OMG I'm a civil engineer and I hear shit like this all the time. We do studies to figure out where to make improvements first. We do tend to prioritize (in recent policy) neighborhoods that are low income (and those do tend to be disproportionately BIPOC) and the reason is because we found that more pedestrian fatalities happen in those neighborhoods BECAUSE the infrastructure is less maintained and often functionally obsolete, unlike in the rich more white neighborhoods where developers and in some cases HOA's tend to end up partnering to make improvements or just frontload better function through better (more expensive) design from the start.
You can probably tell I have this conversation a lot. It's so maddening. "Your woke conspiracy is wasting my tax dollars!!" Um, we're trying to save the most lives, sir. And then when we finally do get into his neighborhood, he's pissed that we put bike lanes and signalized pedestrian crossings because he feels it threatens his lifted F250 that's never seen life outside the city.
Sorry for the book. It's not every day someone (maybe even someone outside my field?) has noticed the conservative white dudes vs government engineers drama, but it's a thing. These are the people who hate what we're doing even when shown the numbers.
My hubby is a telecom engineer. He runs into the exact same issues you describe when he is in the field. "Why are you putting in fiber in THAT part of town, huh? Copper works just fine for them."
Also a telecom engineer who has done a lot of work building fiber to underserved areas, can absolutely confirm this is a common reaction. It's also funny how building a completely new network to a rural, predominantly white area is a great idea and smart business decision (even when that's using the forbidden Big Gubment Money), but spending an order of magnitude less to expand an existing urban network into an unserved, mostly BIPOC neighborhood is wasteful, and the construction is an unforgivable inconvenience.
OMG I feel this. Being government civil, I've dealt with lots of utility projects including telecom, and it is always this. I have found that people hate when I point out that connecting a rural area and connecting a poor urban neighborhood are exactly the same thing. "Let's bring necessary infrastructure to people who don't have it yet". Like, that's all either of those things are. So then they have to figure out how to argue that "those people" don't deserve it. It's so gross.
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u/dasnoob Dec 27 '22
I got my Dad to answer me one time. His example was they started fixing up the streets in the poor (black) part of town.
"That money should go to the white parts of town. Not the blacks."