Summary

Transportation and infrastructure disparities have systematically extracted wealth, health, time, and opportunity from Black communities while channeling public benefits toward white neighborhoods and suburbs. For more than a century, discriminatory routing of highways and the use of eminent domain destroyed Black homes and business districts, erasing intergenerational wealth. Pollution-heavy infrastructure such as freeways, rail yards, and truck corridors was disproportionately sited in Black neighborhoods, producing long-term health harms and reducing life expectancy. Underfunded and segregated transit systems limited access to jobs, schools, and healthcare, while spatial mismatch and suburban job sprawl forced Black workers into longer, costlier, and less reliable commutes. Rising transportation costs further burdened Black households, functioning as a regressive tax that lowered savings and blocked pathways to homeownership and asset building. Together, these mechanisms embedded racial inequality into the physical landscape of American cities, making infrastructure itself a driver of the modern racial wealth gap.

In a 2016 interview, Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx discusses the use of transportation projects in Brooklyn, NC to intentionally displace Black residents for White economic benefit, a pattern practiced across the US.

• White Desires: “By 1912, the local paper captured the prevailing views that Brooklyn was far too valuable to be left to African-Americans,” Foxx said. “They wrote in fact that ‘Far-sighted men believe that eventually this section, because of its proximity to the center of the city, must sooner or later be utilized by the White population.”
• White Actions: “Road projects served as scalpels...First came Independence Boulevard, which cut a gash through the community,” the Secretary said. “Later, an inner beltway, I-277, which remains to this day,” stabbed fork-like into the neighborhood’s heart.”
• Black Outcomes: “In a single decade, white city leaders ripped out almost 1,500 buildings in Brooklyn, displacing over a thousand Black families and 200 mostly Black-owned businesses.”

1865–1900: Emancipation to Jim Crow Transportation Controls

Coercive Labor and Restricted Movement

In the decades after emancipation, transportation and infrastructure were tools for re-controlling Black mobility and labor. Southern states adopted Black Codes and vagrancy laws that criminalized everyday Black life, then funneled people into the convict leasing system. Those prisoners—overwhelmingly Black—were leased out to railroads, canal companies, road crews, and brickworks, building the physical backbone of the post-war Southern economy under conditions that closely resembled slavery.

Sources on labor camps and transportation:

Convict Leasing | Virginia Museum of History & Culture

The Convict Labor Camp | David Cecelski

At the same time, segregation on trains and early streetcars turned movement itself into a site of humiliation, surveillance, and control, foreshadowing later Jim Crow laws that would formalize separation and exclusion in transportation.

1900–1930: Jim Crow Streetcars and Early Transit Segregation

Segregated Transit as Everyday Infrastructure of Disenfranchisement

By the early 1900s, cities across the South passed streetcar segregation ordinances, forcing Black riders to the back or to separate “colored” sections. These laws were backed by violence and economic reprisal, and they came on top of the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld “separate but equal” and explicitly grew out of a challenge to segregated railroad cars.

Plessy v Ferguson upheld segregation – now Plessy’s family seeks a pardon | Louisiana | The Guardian

Black communities resisted with streetcar boycotts in places like Jacksonville, Pensacola, and Montgomery, but the long-term outcome was a transportation system in which Black riders paid into the farebox while receiving inferior service, more policing, and fewer routing benefits. This infrastructure reinforced spatial segregation and limited access to jobs, schools, and civic spaces without yet using massive urban clearance—those tools would come later.

Further reading:

• The Montgomery Bus Boycott: Crash Course Black American History #35

• The Jacksonville Challenge to Segregated Street
  Cars and the Meaning of Equality, 1900-1906

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1930–1950: New Deal Planning, Physical Barriers, and Proto–Urban Renewal

Laying the Groundwork for Racialized Infrastructure

In the pre-Interstate era, transportation agencies and local planners began using roads, walls, and early expressways to entrench segregation. While racially restrictive covenants and redlining (covered on your housing page) structured where Black families could live, infrastructure decisions reinforced those boundaries.

Projects like Detroit’s Eight Mile/Birwood Wall (1941) literally built concrete barriers between Black and white neighborhoods as a condition for issuing federally backed mortgages. Wikipedia Even before the Interstate Highway System, cities were clearing Black blocks for arterials, viaducts, and early expressways, often using eminent domain to condemn Black housing deemed “slums” or “blight.”

Legal scholar Deborah Archer shows how these pre-highway decisions were part of a larger pattern: transportation policy was used not just to move people and goods, but to underdevelop Black communities while channeling investment into white ones. Transportation Policy and the Underdevelopment of Black Communities - TRID

Further reading:

• Transportation Policy and the Underdevelopment of Black Communities | Iowa Law Review - The University of Iowa

• Detroit Wall - Wikipedia

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1950–1975: Interstate Highways, Eminent Domain, and Transportation-Based Dispossession

“Urban Renewal Means Negro Removal”

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 supercharged the use of transportation projects as a mechanism of Black dispossession. Interstates were intentionally routed through thriving Black neighborhoods—often the very places redlining had previously starved of credit—under the banners of “slum clearance,” “urban renewal,” or “traffic relief.”

In city after city, planners and politicians used eminent domain to seize Black homes and small businesses to make way for freeways, ramps, interchanges, and later light-rail and busway corridors. James Baldwin’s line, “Urban renewal is Negro removal,” captured what highways did to Black business districts in places like West Baltimore (the “Highway to Nowhere”), New Orleans, Detroit, and the Bronx. 

