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Moses's Long Island Overpasses
Robert Moses's mid-twentieth-century parkway overpasses on Long Island — designed with unusually low clearances to exclude public transit buses and the populations dependent on them.
The canonical example at the center of Winner's Do Artifacts Have Politics?, drawn from Robert Caro's biography The Power Broker (1974). Robert Moses, the master builder of mid-twentieth-century New York, designed the overpasses on parkways leading to Long Island's public beaches with clearances too low for public transit buses to pass beneath. The effect — and, according to Caro's documentation, the intent — was to exclude the populations most dependent on public transit, predominantly low-income and Black New Yorkers, from the beaches that Moses's parkways ostensibly made accessible to 'the public.' The politics were not in a policy document. They were in the concrete. The bridges required no ongoing enforcement, no guards, no signs — they operated silently, automatically, permanently, long after Moses himself had lost power.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The example is foundational because it is undeniable. The low clearances have no engineering justification. Standard parkway bridge clearances in the mid-twentieth century were higher than Moses specified. The deviation