Racist roads

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Monday that his agency will use billions of dollars from Joe Biden’s public works legislation to remedy racial inequities in U.S. highway design.

Buttigieg described highways dividing neighborhoods and an underpass deliberately constructed “too low” for “a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach” in New York.

“That obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices,” he said. “I don’t think we have anything to lose by confronting that simple reality.”

The only specific example he cited was Interstate 81 in Syracuse, New York, where state and local officials already plan to demolish a decades-old elevated stretch of the highway that was built through a historically Black neighborhood on the city’s south side.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-08/buttigieg-targets-racist-road-design-with-public-works-bill
 
Buttigieg said “There is racism physically built into some of our highways...”

https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/accessibility/546946-transportation-secretary-pete-buttigieg-says-there-is


:thinking:
 
“There is racism physically built into some of our highways.”

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:thinking:
 
Matt Dillon said:
Not here. Here it was mostly crackas n niggas, baby. Chinese really didn't get around here until laundry and restaurant days. :eek:

FL is inconvenient for boats from China, even with the Panama Canal. It's all about logisitics.
Click to expand...

In 1862, the Pacific Railroad Act chartered the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad Companies, tasking them with building a transcontinental railroad that would link the United States from east to west. Over the next seven years, the two companies would race toward each other from Sacramento, California on the one side to Omaha, Nebraska on the other, struggling against great risks before they met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

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In 1865, after struggling with retaining workers due to the difficulty of the labor, Charles Crocker (who was in charge of construction for the Central Pacific) began hiring Chinese laborers. By that time, some 50,000 Chinese immigrants were living on the West Coast, many having arrived during the Gold Rush. This was controversial at the time, as the Chinese were considered an inferior race due to pervasive racism.

The Chinese laborers proved to be tireless workers, and Crocker hired more of them; some 14,000 were toiling under brutal working conditions in the Sierra Nevada by early 1867. (By contrast, the work force of the Union Pacific was mainly Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans.) To blast through the mountains, the Central Pacific built huge wooden trestles on the western slopes and used gunpowder and nitroglycerine to blast tunnels through the granite.

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The building of the transcontinental railroad opened up the American West to more rapid development. With the completion of the track, the travel time for making the 3,000-mile journey across the United States was cut from a matter of months to under a week.

https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/transcontinental-railroad
 
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