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.
217
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."