This year's Plan Preparation Studio, led by Elizabeth MacDonald and Allan Jacobs, studied San Francisco's Central Freeway Corridor, with scenarios for a full or partial freeway take-down.  

 

The Central Freeway is an elevated freeway connecting the Bayshore/James Lick Freeway with the Hayes Valley neighborhood in San Francisco.  After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the city replaced a portion of the freeway with Octavia Boulevard (designed by Elizabeth & Jake).  Roughly one-mile of the freeway stands, forming a dividing line in the city.  San Francisco has a long history of resisting and removing freeways, so exploring this arena and playing with scenarios was particularly fun.

The first half of the studio focused on understanding existing conditions, from the qualities of the physical environment to its social and economic contexts.  For our first assignment, we conducted a reconnaissance of the area, preparing neighborhood drawings from our field observations.

 

My first goal was to orient myself to the study area.  Various grids collide and change at the Central Freeway, which can make it a particularly confusing area.  As a person who gets lost quite easily, I'm constantly looking for cues about where I am.  After exploring the area by foot and bike, I decided to focus on bike flows and points of confusion.

For the base map, I was inspired by Axis Maps, one of my favorite visualization firms.  Typographic maps really highlight streets and orient a person.  The second layer was the cycling map, indicating points of confusion, as well as points of interest.