It’s worth noting that Winner's specific story about the low parkway bridges blocking bus access to Jones Beach (which he got from Robert Caro) has been debunked. Some design researchers in Canada, cued by earlier work in STS, finally dug up 1930s bus schedules to Jones Beach (east via Jericho Turnpike to Mineola, then south to Jones Beach) that simply avoided the low parkway bridges.
It's worth noting that the debunking has been debunked (it's much more nuanced but essentially you can take the quotes, experience of others and the height of the bridges at face value):
"I recorded clearances for a total of 20 bridges, viaducts and overpasses: 7 on the Bronx River Parkway (completed in 1925); 6 on the initial portion of the Saw Mill River Parkway (1926) and 7 on the Hutchinson River Parkway (begun in 1924 and opened in 1927). I then took measure of the 20 original bridges and overpasses on the Southern State Parkway, from its start at the city line in Queens to the Wantagh Parkway, the first section to open (on November 7, 1927) and the portion used to reach Jones Beach. The verdict? It appears that Sid Shapiro was right."
"Overall, clearances are substantially lower on the Moses parkway, averaging just 107.6 inches (eastbound), against 121.6 inches on the Hutchinson and 123.2 inches on the Saw Mill."
If buses have always about 118" that would be effective.
I can’t read the second article, but the first does not cite the later work and makes exactly the same mistake as Winner: sitting at a desk, assuming that (per Caro) parkways were the only way to get there, and looking only at the parkway bridge heights. The point is that parkways were by definition not for commercial traffic and you could get there by routing around the parkway overpasses, and the contemporaneous bus schedules show that they did.
Since busses aren't ”commercial”, I'm not sure why we need to go around measuring bridges to decide if this was an anti-poor design decision (which in many areas and times in the US would also make it a racist one).
