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The U.S. Transportation Department’s Quest to Become a Driver of Justice

The federal agency responsible for building highways that tore through underserved communities in the 1950s is asking the public for ways to make transportation more equitable and accessible.

People wait for the subway during a heat wave in the Bronx borough of New York on June 30, 2021. 

People wait for the subway during a heat wave in the Bronx borough of New York on June 30, 2021. 

Photographer: David Dee Delgado/Bloomberg
From

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has spoken often about the injustices created by federal highways built over the last 70 years, raising interest in the idea of tearing some of them down. 

“It’s disproportionately Black and brown neighborhoods that were divided by highway projects plowing through them because they didn’t have the political capital to resist,” then secretary-nominee Buttigieg told CNN in December. “We have a chance to get that right.”