Posted on 04/01/2021 10:14:06 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
(CNN) — Njeri Camara, 61, can’t visit the Shreveport, Louisiana home where she was born. Like many Black homes and neighborhoods across the country in the 1960s, it was bulldozed to clear space for highways.
Camara says her parents moved when she was a baby to another Shreveport neighborhood, Allendale, where she still lives. But now her current home is at risk of being bulldozed so that a second highway, Interstate 49, can connect directly through the city.
The Shreveport leaders who want to trade Camara’s home for a highway are embracing a Dwight Eisenhower-era belief in the almighty good of the Interstate Highway System. The sentiment lingers even decades after the underbelly of urban highways became clear: pollution, noise, racism, displacement and congestion. For critics, Eisenhower’s highways were a stake driven through the heart of healthy cities.
Now many of these urban highways are crumbling, and a groundswell has emerged in cities nationwide to tear them down. There are 30 local, citizen-led campaigns to convince officials to remove highways, according to Ben Crowther, who leads the “highways to boulevards” program at the Congress for New Urbanism, a think tank devoted to walkable urban environments. A Senate bill introduced last year called for $10 billion to be spent on urban highway removals. Even Detroit, perhaps the most car-dominated US city, is considering removing a stretch of highway.
“Now more than ever, in the age of Covid, people are rethinking how streets and the infrastructure around them serves the people who live in cities,” Crowther told CNN Business.
Activists see highway removal projects as playing a role in racial justice, and making some sort of amends for families displaced decades ago, like Camara’s.
(Excerpt) Read more at channel3000.com ...
PING!
Just another way to weaken the United States, fund leftists, and discriminate against rural Americans.
"But we are going to spend tens of billions of dollars to renovate them in the new bill in congress."
"Highways are all racist! Spend the money on local social programs for people of color."
Don't you just love it?
Our drivers Hate going through Shreveport - that is usually the last load taken. Even the guys from the South say the place is too damn dangerous.
Pretty easy decision.
Everything is racist, from Wonderbread to my very existance as a White man.
Got it? Highways are racist. Why do they call it “blacktop?”
Its obvious, isn’t it? to oppress people of color
I-375 from I-75 to Jefferson Avenue in Detroit doesn’t serve any real good purpose. It would open up a lot of real estate. They could put Hastings Street back in and open some jazz and blues venues - maybe a hotel or two.
When the Mass Pike,I 90,was completed it went through affluent towns.....some people wat to make a racial issue about everything.....I am so sick of it.
..
“Now more than ever, in the age of Covid, people are rethinking how streets and the infrastructure around them serves the people who live in cities,”
6 lanes out in every direction and only 2 lanes in.
I thought that the 2020 riots and COVID had put a stake in the heart of the new urbanism. Detroit could get by with a dirt road just so long as I-275 and I-696 survive.
No kidding, enough is enough.
How ‘bout let the locals decide?
Yeah. They bulldozed plenty of white neighborhoods too. More than Blacks.
Yeah let’s see them tearing down Martin Luther King boulevard in some of these hellholes.
I think we’ve seen peak traffic. Telecommuting, virtual shopping, robotaxis, fine grained mass transit, etc. will cause reduced traffic in many, many ways.
More grift for the NGOs.
"White homes" were bulldozed in the 1960s for the Long Island Expressway and Cross-Bronx Expressway and many other roads. What utter bullshit.
I wonder what happened to Camera’s brothers, Microwave and Clock?
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