the Riverside Freeway, the Santa Ana Freeway, the Chino Valley Freeway, the Orange Freeway, the Garden Grove Freeway, the Costa Mesa Freeway, the Marina Freeway, the Corona del Mar Freeway, the Laguna Beach Freeway... and I'm sure I missed a few, and I also didn't mention the three toll roads in eastern Orange County. Oh, and I didn't even mention the 1/4 mile of Imperial Highway that is technically called "The Richard M. Nixon Freeway" or the little part of Pacific Coast Highway that is commonly called "The Capistrano Freeway". The point of all that brain dump is that what gives LA greatness is the audacity of the entire infrastructure. Red lines crisscross any map of LA, like arteries in some weird globular lifeform you'd see on Star Trek.

Then, there's San Francisco, and here's where you fellow Bay Area people need to listen up and take notes. We had greatness, once. We lost it, and we're about to lose a major component of it forever... if CalTrans gets their way.

At one time, San Francisco had a streetcar system that could make even New York sit up and pay attention. Not only did the city proper had a streetcar system that put a streetcar within a 1/2 mile of every resident and commercial space in the city, but it was connected by a light rail system that reached across the bay and down the penninsula, covering every significant residential development within 30 miles. This is before the Transbay Tube and BART. How?

Well, the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. That's how. The lower deck of the SFOBB used to have trolley tracks. The Transbay Terminal? Today, it's a disused bus terminal, maybe serving a few thousand people. But in the late 30's up to the 50's, it was the second busiest rail terminal in the US, second only to New York's Grand Central Station. Trolleys owned by agencies like the Key System (which was started by real estate investors who saw rail transit as a way to sell property in Berkeley to those living in the City) handled twice as many people per day as BART did, shuttling them across the Bay Bridge in non-polluting electric trolleys.

Anybody who's seen the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" knows what happened to the visionary system of rail transit that San Francisco had. Automotive concerns bought the privately owned Key System (and a few other similar operations along the way), and deep-sixed it. CalTrans didn't help when they ripped up the trolley tracks on the Bridge and converted the bridge to it's current double-decker operation.

Here's where the "greatness" bit comes in. Currently, there's technically nothing stopping the San Francisco Metropolitain Transit Authority from "repossessing" the rail right-of-way on the Bay Bridge and reopening some kind of light rail service across it. Well, maybe there is one thing.

See, the eastern half of the SFOBB failed in the last earthquake, and there are legitimate earthquake safety issues involving the old steel cantilever structure on that side. So, the old east span has to be replaced.

CalTrans has a great idea. Let's build a new bridge, a unique one! One unlike any other bridge in the entire world: a center-span suspension bridge, supported by one center support. It'll be a dramatic addition to the skyline of SF and Oakland. A world-class city deserves a world-class bridge, right?

That would be great, if the new eastern span bridge was a world-class bridge worthy to join the western span suspension and the famous Golden Gate. But it isn't. See, the new bridge isn't strong enough to support any kind of rail use.

The old bridge was built to support the weight of full-size rail locomotives. The new bridge can't even carry modern light rail.

So, this is what seperates a "nice town" from a "great city." Great Cities would look to the past to answer questions about it's future. Great Cities build infrastructure to last CENTURIES, like our forefathers did when they built the original SFOBB. We, on the other hand, are building a bridge that is capable of supporting automotive traffic only... a mode of transportation who's days are numbered.

I have dreams of being able to board a high-speed rail train in San Francisco, and being able to disembark an hour later in Sacramento... or even four hours later in Bakersfield... without having to board a bus to get across a bay on a bridge that once carried rail cars. CalTrans has now guaranteed that dream will never be fulfilled.

And San Francisco loses a big piece of it's once illustrious greatness as a city that lived on the rails, and becomes just another ordinary town, with one more mediocre freeway seperating it from the next town over.

San Francisco used to be the "City that Knew How." It's rapidly becoming "The City that Should Know Better."

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