During a press conference early this week, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg contended that “some beltways and interstates and highways were built . . .to be racist.” He used this argument to justify the $1 billion in the recent infrastructure bill aimed at “reconnecting communities” as well as other spending that will supposedly be focused on disadvantaged communities.
The Southern State Parkway, which Robert Caro claimed was designed by Robert Moses to prevent buses filled with blacks from traveling to Jones Beach. In fact, there is room for buses under the central part of the arch. Photo by Doug Kerr.
The argument that highways were racist stems from two sources. First, Robert Caro’s book about Robert Moses claimed that Moses deliberately built overpasses on New York City parkways too low to allow buses in order to keep blacks and other minorities (who would presumably ride buses and not drive cars) from reaching popular recreation areas such as Jones Beach. Second, the anti-highway movement of the 1960s claimed that highways were deliberately targeting black neighborhoods to force them out of cities. “No white man’s freeway through black man’s neighborhood” became the rallying cry.
Both of these claims are serious distortions of the truth. Caro’s book was simply wrong. The truth is that the New York legislature had forbidden truck traffic on parkways for safety reasons. Since trucks weren’t going to use the parkways, Caro Moses didn’t make the overpasses particularly high, but they were still high enough to accommodate the buses of the day. As documented by Mark Romaine, most of the overpasses are archways, and today some taller buses might not be able to fit under the lower parts of the arches (right lanes), but they can fit under the central parts (usually the left lanes). Besides, there were plenty of alternate routes to recreation areas that were already served by transit.
The black neighborhood claim is a little more complicated. After World War II, many American inner cities were filled with obsolete multifamily housing that most people considered undesirable. For example, many buildings were five or more stories tall but didn’t have elevators, so people living on the top stories had to climb many stairs. Many of these buildings had emptied out as people moved to single-family homes in the suburbs, and the remaining occupants tended to be poor, including many blacks and immigrants.
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Urban planners of the day called this “blight,” and they believed that property owners wouldn’t voluntarily invest in improving or replacing these buildings because no one would spend a lot of money on a new building whose value would be brought down by adjacent blighted structures. Thus, they decided to use the government’s power of eminent domain to buy blighted neighborhoods, clear them of the blighted structures, and then sell the land to developers who would build new housing, at least some of which could be occupied by the people evicted from the blighted housing. That part never worked very well because of the time delay between evictions and construction of new housing.
When Congress created the Interstate Highway System in 1956, which included funding for several thousand miles of urban highways, city planners — not highway engineers — decided to route many of those highways through blighted neighborhoods, not because they were inhabited by blacks but because the cities wanted to rid themselves of obsolete housing. Fundamentally, the real problem was not blight but job and education discrimination that kept blacks poor so that the only housing they could afford was housing no one else (except similarly poor immigrants) wanted.
Today, the anti-automobile lobby is using claims of racism to justify their anti-highway programs. The reality, as I’ve pointed out before, is that highways and automobiles are the most egalitarian form of transportation ever devised. They don’t discriminate based on race, gender, or religion. While auto ownership requires some base level of income or wealth, it is less expensive in the long run than urban transit or intercity passenger trains, both of which were used mainly by elites before governments began to subsidize them.
Turning this around, any efforts to discourage driving will hit low-income people the hardest. Traffic congestion especially hurts them because their jobs tend to have less flexibility about locations and starting times than those of higher-income people. Truly just transportation policies would focus more on increasing auto ownership and reducing congestion so that auto drivers could make it to their jobs and other meetings on time.
There’s no such thing as “Black Neighborhoods” there’s historically black neighborhoods where govt and associations dumped black people to live……….
People pay little attention to lowtech solutions to problems people spend fortunes and software trying to fix. One of the most low-tech innovations ever the humble bicycle. I’ve recently adopted a bike Now and for little effort get’s me anywhere in a 10 mile radius. We noted the appeal of pedal power. Bicycles themselves are a mature technology with not that much to improve upon. They don’t need rails, overhead lines, traffic management systems, traffic lights, smart grids, smart phone aps, gas stations, batteries or superconductors, charging ports, digital doodads, computerized whatcha callems. They require none of those things, which is why upper establishment types hate them. They represented mobility and freedom in the 19th century. Today, Largely invulnerable and independent from Energy prices. But they do need roads, Albeit very little.
