01515215

Component

Boston was at a crossroads at the mid-point of the 20th century. During the first half of the last century, Boston gradually declined as a great urban center. Its industrial base began to deteriorate and the once vibrant seaport began to stagnate as business left for better, busier ports. Boston was not viewed as a place where people wanted to live. Instead, it was considered a place for commerce – a place that people traveled to and from. As a consequence, transportation planners, eager to facilitate the growth of suburbs ringing Boston, proposed and built a number of projects that improved regional mobility at the expense of urban quality of life. Predictably, the Boston neighborhoods that bore the brunt of “transportation improvements” were those with little or no political clout. The Italian immigrant community of East Boston and the largely African American communities of the South End and Roxbury were targeted by transportation planners as places where significant infrastructure projects could be located to promote urban and regional mobility, without regard to their impacts on those neighborhoods. In the 1960s, average citizens who had no prior experience at advocacy rose up to demand a transportation policy that would improve the quality of their lives. These citizen activists ultimately made government officials reconsider how they planned and designed transportation improvement and expansion projects. What happened in Boston in the 1960s was the beginning of a successful citizen effort to promote social and economic justice in transportation planning.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD50 Environmental Justice in Transportation.

01503729

14-0974

English

11p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Advocacy groups; Communities; Equity; History; Immigrants; Impacts; Improvements; Neighborhoods; Transportation planning; Urban renewal; Urban transportation policy

Boston (England)

Highways; History; Planning and Forecasting; Policy; Public Transportation; I10: Economics and Administration; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-0974

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 2:23PM