Sustainability Through Transportation and Urbanism: Saving the Planet, One Fewer Car Trip at a Time

  From my  previous post , you know that government of all levels was heavily involved in the systematic discrimination against African Americans, and their short-sighted decisions contributed to a highly segregated America. Black families were refused "bailouts" of their mortgages when the Great Depression hit due to the HOLC's "Residential Security Maps", which were drawn largely on racial lines. Black neighborhoods were redlined, cutting them off of this opportunity for more favorable mortgages, if they were luck enough to own a home in the first place. Racially restrictive covenants, enforced by governments, kept Blacks out of White (or desired to be White) neighborhoods. FDR's Federal Housing Administration would not provide insurance to Black families or developers who desired to build integrated neighborhoods. When other means of segregating the country failed, governments turned to highways, the construction of which displaced countless African Ameri...

The Interstate Highway System is often seen as the most impressive achievement in American transportation history. Once completed, people and goods could travel between cities at speeds people could only dream about before. It is pretty amazing that I can make the trip from home to Columbus in just 2 hours (a 110 mile trip), or that you can make it all the way to South Carolina in just about 9 hours. The Interstate Highway System was the backbone of suburbanization, allowing people to live farther away from their jobs and still get to work in a reasonable amount of time.  "Connecticut - Eisenhower Interstate System"  by  wallyg  is licensed under  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Our society wastes no time worshiping this system, and the benefits it has brought to Americans are undeniable. While we worship the engineering marvel that the Interstate Highway System is, we rarely consider the absolutely horrific things that had to occur to make it a reality. You might not think any...

Unless you were raised under a rock (or a radical far-right household), you know that the United States has a long history of racism. Heck, even if you were raised under a rock, you would know this is true. From the horrific acts of slavery to the Tulsa Race Massacre, from separate schools and water fountains to redlining and housing discrimination, it is no secret that official government policy is very much to blame for these injustices. And this is not something just limited to the deep south. It happened practically everywhere . Even today, we are nowhere near where we ought to be. The horrific murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery show us that racism continues to be prevalent in our society. Even though the 13th,14th, and 15th Amendments, and numerous court cases  explicitly outlawed the deprivation of civil rights based on the color of one's skin , instead of just accepting people who were different from themselves, governments and citizens around the country sought looph...