Presidio Parkway

The Presidio Parkway is a roadway tucked into the natural contours of the Presidio of San Francisco and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, one of the nation’s largest urban parks. Presidio Parkway creates a regional gateway between the Golden Gate Bridge and the city of San Francisco and North Bay communities.

The 1.6-mile, six-lane roadway (Highway 101) winds through the Presidio national park, linking the city to the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. The new highway includes twin high-viaduct bridges, four tunnels, and a low viaduct interchange, with continuous shoulders and a landscaped median.

Known as Doyle Drive since it was first opened in 1936, the safer, streamlined Presidio Parkway includes local roads within the Presidio, providing a major regional traffic link between the San Francisco Peninsula and North Bay Area counties. It features numerous safety enhancements, including current seismic safety requirements, a median barrier separating north-bound and south-bound traffic, wider traffic lanes and safety shoulders.

WSP USA has been involved with the Presidio Parkway for 16 years in several planning, design and advisory roles on behalf of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) beginning in 1999 as lead consultant for an environmental and design study that considered alternatives for replacing Doyle Drive. The resulting environmental impact statement and report was approved in 2008. Construction of the new Presidio Parkway started in 2009.

WSP was the prime consultant for the environmental impact statement/report, in joint venture: provided general engineering, final design and construction support services; and P3 contract services.

Presidio Parkway was the first P3 procurement under California’s new SBX-4 P3 law. This was a complex project with multiple federal, state and local stakeholders that required multiple technical, commercial, financial and political resources to advance the project and meet the owner’s goals and the stringent requirements of the local federal landowner. We led development of the payment mechanism and continued to play an advisory and contract oversight role.

The project team strived to create a roadway that reduced impacts to biological, cultural and natural resources; respected the project setting within a national park, the National Historic Landmark District, and the surrounding neighborhoods; met community needs; and provided a safer roadway.

Opened to traffic in July 2015, Presidio Parkway has three travel lanes in each direction—two 11-foot lanes and one 12-foot lane to accommodate buses—separated by a landscaped median ranging from 16 to 41 feet. Wider lanes, the new median and continuous shoulders will improve safety. Pedestrians and bicyclists will also benefit from numerous new opportunities to cross over or under the parkway to access the shoreline.

The project won the American Roads & Transportation Builders Association P3 Project of the Year in 2012. In addition to our role as P3 advisor, we supported the successful Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant application, which gained the project a $46 million federal funding award.

Other project elements include new steel and concrete bridges, two cut-and-cover tunnels and an at-grade roadway with landscaped berms—all designed to withstand a high magnitude 8 earthquake without danger of collapse and/or easily repairable damage. The first phase of this project was completed under a design-bid-build procurement and the second phase will be constructed under a P3 procurement (design-build-finance-operate-maintain), with the private concessionaire providing operations and maintenance services on the new roadway for 30 years.