The Central Freeway is a roughly one-mile (1.5 km) elevated freeway in San Francisco, California, United States, connecting the Bayshore/James Lick Freeway (US 101 and I-80) with the Hayes Valley neighborhood. Most of the freeway is part of US 101, which exits at Mission Street on the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. The freeway once extended north to Turk Street, and was once proposed to form part of a complete loop around downtown (along with the Embarcadero Freeway), but was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and has been replaced with the surface-level Octavia Boulevard north of Market Street. Route description The Central Freeway begins at a directional "Y" interchange at the west end of Interstate 80 in the South of Market neighborhood, and travels west above Division Street and 13th Street. This interchange also includes access between the Bayshore Freeway, which carries US 101 to the south, and the one-way pair of 9th and 10th Streets. As it approaches the end, US 101 exits onto Mission Street to access Van Ness Avenue, which it follows north to Lombard Street and the Golden Gate Bridge. The remainder of the freeway is signed as exit 434B from US 101, and comes to the surface at Market Street and Octavia Boulevard, the latter continuing north to Oak and Fell Streets, a one-way pair west to Golden Gate Park. No traffic from Market Street is allowed to turn onto the freeway, but traffic from the freeway may turn right onto Market. The first opportunity for traffic that instead continues onto the boulevard to leave it is east on Page Street. Before the Loma Prieta earthquake, the freeway continued beyond Fell Street and then curved northeast, with the northbound side ending at a ramp to Golden Gate Avenue and Franklin Street, and the southbound level touching down to the northwest at Turk and Gough Streets. Until 2007, this land remained mainly undeveloped, filled primarily by parking lots. However, the parcels were sold off to developers in the 2010s and as of 2020, most of it has been converted into a mix of affordable and market-rate housing. History Plans and original freeway The 1948 Transportation Plan for San Francisco, prepared by De Leuw, Cather and Company, included the Central Freeway. This elevated roadway would begin at the Bayshore Freeway – the approach to the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge – near Division Street and