Yes, racism. It’s really hard to overstate how malicious urban highway construction was in the US.

I highly recommend folks watch episodes 6-8 of Ken Burn’s ‘The History of New York’ (available on Youtube) and where it talks about the period of time when Robert Moses et al began to push for and implement a cars/drivers-first-at-the-expense-of-everyone-else design of new roads and bridges. You can see actual video footage of buildings and neighborhoods being demolished, all to make way for new highways, bridges, and ultimately cars and their drivers. Once you fully understand, you realize just how perverted it all was…and still is…for a city such as this. In the words of historian Craig Steven Wilder: “Through Robert Moses, we put the physical prominence of the city before its people. We fetishized the urban form, and forgot about the human beings who lived there.”

Another example is this:

Another source on the topic ->https://www.segregationbydesign.com/the-bronx/freeways

This podcast is also good -> https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-man-who-ruined-99056594/