Initial construction Before the
Dumbarton and
San Mateo-Hayward Bridges were built across the
San Francisco Bay in the 1920s, San Francisco was bottled up at the north end of
a long peninsula, with driving south on
El Camino Real towards
San Jose as the only reasonable alternative to the
ferries for crossing the bay. The first of several highways built as an alternate to El Camino Real was the
Skyline Boulevard, which was added to the state highway system in 1919. A second route, the Bay Shore Highway (Route 68), became a state highway in 1923, but only from the San Francisco city limits into
San Mateo County, where the Dumbarton Bridge would begin. Just prior to the start of construction on the Dumbarton Bridge, San Francisco Supervisor
Richard J. Welch noted that the Bay Shore Highway would need to be built all the way to San Jose as an escape valve for the additional traffic that the bridge would attract. Groundbreaking ceremonies were held in South San Francisco for the Bayshore Highway on September 11, 1924. The route used a right-of-way that was wide with a four-lane undivided highway wide. Construction between
South San Francisco and
Burlingame had begun by 1924, funded by a $500,000 contribution from San Francisco, and was completed in 1928. A disconnected segment north of
San Mateo was built by the state at the same time. It was not until February 1929 that the road was fully
paved between San Francisco and Burlingame, and on October 20, 1929, the new highway was officially dedicated to San Mateo, several months after the connecting San Mateo-Hayward Bridge opened (at what is now Third Avenue). Even then, motorists had to wait until May 7, 1931, to reach Jefferson Avenue in
Redwood City (near the west end of the four-year-old Dumbarton Bridge). The roadway was extended to
Oregon Avenue in
Palo Alto in mid-1932,
Lawrence Station Road in mid-1933, and to Lafayette Street near
Santa Clara, across the
Guadalupe River from San Jose, by 1934. The final piece to Oakland Road (13th Street) in San Jose, which was then the main road -
Legislative Route 5 and
Sign Route 17 - between San Jose and
Oakland, was dedicated on June 12, 1937, over ten years after the Dumbarton Bridge opened in January 1927. Although the highway was designed and built to what were, at the time, high standards, with a 100-foot (30 m) wide
right-of-way in most places, it was
accident-prone because it lacked a
median barrier. The roadway was entirely
at-grade except for crossings of
rail lines. It generally followed the present alignment of the Bayshore Freeway, but deviated in several places: Old Bayshore Highway in
San Jose, Veterans Boulevard in
Redwood City, Bayshore Highway in
Burlingame, a destroyed section of road through
San Francisco International Airport, and Airport and Bayshore Boulevards from
South San Francisco through
Brisbane into San Francisco. Within that city, the new highway continued three miles (5 km) along the present Bay Shore Boulevard to Army (Cesar Chavez) Street and Potrero Avenue. When the Bayshore Highway was completed in 1937,
U.S. Route 101 signs were moved to it from
El Camino Real, and El Camino became
U.S. Route 101 Alternate. Businesses along El Camino created the El Camino Real Association to protest the move and resulting loss of business, and by 1939 the main route had been moved back, with the Bayshore Highway becoming U.S. Route 101 Bypass. The two routes split in San Jose at the junction of First and Second Streets near Keyes Street, with the El Camino route mostly following the present
SR 82 and the Bayshore route using locally maintained Second, Reed, and Fourth Streets to reach the state-maintained Bayshore Highway. In San Francisco, they rejoined at the present location of the
Alemany Maze, with the El Camino route following
Alemany Boulevard from near the city line; from there US 101 continued north on Bay Shore Boulevard, Potrero Avenue, and 10th and Fell Streets to
Van Ness Avenue, meeting the
Bay Bridge approach (
US 40/
US 50) at Bryant and Harrison Streets. The Bryant/Harrison
one-way pair was added to Route 68 (which already included the bridge) in 1937 and removed in 1947 along with the bridge; Construction of an extension to
Route 115 (Santa Clara Street, now
SR 130) at 30th Street in San Jose began in 1939, and was completed by late 1940. As with the portion between Fourth and 13th Streets, it was not marked as a numbered route. which was already under construction, and was completed that year. This was the first segment built with
interchanges, and included a
median barrier. Despite this, most crossings were
at-grade; only the two ends at Route 115 (Santa Clara Street) and regular US 101 included bridges, the former a
diamond interchange and the latter a simple split with additional access to Ford Road. It also crossed over Coyote Road, though with no access, just south of the
Coyote Creek bridge. The original 1947 bridge over Coyote Road remains, though widened in 1990, and is one of the oldest road-road
grade separations on the present freeway. It was the first freeway planned for Northern California, and the second in the state, after the
Arroyo Seco project. In general, the goals of the Bayshore Freeway project were to grade-separate the freeway from surface streets and railroad tracks to accommodate projected traffic and to reduce the rate of accidents. The first segment rebuilt as a modern freeway was finished in 1947, stretching from Peninsula Avenue (then called Peninsular) at the
San Mateo-
Burlingame line to Broadway Avenue in Burlingame, including the overpass for Peninsula. a distance of . This segment converted the existing two-way traffic on Bayshore Highway to a single three-lane one-way road and added a new three-lane roadway running parallel to it. The new roadway, intended for northbound traffic, was constructed east of the existing alignment, separated by a wide median, permitting a future expansion to four lanes in each direction. The routing had been adjusted to the west to allow an additional for airport expansion. This segment opened on June 1, 1951. Also in 1951, the state legislature renamed the portion within San Francisco after
James Lick, a California pioneer and philanthropist. San Francisco construction included segments to the north, opened in 1953, and the south. opened in June 1955. Construction in San Francisco was completed by 1958. in San Francisco (2013), showing US 101 over the 1957 causeway.
San Bruno Mountain and
Sierra Point are in the background. The area west (right) of the freeway is part of the proposed
Brisbane Baylands development. A new causeway across
Candlestick Cove connected the completed section in South San Francisco with San Francisco and opened on July 11, 1957. Planning began in 1951, when bids were taken for an experimental causeway wide extending south from Candlestick Point; rather than pumping out soft bay mud and back-filling with sand, fill dirt would be dumped directly into the Bay to see if the mud underneath could be displaced instead. This section of the Bay had water up to deep, overlying soft mud deep, which in turn was overlying harder, compacted mud. The compacted mud was deemed sufficiently strong to support the weight of the freeway, but it was hoped that excavation of the soft mud layer could be avoided by dumping fill at a sufficient rate, later calculated to be per day. The experiment was deemed a success, and the remaining of causeway was put out for bid in 1954, awarded in 1955 to Guy F. Atkinson Co. By that time, over of fill had already been placed. Meanwhile, construction had progressed south from San Mateo through San Carlos, with that segment completed in 1954, A movement to make the four-lane undivided "Bloody Bayshore" safer all the way to San Jose began in Palo Alto. Contracts for the projects in Santa Clara County had been awarded by 1959, The total cost of freeway conversion was , including to acquire right-of-way. The south end of the freeway was the old El Camino Real merge near Ford Road until 1984, when the
South Valley Freeway was built from there to Cochrane Road in Morgan Hill connecting the Bayshore Freeway to the existing segment of the South Valley Freeway south of Cochrane Road in Morgan Hill to Monterey Road in Gilroy which had been built in 1973. ==Exit list==