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Foxx: Transportation Can Rebuild Urban Neighborhoods
In remarks before the Charlotte Rotary Club on March 29, DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx recounted his own experience growing up in one of the city’s neighborhoods as an example of how interstate highway construction sometimes isolated neighborhoods where minorities and people with low incomes lived.
"Neighbors were separated from neighbors. The corner store was gone because the corner was gone,” he said. “A new, more convenient, high-speed thoroughfare had been created. But the way of life of another community had been destroyed. … It became clear to me only later that those freeways were there to carry people through my neighborhood, but never to my neighborhood. Businesses didn’t invest there. Grocery stores and pharmacies didn’t take the risk. I could not even get a pizza delivered to my house.”
Foxx added, “If we want a society in which everyone has a real shot at the American dream, then it is imperative that we acknowledge the divisions we’ve embedded with the concrete, steel and asphalt in this country,” he said.
As a solution, he pointed to DOT grant programs such as TIGER and Ladders of Opportunity, which are “having a very real impact” on communities and their residents, while the LADDERStep program provides technical assistance to community transportation projects in seven U.S. cities. Almost all decisions on how to use federal surface transportation spending are made at the state and local levels, Foxx said, adding, “The same federal, state and local governments that created these problems have an equally powerful ability to solve them.”
In related news connecting transportation to jobs and other quality of life issues, DOT recently launched the National Transit Map. DOT is asking public transit agencies to voluntarily permit it to periodically collect data from their websites. Find details here.
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