Road reformers want to demolish aging center-city freeways to make up for old racial harms. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it may be an effective argument.
Governing
By Alex Marshall
June 24, 2021
In 1956, after several years of wrangling, President Eisenhower signed the bill that created the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. While there was some validity to including “Defense” in the title — armies do use highways — it was mostly salesmanship, and it worked.
Now we are talking about plans to shrink, deck over or tear down some of those highways, the ones that plowed through the middle of cities. And we are seeing another piece of effective salesmanship. The Biden administration, led by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, is pursuing the removal of these roads in the name of racial justice. While nothing has been funded yet, President Biden in April called for $20 billion to be spent on such projects.
“Black and brown neighborhoods have been disproportionately divided by highway projects or left isolated by the lack of adequate transit and transportation resources,” Buttigieg succinctly tweeted. “In the Biden-Harris administration, we will make righting these wrongs an imperative.”
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