Most days, Centennial Way looks exactly like what it was built to be: a paved strip on top of a buried BART tube, the kind of trail you use to get somewhere else. Joggers use it to log miles between Spruce and Huntington. Parents use it to get a stroller from one side of the underground tracks to the other without touching traffic. It is, by design, infrastructure first and park second.
Then you reach the stretch near Huntington Avenue and the trail stops behaving like infrastructure. A flat expanse of granite opens up, ledges cut in clean rectangles, low embankments angled just so. Skateboarders who have never set foot in South San Francisco know this four-acre patch of ground by name. Thrasher Magazine, the sport's most-watched publication, called it "a beauty" within days of it opening. Pro street skater Miles Silvas told SFGATE it felt "perfect." None of that reputation is visible from the trail's original purpose. You have to already be standing on it to know what it became.
That gap between what Centennial Way was engineered to do and what it has quietly turned into is the actual story here, and it matters right now because the city just started doing it again on a different stretch of the same trail.
A trail built over the BART tunnel
Centennial Way opened in May 2009 as a 2.85-mile linear park laid directly over the underground BART line connecting the South San Francisco and San Bruno stations. The trail itself is unglamorous by design: a 10-foot paved path with 2-foot granite shoulders, lit for use after dark, edged with low-maintenance landscaping and wildflowers. Its job was never to be a destination. It was a way to make the strip of buried transit infrastructure feel like usable land instead of dead space.
For over a decade that's mostly what it stayed. A commuter shortcut. A place to walk a dog on the way to the BART station. Functional, unremarkable, exactly as engineered.
The four acres that changed the trail's reputation
The shift started with a stretch between South Spruce Avenue and Huntington Avenue that the city had marked as underutilized. Caltrans backed the redesign through its Clean California Local Grant Program, contributing toward new trees, a pump track, lighting and pet waste stations, according to reporting from the San Mateo Daily Journal at the time construction was approved.
What opened on September 29, 2024, as Centennial Way Park South went further than that original scope. SFGATE reported the finished park cost about $1.4 million, with the city spending close to $500,000 on granite alone for what designers call a skate plaza: a flat-ground layout with ledges and embankments instead of the ramps and rails typical of a conventional skate park. Ryen Motzek, who co-owns DLX Skateshop in San Francisco and helped design the space, told SFGATE the granite surface makes tricks easier without feeling artificial.
"It's not stupid slippery, not overly sticky. It's like hard, flat, awesome ground."
That distinction, granite over concrete, flat plaza over ramp park, is why skateboarders outside the neighborhood started paying attention within a week of the ribbon cutting.
The rest of the four acres reads more like a standard neighborhood park: a bike pump track built for riders to gain speed through berms rather than pedaling, a nature play area built from trees the city removed elsewhere after storm damage, an outdoor classroom, and a pollinator garden. The Boys and Girls Club, South San Francisco High School and Los Cerritos Elementary all sit close enough that city planning documents specifically cited student access as part of the project's rationale.
Here's what the corridor looks like segment by segment right now:
| Segment | Length / Size | What's There | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full Centennial Way Trail | 2.85 miles, SSF BART to San Bruno BART | Paved path, granite shoulders, lighting | Complete since 2009 |
| Centennial Way Park South | 4 acres, Spruce Ave to Huntington Ave | Skate plaza, pump track, nature play area, outdoor classroom, pollinator garden | Opened September 29, 2024 |
| Centennial Dog Park | Large and small dog runs | Off-leash areas, separate by dog size | Open, near Orange Avenue |
| Centennial Way Park North | Segment near SSF BART station | Not yet built | First community workshop held August 1, 2026 |
The dog park nobody had to fight for
While the skate plaza collected national coverage, the trail's dog park settled in more quietly. It sits near Orange Avenue, close enough to the Safeway and Wells Fargo on that corner that regulars use those storefronts as the landmark when giving directions rather than a street address. It offers separate runs for large and small dogs, a detail that matters on a trail narrow enough that off-leash dogs of different sizes used to compete for the same open ground. It didn't generate a magazine write-up. It just became one more reason residents already walk this corridor daily instead of driving somewhere else for the same errand.
The next segment is being decided right now
This is the part that hasn't happened anywhere else on the trail yet, and it's happening this year. The city has identified another underutilized stretch of Centennial Way, this one near the South San Francisco BART station, for a project it's calling Centennial Way Park North. According to the city's Parks and Recreation Department, the goal is the same instinct that produced Park South: take a segment of trail built over the tube and turn it into something residents actually use for recreation, wellness and education.
The first community workshop was held Saturday, August 1, 2026, as a pop-up session directly on the trail near the BART station. The city's recap page thanks the community members of all ages who stopped by, and the project's feedback page is still open for residents to weigh in on what they want to see.
That's a meaningfully different position than where Park South started. Nobody consulted future skateboarders about granite specifications before Park South existed. This time, the shape of the next four acres, or however much land ends up allocated, is still being drawn. If you use this stretch of trail on a regular basis, whatever complaint or want you've been quietly carrying about it, more shade, a different kind of play space, better lighting near the station, has an actual channel right now instead of a hypothetical one.
What the pattern tells you about the trail's next decade
Centennial Way was built as a trail over a transit tunnel. What's actually happened is that nearly every segment the city has touched has ended up doing more than its original job, first the trail itself as a commuter shortcut that became a daily dog-walking route, then Park South as a pump track project that became a nationally recognized skate destination almost by accident.
Park North is the same experiment running again, in public, with residents in the room before the concrete gets poured. The corridor's history suggests the segment that comes out of this process probably won't stay confined to whatever the initial workshop notes describe. It rarely has.
If you live along Centennial Way and haven't walked the Park North stretch lately, that's the segment worth watching over the next few seasons. Not because it will look like Park South. Because the trail's actual pattern is that it never stays what it was built to be.
Bryan Cruz and Rey Ancheta walk this corridor too, and they'll be tracking what the Park North workshops turn into as the city moves past the first round of feedback. If you want the next update on Centennial Way or any other corner of South San Francisco before it shows up anywhere else, Bryan Cruz and Rey Ancheta are the team to ask.
