Driving environmental inequality: the unequal harms and benefits of highways

ABSTRACT

Highway construction projects have created extensive environmental and social burdens on racially segregated neighborhoods in urban areas in the U.S. However, few studies examine how some places benefit from highways and contribute to the harms in highway-adjacent communities. This paper aims to fill this gap by (1) conducting a case study of three highway projects in Omaha, Nebraska, and (2) using location-based services data to compare the neighborhood racial demographics of highway drivers to the racial demographics of highway-adjacent neighborhoods. In doing so, our paper heeds the call for more research on relative distribution environmental inequality and environmentalized urban sociology. Our historical case study elucidates how highway planning differed across three highway projects in racially segregated Black, Hispanic, and White neighborhoods. Further, the descriptive statistics show that modern-day drivers on highways in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are from disproportionately more White neighborhoods compared to the neighborhoods bordering the highways. However, the reverse is not true: drivers using the highway in a majority White neighborhood are from neighborhoods that largely match the demographics of bordering neighborhoods. We discuss the implications of these results for future studies of transportation-related environmental and social inequality and current policy initiatives to remedy these harms.

KEYWORDS:

• Highways
• interstates
• environmental inequality
• environmental justice
• racial segregation
• transportation justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. At the time of the Kennedy Freeway planning and construction, many ethnic populations from countries such as Mexico, Italy, Greece, Poland, and Czechoslovakia lived and worked together in South Omaha (Arbelaez 2007). It wasn’t until the latter half of the 1900s that Hispanic residents became the majority in South Omaha.

2. The sample includes devices from across North America and thus includes not only commuters within the city or county but also commercial vehicle trips.

3. Streetlight data is exempt from institutional review board approval because it is a secondary use of existing data, and therefore is not human subjects research. Streetlight also takes many steps to ensure that individuals and their movements cannot be identified in their data. For example, the company automatically flags queries containing street segments below a minimum threshold of 50 trips per month for manual privacy review. Any data that could potentially cross-referenced to identify individuals are censored. All Streetlight users are also contractually required to agree they will not attempt to use the data to identify individuals.

4. The Metropolitan Area Planning Agency, City of Omaha, and community development group SPARK were selected in 2023 for a US DOT Thriving Communities Program to study to the impacts of 75 North.

5. As an example: the largest recent investments in public transportation in Omaha are along its East-West corridor, including a nearly half-billion-dollar streetcar between midtown and downtown Omaha to drive urban real estate investment and development, alleviate parking concerns in the city center, and bolster tourism.

Additional information

Funding

Access to the Streetlight data used in this study was provided by the Spin Mobility Data for Safer Streets Initiative.

Notes on contributors

Pierce Greenberg

Pierce Greenberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Clemson University. His research focuses on questions related to environmental and spatial inequality—which has been published in journals such as American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Social Science Research, and Rural Sociology. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Washington State University.

Ryan Wishart

Ryan Wishart is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural and Social Studies at Creighton University. He is an environmental sociologist who studies environmental justice issues in the Appalachian region, social movements, and elite political organization and mobilization. His work has appeared in journals such as Energy Research and Social Science, Social Science Research, and Organization and the Environment. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Oregon.

Sabrina Danielsen

Sabrina Danielsen is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural and Social Studies at Creighton University. She also is the director of the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion and Society at Creighton and the editor for the Journal of Religion and Society. Her research—primarily focusing on the sociology of religion—has been published in American Journal of Sociology, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Social Science Research, and Environmental Research Letters. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.