Two places:
Here:
And look in here:
If you pay taxes, that is.
If not, and there are plenty of people who don't; refer to graphic #1.
Posted on 07/02/2022 6:17:45 AM PDT by MtnClimber
On Thursday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced that the Department of Transportation would be spending at least $1 billion to address so-called “racism” in America’s public roads.
As reported by the Daily Caller, the program will be called Reconnecting Communities, which the Transportation Department calls the “first of its kind.” The new initiative says it will focus on rebuilding communities that were “racially segregated or divided by road projects.”
Claiming, with no evidence, that the design of the interstate highway system in the 1950s was specifically meant to negatively impact African-American areas, Buttigieg said that the program will provide financial handouts over the course of five years to predominantly African-American communities across the country.
“Transportation can connect us to jobs, services and loved ones, but we’ve also seen countless cases around the country where a piece of infrastructure cuts off a neighborhood or a community because of how it was built,” Buttigieg said during his announcement speech in Birmingham, Alabama.
“We can’t ignore the basic truth: that some of the planners and politicians behind those projects built them directly through the heart of vibrant populated communities,” Buttigieg falsely claimed. “Sometimes as an effort to reinforce segregation. Sometimes because the people there have less power to resist. And sometimes as part of a direct effort to replace or eliminate Black neighborhoods.”
The announcement builds off of previous suggestions by Joe Biden, laid out in his proposals for the American Jobs Plan in 2021, to spend as much as $20 billion to “reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access.”
Among the cities seeking federal handouts from the new program are: Portland, Oregon; St. Paul, Minnesota; Tampa, Florida; Syracuse, New York; Houston, Texas; and New Orleans, Louisiana.
Even left-wing groups admitted that the concept of “racist” roads was a “fringe idea,” but nevertheless praised the Biden Administration for promoting such a conspiracy.
“Prior to 2021, the idea that we would deal with highway infrastructure that has divided communities was very much a fringe idea,” said Ben Crowther, a spokesman for the Freeway Fighters Network. “The Biden administration has really transformed that into mainstream thinking.”
THAT'S RIGHT!!!
Asphalt is BLACK and therefore oppressed!
Cement is WHITE and therefore the OPPRESSOR! (or something)
But what is FOR SURE and DECIDED is that RACISM is rampant EVERYWHERE!!!
And this NEEDS to be ADDRESSED with BILLIONS and TRILLIONS of $$$$$!
Only THEN can there be racial equity, harmony, fairness and whatever...
/s
Post of the year!
Ditto! Excellent!
When I93, I91, I95 and I89 were built through Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, communities, towns and cities were divided by them.
In that era, almost no black folks resided in these states.
The town I grew up in was one of the divided ones, with no exit in the town, and many miles to one.
It was just the logical place to build the roads.
This is NUTS.
When I was very young, my parents - living in a white community - had to vacate their home b/c a new freeway was going right through the development, straight through where the house was standing. They were renting at the time.
So I say Pete Buttigieg is a liar.
But then we already knew that.
The Golden State freeway cut my city in half in the mid 1960’s.
I live on a street bisected by the freeway - before GPSs, people stopped all the time to ask where a certain address was b/c they couldn’t find it on my end of the street - I’d have to give them complicated directions to get to the same street on the other side of an 8-lane freeway.
Where’s my city’s compensation for so-called “racist” 60s road policies that divided my city in half?
So is Petey B going to build mandatory exit ramps on the interstates into ghetto neighborhoods so travelers can slow down, smell the roses and take a mandatory scenic route? Reminds me of that movie Vacation when Chevy Chase makes a wrong term off the interstate and is routed through a St Louis ghetto and they are stealing his tires while he is asking some gangbanger for directions out of there
There has to be a secret reward of some type hidden to everyone one except talking heads and content producers for the one who can promote and get inserted into the American lexicon the craziest policy or item as RACIST. Every day there’s something new that’s racist. What isn’t racist?
Two places:
Here:
And look in here:
If you pay taxes, that is.
If not, and there are plenty of people who don't; refer to graphic #1.
Idiot Homo
Stupidity is always tiresome, but especially so when it sabotages reasonable initiatives at the outset.
The U.S. began to reengineer the cities around mass automobile commuting after WWII. This isn’t the place to sort out all the plusses and minuses, but it’s fair to say that scale matters. A lot of the minuses become acute problems once cities cross a size threshold, which varies from place to place depending on local topography and the presence or absence of a compact downtown core. Arterial roads slashed through city and inner-ring suburban neighborhoods do vast damage that was underappreciated in the great heyday of highway building in the 1950’s-70’s. Remediating some of the damage is long overdue. Burdening sensible corrective actions with racialist gibberish is stupid and counterproductive.
What works in a city of 250-500,000 may not work in an urban conglomeration of 10 million or more (the size of my region, the DC-MD-VA-WV-PA Combined Statistical Area, which is the appropriate framework for transportation planning). Scale matters for infrastructure. That’s just as true for transportation planning as it is for sewage treatment.
Cities should work first and foremost for the people who actually live there. People should be able to walk conveniently and safely around their own neighborhoods. This includes being able to cross the street without have to jump in your car and drive to the nearest expressway crossing two miles away. If suburban commuters have to wait at more stoplights, that’s ok with me. If it’s not ok with them, they can live closer to their jobs or take the train.
I do not underestimate the ability of the current crowd to fumble even simple things, but a lot of what Mayor Pete is talking about (I think) is neighborhood reunification. That’s a good thing. How to do it depends on local conditions and not everything can be fixed, but there are opportunities to make significant improvements in many places. There is a lifecycle for roads as for everything else. When old infrastructure reaches the point that it needs to be comprehensively rebuilt, that’s the time to step in and reengineer some of the stupid mistakes of the 1960’s, which was chock-full of stupid mistakes. Our cities were gutted by bad planning. The modern ghettos centered on vast swaths of public housing disasters aren’t the natural order of things; they’re bad planning. Chronic traffic gridlock is the product of bad planning. Neighborhoods blighted by toxic commuter sewers are the product of bad planning. At least some of these things can be remediated.
Mayor Pete just needs to shut up about race and get on with sensible solutions to addressable problems. Race is a pointless distraction at this point. The political battle is between people who want to spend a fraction of our transportation dollars to mitigate the effects of commuter sewers and, on the other hand, the people who want to spend every available dollar on adding lanes to the existing interstates and pushing new arterial roads through other people’s neighborhoods to shave a few minutes from their 30 miles commutes.
I live in DC. If someone wants to live in Urbana, Haymarket, Stafford County, etc., that’s his business. But take the train. Don’t expect viable inner-ring and urban core jurisdictions to collaborate with the degradation of their own neighborhoods to accommodate extreme commuters who want to continue their addiction to the automobile commute. The state of Virginia is still scrambling to add lanes to I-95 and I-66, which is starting to look like the New Jersey Turnpike. Virginia would do better to take automobile lanes away from I-66 and use the right of way for commuter rail.
Buttjuice is stunning and brave
You mean the same 33 that cut through all those white neighborhoods between Fillmore avenue and Cayuga rd?
Things like this didn’t happen when we had mean tweets huh.
Bookmarking for later reply. Excellent points
The Irish, Italian, etc. Americans also need reparations.
They want more underpasses for the homeless to camp in.
I’m sure most Americans consider this one of their top priorities /s/.
A billion.... for this.
How about NO.
Don’t forget the ten percent for the Big Guy!
The new name for Buttigieg’s highway interchanges will be “on-rumps” and “off-rumps”.
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