The Agenda Behind Buttigieg’s Claim That Highways Are ‘Racist’

Midcentury road projects displaced blacks and whites alike. Tearing them down now won’t help.

By Steven Malanga. He is senior editor of City Journal. Excerpts:

"There’s little doubt that some post-World War II federal road projects were misguided and poorly planned. Some local officials saw gleaming new roads as a way to replace deteriorating neighborhoods. Planners arrogantly imposed their visions on unwilling residents, undermining communities around the country—but not only Mr. Buttigieg’s “black and brown ones.”

In his acclaimed book “The Power Broker,” biographer Robert Caro tells how New York’s 20th-century master builder, Robert Moses, constructed the Cross Bronx Expressway through the largely Jewish neighborhood of East Tremont, tearing down 54 apartment buildings and displacing thousands of residents. The Indianapolis portion of Interstate 70 that runs through working-class Southside cut into a neighborhood of Jews, Italians, Germans and blacks. Boston’s Central Artery, built in the 1940s and 1950s, displaced residents and businesses in that city’s largely Italian-American North End.

But reversing the damage decades later under the banner of racial justice carries enormous risks. Boston’s so-called Big Dig project is an example of what can go wrong. City planners quickly recognized that the elevated Central Artery was a mistake; it increased traffic in surrounding neighborhoods as cars exited the roadway, and it blocked an access to the city’s waterfront.

The ambitious solution—tear it down and build a tunnel—began in the early 1980s but wasn’t finished until 2005. It cost five times its original estimates and disrupted the city for decades. Even with federal aid, local governments piled up billions of dollars in debt.

Here is the point of claiming the highway system is racist: turning an environmentalist agenda into a moral crusade. It is a way to sell the infrastructure plan the Biden team has been pitching. For cities, much of that plan, now reflected in a bill the administration says would double spending for mass transit, revolves around getting people off roads and into public transportation.

Many Americans are uninterested in this agenda. Mass-transit ridership has been declining since 2014, falling by double digits before the pandemic in more than two dozen major metro areas, despite billions of dollars in government subsidies. Since the pandemic, ridership has further collapsed, down by more than two-thirds. Merely returning to pre-pandemic levels will be a challenge, as employees continue to work from home. Data also show a significant number of people leaving dense cities, where mass transit is most used."