Data from X shows that freeways still choke social ties more than half a century after they were builtIn 1956, the U.S. Federal Aid Highways Act provided $25 billion to create a network of roads across the nation. In today’s money, that’s equivalent to $215 billion.
Tackling these issues is an important challenge. But allocating resources is hard in the absence of good evidence that quantifies the magnitude of the problem.Enter Luca Maria Aiello at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark and colleagues who have developed a way to measure the association between freeways and the social ties across the communities they pass through. Their work provides an evidence base that could be used to allocate funds to communities that desperately need them.
They kept constant the number of geolocated tweets and their location. But they randomized where the tweets point to. The modified tweet map should be entirely independent of physical barriers like freeways but be otherwise the same. An important question is whether the results reveal a real barrier effect or just an artifact of the approach. So Aiello and co test the validity of their method in three ways. First, they look at the barrier effect associated with smaller roads. These also disrupt social ties but on a much smaller scale, as expected if the approach is valid.
The results reveal just how deep the effects of freeway building have been. “At the unprecedented granularity of individual social ties, we show that urban highways are associated with decreased social connectivity,” they say. “This barrier effect is especially strong for short distances and consistent with historical cases of highways that were built to purposefully disrupt or isolate Black neighborhoods.”The team examine in particular highways associated with racial segregation.
“These findings add another piece of evidence consistent with the established concept that urban highways in the US have a strong relation with government-backed racial segregation,” say Aiello and co.
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