Driving environmental inequality: the unequal harms and benefits of highways

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.