Paving the way: redlining and contemporary transportation emissions in US cities

We expand upon the structural human ecology tradition by recasting its classic drivers as historically racialized mechanisms operating within a system of racial capitalism. We draw on critical approaches to environmental justice to link multiscalar processes to material infrastructures, theorizing redlining and interstate-highway planning as coupled racial projects that organize the production of transportation emissions across urban space. To test this empirically, we combine Home Owners’ Loan Corporation grades with on-road carbon dioxide (CO₂) and estimate multilevel models for 9661 census tracts nested in 194 US cities (2010, 2015). Redlined areas exhibit higher on-road CO₂ net of contemporary tract characteristics. Associations between affluence, whiteness, and emissions are strong in greenlined areas but largely flat in redlined areas, and public-transit commuting shares show little relationship to emissions across grades. Together, the results indicate that spatially fixed, historically racialized transport infrastructure continues to concentrate emissions in disinvested neighborhoods regardless of who lives there now.