The Interstate Highway System, which the U.S. began constructing in the 1950s, has a complicated legacy, to say the least. Boosters see it as the greatest infrastructure program undertaken in the country during the second half of the twentieth century, connecting vast areas in new and important ways, unlocking largely untapped regions outside of cities that helped spark a new kind of middle-class living. Detractors accuse the system’s planners and builders of emptying out cities and encouraging the rise of low-density suburban sprawl. That process, critics argue, prompted “white flight” to the suburbs, while stranding poor minorities in urban neighborhoods disfigured by the highways that bisected them. To these critics, the Interstate Highway System is just another example of America’s racist past.
Though this view of our highway system is not new in academic circles and at urban-planning conferences, it now has emerged as part of the larger reevaluation of everything from federal monuments to the reputations of America’s Founding Fathers in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May at the hands of a Minneapolis cop. Critics argue that it’s not enough simply to see our highways as the product of discrimination; it’s time to begin dismantling them, in the same way that mobs are pulling down statues of old Confederates. “Want to tear down insidious monuments to racism and segregation? Bulldoze L.A. freeways,” the opinion section of the Los Angeles Times asserted earlier this year. “Neither the Klan nor legally dubious covenants nor flagrantly unconstitutional land grabs were arguably as effective as the automobile and its attendant infrastructure at turning Los Angeles into an intentionally segregated city,” the op-ed declared modestly.
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