Streets & Highways

Landscape architects and architects also receive little recognition for their design contributions to the landscape such as street and highway plantings, tool booths, freeway overpasses, and essential signage.

Streets, highways, overpasses, curb plantings, street furniture, and related structures such as gas stations are all designed by someone, despite most of us taking them for granted as mundane entities.

State Route 480 was planned as a state highway in San Francisco consisting of the elevated double-decker Embarcadero Freeway, the elevated Doyle Drive approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, and the proposed but unbuilt section in between. The unbuilt section from Doyle Drive to Van Ness Avenue was to have been called the Golden Gate Freeway. The Embarcadero Freeway as originally planned would have extended from Van Ness Avenue along the north side of Bay Street and then along the Embarcadero to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

SR 480 became Interstate 480, an auxiliary route of the Interstate Highway System, from 1955 to 1965. The Embarcadero Freeway, which had only been constructed from Broadway along the Embarcadero to the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, was demolished after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and Doyle Drive is now part of U.S. Route 101.¹

1.     "Former State Route 480". California Highways.