[Dion]

Originally Posted by BoLevi

Pete Buttigieg said overpasses can be racist.

Both sides have their crazies.

There is truth in what he says.

We reached out to experts on highways and urban history and found wide support for Buttigieg’s assertion, although other factors often played a role as well. Buttigieg’s office also provided links to articles on the subject.

Even in cases where it’s hard to document whether racist thinking explicitly drove highway construction, the existence of divided and weakened neighborhoods in so many cities has been "racist in effect," said Earl Swift, author of "The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways."

One of the most notorious examples of racism in highway planning predates the Interstate system: the Southern State Parkway on New York’s Long Island, which was built by the powerful planner Robert Moses.

In Robert Caro’s critical biography of Moses, "The Power Broker," Caro reveals that Moses ordered his engineers to build the bridges low over the parkway to keep buses from New York City away from Jones Beach, making it less accessible for many poor minorities without cars.

Thomas J. Campanella, a professor of architecture, art, and planning at Cornell University, investigated the anecdote and found aesthetic concerns may have played a role — but that unusually low bridges on the parkway give credence to the allegation of racism.

"It’s fair to say that the Southern State Parkway has racism in its DNA," Campanella told PolitiFact.

https://www.politifact.com/factcheck...me-urban-high/