Why Low Overpass Crashes Are Fun to Watch
By: Ernie Smith
Tags: Driving, Transportation, History, Cars, Roads

There is no functional reason the overpasses on the Southern State Parkway hang this low. (Doug Kerr/Flickr)

Were the low overpasses racist? An infamous Long Island legend, explained

Robert Moses never held a valid driver’s license, but he knew how powerful roads were to the way that people experienced a city.

A key figure in the urban design of New York City and surrounding areas, he carries a complicated reputation — helping to shape key thinking on the automobile’s role in urban planning and helping to foster the post-WWII growth in the suburbs.

But this power cut both ways — especially on one of the roads he was responsible for developing, Southern State Parkway. The parkway, a key connector between New York City and Long Island’s beach towns — particularly the popular Jones Beach State Park — is intentionally designed with low overpasses, in part to prevent commercial traffic from using the road. As Hofstra University historian Geri Solomon told Patch last year, this was intended to create a certain type of feel when driving on the parkway.

“The roads were supposed to embody the idea of a ‘park’ way — it was supposed to be idyllic and natural, and you drove through park-like land to get where you were going,” she said. “You were going for a leisurely drive through a natural-looking environment, as driving was one part getting to where you needed to go and one part recreation.”

(Long Island has serious problems with accidents caused by low overpasses, as you might guess.)

The problem is that adding low overpasses to prevent trucks from getting through also prevents people without access to cars from getting through using public transportation, such as buses. And it turns out that may be intentional as well — intentionally racist.

A drawing of Robert Moses. (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

A famed biography of Moses, The Power Broker by Robert Caro, makes the case that Moses had a low opinion of many New Yorkers, and that some of the decisions that led to the design of the road were intended to keep certain types of people from visiting Jones Beach — something he encouraged his deputies, such as Sid Shapiro, to do. A key passage:

He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road’s proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low — too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous.

And the stuff immediately after that passage is somehow even worse, discussing his racist views of Black people, which led to buses needing additional permits and a variety of decisions, based on personal beliefs, that seemed designed to discourage Black people from enjoying the park in the same way as their white counterparts.

At least one modern historian has publicly questioned the view put forth in Caro’s book … or, at least, tried to. In a 2017 piece for CityLab, city planning historian Thomas J. Campanella discussed the way that the story had become a “microbiography of Moses, a tragic hero who built for the ages, but for a narrowly construed public.”

But he explained that this shorthand had always given him doubts. While not disputing Moses’ bigotry and noting many other ways he had developed the New York metropolitan area with discrimination in mind, he noted that Moses was a complex figure and that the design of the Southern State Parkway copied heavily from other parkways of the era, particularly those in Westchester County, with the goal of keeping commercial traffic off the roads — ensuring that the road was free of trucks and keeping a certain tone.

So, he put the theory to the test, comparing the heights of the overpasses on the Southern State Parkway to other parkways that predated it. And what he found … well, confirmed Robert Caro’s 50-year-old reporting.

“The verdict? It appears that Sid Shapiro was right,” he wrote, explaining that the overpasses, at an average of 107.6 inches (just a hair below 12 feet), were more than a foot shorter than two other major parkways from the era, and that there were four overpasses with clearance below eight feet — more than were found on the Westchester parkways that inspired the road.

While access to Jones Beach is no longer limited by the Southern State Parkway, the road carries quite an impression today, and it’s one that carried over to many of the parkways along Long Island.

The problem is that impression, given what we know about it today, feels exclusionary.