The Cross Bronx Expressway, for example, displaced tens of thousands of mostly Black and Puerto Rican residents, helping trigger neighborhood decay and long-term disinvestment. Wikipedia In West Baltimore, the Franklin–Mulberry corridor project destroyed nearly a thousand homes and over sixty businesses—more property than was lost in the 1968 uprising—only to create an unfinished mile-and-a-half freeway trench. Reason.com

These projects severed Black political power centers, erased accumulated home equity and business assets, and rerouted regional economic flows around Black communities toward predominantly white suburbs.

Further reading:

• Urban Renewal Means Negro Removal
• Cross Bronx Expressway - Wikipedia
• The Power Broker - Wikipedia
• The Wound in West Baltimore

• Cross Bronx Expressway - Wikipedia

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1975–2000: Transit Cuts, Job Sprawl, and the Spatial Mismatch

Transportation Systems that Serve Suburban Whiteness

By the late 20th century, the main damage from freeway construction was done, but its economic effects deepened. Jobs increasingly moved to the suburbs, while Black residents—constrained by earlier housing and land-use policy—remained concentrated in central city neighborhoods.

Transportation planning focused on moving white suburban drivers quickly in and out of downtown via highways and commuter routes, while urban bus systems—disproportionately used by Black riders—were underfunded, unreliable, and often slow. Research by Michael Stoll at Brookings showed that metro areas with more “job sprawl” had significantly greater spatial mismatch between where Black residents lived and where jobs were located

The U.S. Census Bureau has since documented how this mismatch raises unemployment and lengthens spells of joblessness for low-income workers who cannot afford cars and lack fast, reliable transit options to suburban job centers. Recent work from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies confirms that Black workers still face especially severe spatial mismatch in today’s metros. 

Spatial Mismatch: When Workers Can’t Get to Jobs in the Suburbs

For Black workers, housing segregation hinders job access | Center for Transportation Studies

While specific federal laws like ISTEA (1991) and TEA-21 (1998) began to talk about equity and “environmental justice,” they largely did not require repair for the damage done by earlier highway and transit decisions.

Further reading:

• The Unequal Commute | Urban Institute

• Does transit moderate spatial mismatch? The effects of transit and compactness on regional economic outcomes - ScienceDirect

• Is spatial mismatch really spatial, and really a mismatch? Recent evidence on employment among Hispanic and Black people in the U.S.: Journal of Urban Affairs: Vol 46, No 3

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2000–Present: Environmental Racism, Traffic Violence, and Renewed Displacement

Pollution Corridors, Deadly Streets, and “Equitable” Megaprojects

In the 21st century, the racialized pattern of transportation harms has become even more visible:

• Pollution corridors: Black communities are disproportionately located along freeways, port access roads, rail yards, and petrochemical corridors like Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley”, where more than 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities line an 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi. Residents—largely Black and often descendants of enslaved people—face some of the highest cancer risks in the country.

• Traffic violence: National analyses in Smart Growth America’s Dangerous by Design reports show that Black pedestrians are killed at far higher rates than white pedestrians, in part because their neighborhoods are more likely to be carved up by wide, high-speed arterials without safe crossings or traffic calming. 

• New displacement via eminent domain: As cities pursue “transit-oriented development” and highway expansions, Black neighborhoods are again targeted as “low-value land” for light rail, freeway widening, and station-area redevelopment, often using eminent domain to remove Black housing and businesses for projects marketed as sustainable or equitable. Programs in the current era (e.g., the Reconnecting Communities grants referenced in recent federal initiatives) explicitly acknowledge this history—but repair is uneven and often modest compared to the scale of harm. Baltimore to invest in Black communities ravaged by highway | AP News

These contemporary outcomes—higher chronic illness and cancer risk, disproportionate traffic deaths, ongoing land loss—directly reduce Black life expectancy, earnings, and property values, while white neighborhoods benefit from safer designs, cleaner air, and infrastructure that enhances property values.

Further reading:

• Racial Disparities in Urban City Planning: “Environmental Racism” – Brown Undergraduate Journal of Public Health
• Urban highways are barriers to social ties | PNAS

 

Metrics: Transportation & Infrastructure and the Racial Wealth Gap

Transportation and infrastructure discrimination have functioned as multigenerational wealth extraction systems that systematically advantage white families while suppressing Black economic mobility. Highway construction and eminent domain destroyed tens of thousands of Black-owned homes and business districts, eliminating the primary source of intergenerational wealth. Pollution from highways, rail yards, and truck corridors concentrated environmental harm in Black neighborhoods, lowering life expectancy and long-term earnings. Segregated transit and decades of transit underinvestment restricted access to jobs, healthcare, and education, while spatial mismatch and suburban job sprawl forced Black workers into longer, costlier, and less reliable commutes. Rising transportation costs imposed a disproportionate financial burden on low-income and Black families, functioning as a regressive tax that reduced saving capacity, undermined homeownership, and diminished retirement security. Across these mechanisms, transportation policy has consistently funneled wealth, time, land value, and political power away from Black communities and toward white ones.

Key Metrics and Estimated Share of the Racial Wealth Gap

• 475,000+ households displaced during Interstate construction, disproportionately in Black neighborhoods.
• 50–90% loss of Black business districts in many cities due to highway routing and urban renewal.
• 20–50% decline in property values for homes adjacent to new highways.
• 5–15 years of life expectancy lost in pollution-impacted Black neighborhoods.
• $800–$1,600 per person per year in health-related costs from transportation pollution.
• 20–50% longer commutes for Black workers than white workers in the same region.
• 20–30% longer unemployment durations due to spatial mismatch and transit barriers.
• 36.5% rise in transportation costs (1992–2000) for households under $20,000; 57% rise for incomes $5,000–$9,999; just 16.8% for incomes above $70,000.
• 20–30% of income spent on transportation by low-income households vs. 10–12% for higher-income households.

Estimated 10–20% of the racial wealth gap attributable to transportation-related land loss, cost burden, spatial mismatch, and health impacts.