Imagining what the Great Highway park could look like with AI

The Great Highway will cease to be a road and become a park — at some point. That’s because last week San Francisco voters narrowly passed Proposition K, a measure to extend the ban on vehicles from the section between Sloat Boulevard and Lincoln Way.

The only problem? Prop. K didn’t offer a plan for how to transform the four-lane divided road into open space, or specify where funding for it might come from.

This was a major reason why many voters opposed the measure. But for others, this lack of a blueprint is an opportunity to take matters into their own hands and reimagine Ocean Beach Park for themselves. To that end, one Redditor used ChatGPT to generate a bucolic greenscape full of zigzagging trails and palm trees extending north from Sloat.

Like most AI renderings, the vision is uncanny. Baffling, really. There’s a skyline where the Richmond should be — and a roadway that still shows plenty of cars. But the picture of the imaginary park is beautiful, and the post spawned plenty of ideas for what to do with the current Great Highway, the suggestions ranging from practical to fantastical to straight-up trolling. 

The Standard took some of the most ridiculous suggestions and ran them through ChatGPT ourselves. For good measure, we added a few of our own conceptions of what a Great Highway Park of the future could look like.

This one is our idea of the ideal version of the park that could replace the Great Highway. A landscaped wonderland with winding foot paths, meadows for picnicking, dunes for gazing out at the sea and sliding down, piers for fishing, and ponds for native birds, this would be more an extension of Golden Gate Park.

The simplest vision may well be the best: Demolish the roadbed and restore the ecosystem. Most of the west side was originally sand dunes, so a park that expands their reach inland from the ocean might be best for shorebirds like the vulnerable snowy plover. As long as somebody promises to stay on top of any invasive ice plant.

For most of the 20th century, the northern end of Ocean Beach was the site of a giant amusement park called Playland. One commenter in the Reddit thread fondly remembered their grandma describing it. Santa Cruz has been stealing our boardwalk thunder since its demolition in 1973, so here’s a resurrected version, complete with roller coasters, water slides, and a carousel.

In the Reddit thread, one cheeky commenter called for “world’s longest stadium trough urinal, from Sloat to Balboa.” Well, SF is notoriously short on public restrooms, so maybe this beachfront pissoir will help keep the surrounding neighborhood’s streets clean.

A commenter with a populist bent expressed interest in carpeting the former Great Highway in casinos and Wal-Mart superstores. So we decided to crank up the dystopia factor a bit, turning the seashore into a hideous, hyper-commercialized Coney Island boardwalk with corporate logos galore.

Remember last year’s pie-in-the-sky proposal to erect a 50-story residential tower near the zoo? It was thoroughly criticized for being out-of-scale with the surrounding neighborhood, but then again, San Francisco is on the hooks to approve 82,000 new housing units by 2030. They can’t all go up in Mission Bay.