The Broadway Tunnel (officially the Robert C. Levy Tunnel) is a roadway tunnel in San Francisco, California. The tunnel opened in 1952, and serves as a high-capacity conduit for traffic between Chinatown and North Beach to the east and Russian Hill and Van Ness Avenue to the west. In a proposal of the city's 1948 Transportation Plan, the tunnel was to serve as a link between the Embarcadero Freeway and the Central Freeway. History Early plans Abner Doble (grandfather of the namesake who would go on to build steam-powered cars) and his associates in the Folsom St. and Fort Point Railroad and Tunnel Co. were granted "the right to construct a tunnel through Russian Hill, on the line of Broadway, from Mason to Hyde or Larkin" by the California State Assembly on April 22, 1863. Fifty years later, Bion J. Arnold submitted a report to the City of San Francisco in March 1913, calling for a tunnel on Broadway to supplement the Stockton Street Tunnel, which was already under construction. The general route of a tunnel for Broadway was described in April 1913, extending from Mason to Larkin. A landowner protested against the proposed tunnel, calling it "absolutely as unnecessary as a bridge to the moon". Also in 1913, a railway tunnel was proposed for Broadway as part of an extension for the Municipal Railway to carry passengers to and from the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Arnold's proposal called for a combined rail and road tunnel with a single arch for Broadway through Russian Hill, long and wide, carrying two tracks each wide; three lanes of traffic wide in total; and two sidewalks each wide.. Plans were elaborated in brief by City Engineer M.M. O'Shaughnessy as one of ten potential tunnel projects in San Francisco at the October 1917 meeting for the San Francisco Association of the members of the American Society of Civil Engineers. O'Shaughnessy proposed a bore, but the article reporting the meeting described it as merely "investigated and not likely to be soon built". Construction In 1948, voters in the City of San Francisco passed a $5 million bond measure (equivalent to $ in ) to fund the construction of the Broadway Tunnel. Site preparations, including the move of an apartment building from 1453 Mason to Vallejo Street, were underway by October 1949, and the construction contract was anticipated to be bid in January 1950. In February, Morrison-Knudsen was