While "Robert Moses" is trending, most freeway projects conducted slum clearance through Black neighborhoods. In the Bay Area, the most prominent examples are Oakland's 24, 980 and former 880. The infrastructure bill is right to tear down bad freeways and return community space.

980 in particular, much like Oakland's old Cypress 880, serves no real purpose other than to clear "undesirable" homes in West Oakland for suburban drivers. It should be torn down with federal funding.

Federal funding should also tear down 280/101 in the Bayview. Which also served no purpose other than to segregate Black neighborhoods from the rest of San Francisco during the urban renewal era.

Federal funding should tear down part of the infamous Grove Shafter freeway in Oakland Hwy 24 from 980 to 36th street. While the Bay Bridge spur is necessary to get to Contra Costa, the spur to Downtown Oakland split Temescal White from Black and ruined downtown Oakland for years

I should do a complete thread about Oakland/Bay Area freeway eras that bulldozed entire neighborhoods for suburban commuters and removed rail infrastructure for car companies.
https://twitter.com/IDoTheThinking/status/1278050988125851649?s=20

A good use of the infrastructure bill would be to give BART's MacArthur station a west entrance. The station enters only from the east which faced the white part of Temescal while forcing Black residents west to walk under the freeway. Something they did not do for Rockridge

This is a picture of a tank demolishing homes in West Oakland to make way for 980, 880, BART, the Post Office, parking lots or any of the many urban renewal projects occurring at the time.

Yes, the freeway era was an era of anti-housing, carbon intensive, automobile lobbied and military lobbied war against POC neighborhoods. Mostly white neighborhoods successfully resisted. Buttigieg is correct. It's not a parody @yaf

I've also proposed removing the severely underused 980 trench to the MacArthur maze and replacing it with a big central park and housing. A new BART line underneath. This could be funded by the $10 billion dollar federal program to repair freeway damage in the infrastructure plan

Many freeways are bad but due to the defunding of public transit and removal of interurban rail systems, not all freeways can be removed (such as 880 east, I-80 and 580, 101 in San Francisco, ). In order for freeways to be useful, alternatives had to be gutted in the U.S.