As a result of autocentric culture and an American attitude regarding pedestrians and transit users as Losers, riding a bike is dangerous pasttime in transportation corridors; at the very least it’s hazardous and plain suicide at worst. The reason for this is simple: cars rule the roads. It does not matter whether cars drive on gasoline, diesel, batteries, biofuels, hydrogen, or unicorn farts. The assholes behind them have no regard for pedestrians/bikers. Unlike highways which finance thru user fees, bike/pedestrian infrastructure doesn’t enjoy the same “USE/Abuse/finance” system, It’s impossible to charge bikers. Like sidewalks… More highways don’t fix traffic, China has build 160,000 kilometers of major roadways….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I9_mG5cjbc
Yeah made in China.
It don’t matter what color they’re skin is, if you demolish neighborhoods to expand a highway you’re failing on two fronts.
– Shutting cheap places to live
– Fixing traffic.
Traffic is not a hazard, hazards are like environmental factors. Traffic is a consequence, demonstration of physics. “Two objects cannot occupy the same space”
Expanding highway lanes doesn’t improve traffic, because once you add a lane, and exit or entrance follows with it… Thus more vehicles pour onto it. Traffic remains relatively the same. There’s two solutions to traffic
1: Mitigate automobile use per individual (Walking, biking, carpooling, jitney’s, localized transit (Vanpools)
2: Do not adopt the “Dead Worm” neighborhood concept, that relegates neighborhoods to move via only one road. A dead end, begins on a feed road which feeds the highway. If you can bypass the highway you cut out traffic. I used to drive to work everyday using a back-road technique avoiding state route highway. Though 5-7 minutes longer, I was never late and I never went above 50 mph. By adding a mere five minutes I cut gas use by not having to speed demon my way.
“… Caro didn’t make the overpasses particularly high….” Neither did Moses. ;o)
LazyReader … Bicycles are a great low-tech solution to the short-distance transportation “problem” — unless it is raining or snowing or cold or windy or hot and humid. They are not very good for carrying a family’s weekly groceries home from the store.
Bicycles are not very time-efficient. The 10 mile ride you mention takes 45 to 60 sometimes sweaty minutes on a bicycle but by car, just 20 minutes on non-highway streets or 10 minutes on a highway. Longer if taking the kids with their own miniature pedal-powered machines.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttplugg played the race card. So surprised. He was selected for the position because of diversity as he likes it up the ass.
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Expanding highway lanes doesn’t improve traffic, because once you add a lane, and exit or entrance follows with it… Thus more vehicles pour onto it. Traffic remains relatively the same.
”
Only an ideologue that values their feelings beyond God would make such a fantastically facetious claim.
In most circumstances adding capacity improves the system. Period.
“Since trucks weren’t going to use the parkways, Caro didn’t make the overpasses particularly high, but they were still high enough to accommodate the buses of the day.”
You mean “Moses” not “Caro.”
Study human behavior long enough you discover the Incentive principle.
The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads or chocolate or pornography) makes people want that thing even more. Traffic engineers made note of this phenomenon as early as the 1960s, it is only in recent years that social scientists collected enough data to show how this happens pretty much every time we build new roads.
– San Francisco removed a highway section, called the Central Freeway, that carried nearly 100,000 cars per day in 1989. The boulevard that replaced it now only carries around 45,000 daily cars and yet they move.
– Seoul, South Korea, where the city tore down a highway that was considered a vital roadway corridor, carrying 168,000 cars per day. After replacing the cars with a river, parkland, and some smaller roads, traffic didn’t get worse and many other things, including pollution, got better.
Like I mentioned above, the dead worm/collector road concept funnels automotive traffic. The street grid distributes traffic. Roads in your city actually have a great deal of underused capacity. Think about how they sit mostly empty, in the afternoon, late evening, and at night. Distributive road/streets filter traffic.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Trina-Lamanes/publication/308906314/figure/fig2/AS:414357109395457@1475801841246/Example-of-street-connectivity-Neighbourhood-Streets-Project-Stakeholder-2001.png
I put about 5K miles/year on my bike, and about 5K miles per year in my car. As such, I’m vcry familiar with the behavior of both riders and drivers. Asshole bike rider behavior occurs at a 2x rate as asshole car driver behavior. Lotta’ asshole bike riders.
I think it’s an entitlement attitude: Hey, I’m being green and stuff so I deserve to run stop signs even when there’s cross traffic, especially because ya’ll are destroying Gaia with your evil cars.