Captain Blake versus the Highwaymen: Or, How San Francisco Won the Freeway Revolt

Abstract

The San Francisco freeway revolt was not just the first but the longest 1960s protest against superhighway construction in urban areas. Most accounts attribute this to the city's dramatic natural setting, which fostered an early and insistent aesthetic critique. This article identifies the critical condition in not the city but the state. In 1947, the California legislature reoriented its entire highway program from multipurpose roads to limited-access freeways designed to go directly into cities. Resituating the revolt in this context explains not just its precocity but its duration and intensity. What began as a reasonable assertion of local jurisdiction was transformed into a protracted standoff with the state by the vast new funding of the Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956. It also reveals how close the city came to losing the revolt, despite the legitimacy of its claims, and identifies a direct impact of this narrow victory on the emerging environmental movement.