Originally Posted by
Roody
Many of those inner city freeways weren't even built to serve transportation needs. Instead, they served to tear apart minority communities in the hopes that "those people" would move somewhere else. When that didn't work, the freeways enabled wealthier people to move away from the central city by making suburban sprawl possible. They basically just feed people from their suburban homes to their jobs downtown. This was a major factor in the decline of Detroit and other cities.
The first house I lived in was very near the current MacArthur freeway in Oakland, CA. Had that monstrosity not been built, my family might have stayed in Oakland instead of moving over the hill into a neighboring town. My life has been much better because of that move, but those who couldn't leave were much worse off because of that freeway. For several decades after its construction, trucks were forbidden to use it; it was for commuters only.