Deathways
World's First Network of Highways
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/ancient-maya-cities-super-highways-revealed
Indigenous Roadways
Native peoples left an indelible imprint on the land with systems of roads that tied nations and communities together across the entire landmass of the Americas. Scholar David Wade Chambers writes:
"The first thing to note about early Native American trails and roads is that they were not just paths in the woods following along animal tracks used mainly for hunting. Neither can they be characterized simply as the routes that nomadic peoples followed during seasonal migrations. Rather they constituted an extensive system of roadways that spanned the Americas, making possible short, medium and long distance travel. That is to say, the Pre-Columbian Americas were laced together with a complex system of roads and paths which became the roadways adopted by the early settlers and indeed were ultimately transformed into major highways."
Roads were developed along rivers, and many Indigenous roads in North America tracked the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Columbia, and Colorado Rivers, the Rio Grande, and other major streams. Roads also followed seacoasts. A major road ran along the Pacific coast from northern Alaska (where travelers could continue by boat to Siberia) south to an urban area in western Mexico. A branch of that road ran through the Sonora Desert and up onto the Colorado Plateau, serving ancient towns and later communities such as those of the Hopis and Pueblos on the northern Rio Grande.[1]
Racism
... Contemporary antiracist activists in Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York view "transit racism" as a major factor skewing opportunities and life chances along racial lines. Public transportation vehicles are not more segregated than neighborhoods, jobs, or schools, but in a society where race is coterminous with space, transit vehicles are sites where segregated worlds collide. Transit racism channels subsidies to mostly white suburban commuters while making commuting difficult for people of color. Blacks and Latinos make up 62 percent of urban bus riders and 35 percent of subway riders. They are twice as likely as whites to get to work by riding public transit, walking, or biking. Overfunding of highways and underfunding of nonautomotive means of transportation result in public transit commutes taking twice as long as travel by car. Inadequate public transportation, residential segregation, and automobile-centered development also endanger Black lives.
... Close to 50 percent of low-skill jobs are unavailable to Blacks because the jobs are located in white suburbs inaccessible by public transportation. Residential segregation leaves Blacks more physically isolated from available jobs than any other racial group...
...Nationwide, Blacks have a higher likelihood than whites of dying in pedestrian-vehicle accidents, in part because they walk more and drive less, but also because transit racism places them in situations of jeopardy.[2]
New Orleans
... When the construction of the I-10 Freeway subsidized white migration to suburban St. Tammany Parish outside New Orleans, housing opportunities opened for Blacks in New Orleans East. But they found themselves living without cars and without public transit in an automobile-centered locale. Fatal accidents took the lives of several pedestrians trying to cross the I-10 service roads to reach shopping centers.[3]
New York
... The American Broadcasting Corporation's program Nightline examined a similar situation in the 1999 episode "The Color Line and the Bus Line" It detailed the death of Cynthia Wiggins, a seventeen-year-old African American single mother in Buffalo, New York, run over by a ten-ton dump truck on her way to work as she attempted to cross a crowded seven-lane highway to get to her job at a fast-food counter in the Walden Galleria shopping mall. Her death was an accident, yet she would not have been on the spot where she died had it not been for transit racism. City officials, bus company managers, and shopping mall owners conspired to make sure that buses traveling from Black neighborhoods could not stop at the mall in the nearly all-white suburb of Cheektowaga in an effort to cater to the fears and prejudices of suburban whites by keeping down Black patronage of the mall's establishments. Wiggins had to take the bus because there were no jobs available in her neighborhood and she did not own a car.[4]
Houston
Los Angeles
https://calmatters.org/housing/2021/11/california-housing-crisis-podcast-freeways/
https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2021-11-11/the-racist-history-of-americas-interstate-highway-boom
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-24/bulldoze-la-freeways-racism-monument
Sources
- ↑ Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2015). An indigenous peoples' history of the United States. Boston, Beacon Press.
- ↑ Ruth Thompson-Miller, How Racism Takes Place By George Lipsitz Temple University Press. 2008. 310 pages. $27.95, Social Forces, Volume 93, Issue 4, June 2015, Page 66-68, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sot021
- ↑ Ruth Thompson-Miller, How Racism Takes Place By George Lipsitz Temple University Press. 2008. 310 pages. $27.95, Social Forces, Volume 93, Issue 4, June 2015, Page 67, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sot021
- ↑ Ruth Thompson-Miller, How Racism Takes Place By George Lipsitz Temple University Press. 2008. 310 pages. $27.95, Social Forces, Volume 93, Issue 4, June 2015, Page 67, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sot021