he shaped much of New York’s infrastructure, including a number of “low-hanging overpasses” on the Long Island parkways that led to Jones Beach.3 According to his biographer, Moses directed that these overpasses be built intentionally low so that buses could not pass under them.4 This design decision meant that many people of color and poor people, who most often relied on public transportation, lacked access to the lauded public park at Jones Beach.5

or example, Elise C. Boddie argues that places have racial identities based on their history of or reputation for exclusion, and that courts should consider this racial meaning for purposes of racial discrimination claims

Sometimes transit will allow a person to get close to a given area, but not all the way there, leaving the rider in a dangerous situation.

As one scholar acknowledged, “race has been a factor limiting the geography of transit.”125 For example, wealthy white residents of suburban Atlanta, Georgia,126 suburban San Francisco, California,127 and Washington, D.C.,128 have organized to oppose the locating of transit stops in their communities, at least in part because transit would enable people who live in poorer areas of the cities to easily access these wealthier areas.

The wall still exists today—a legacy of discriminatory government policy—and though Detroit has experienced declines in segregation in recent years, this city is still the most racially segregated metropolitan area in the United States.96

Scholarship on urban planning, which describes the history of city-building, is rife with tales of physical exclusion.16