I admit to not liking what I read of her, she sounds like someone I would have detested in so many ways, particularly with the company she kept.
That said, her battle to fight expressways has merit to it.
I saw the effects an expressway can have, and the arm twisting that took place to build them is unseemly and un-American. It the Boston area (and many other cities) people were forced against their will to relocate, and these expressways put up. The one in Boston cut right through the center of the city, a big, ugly, rotting, rusting thing that turned out to be filled with cars day and night.
It was only after it was taken down during “The Big Dig” that you could easily see just exactly what that expressway had done to the city, how it changed its character.
(Note: I like what the Big Dig has done for Boston, but I would never, ever support it because of the way it was funded, and the wasteful way money was spent...my comment on this thread is about the effect of an expressway through the heart of a city and its subsequent removal, which I have seen with my own eyes. I DON’T WANT OLAG-HAI’S THREAD HIJACKED TO DISCUSS THE BIG DIG PLEASE)
That said, I understand the NEED for expressways. But the way it was done in Boston back in the 1950’s actually laid much of the groundwork for the additional EXORBITANT expense when the Big Dig was built. That expressway should have been done differently back in the Fifties.
There are many such project which get rid of previous expressways that were poorly designed or placed or both ... some are major projects like the one in Boston. In Seoul South Korea for example they removed a huge expressway built over a river and restored the river. It is quite impressive.
I’m one who touts the private sector having built the expressways instead of the public sector, especially since state ownership of infrastructure means state control.
However, cities like Boston and NYC have been bastions of feudalist revanchism since their founding, sharing desire for government control with the socialists. It’s thanks to NYC laws against operation of steam locomotives that the railroads never crossed the Hudson and East Rivers, just for a nineteenth-century example.