On one hand, there do exist perfectly innocent explanations - bridges were built lower at the time. And parkways were meant to evoke a rural area and exclude commercial traffic.
But there's also some pretty damning evidence:
So when I say that one man not only shaped New York but shaped it for centuries to come, because now how can you overcome that? All the people who live in northeastern Queens, or Co-op City in the Bronx, and all of Suffolk and a lot of Nassau County, they’re condemned to use cars. It’s not easy to use mass transit. Moses came along with his incredible vision, and vision not in a good sense. It’s like how he built the bridges too low.
I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways.
Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.
We used Jones Beach a lot, because I used to work the night shift for the first couple of years, so I’d sleep til 12 and then we’d go down and spend a lot of afternoons at the beach. It never occurred to me that there weren’t any black people at the beach.
Moreover,
the bridges blocking access to Jones Beach were, in fact, notably lower than average:
The Parkway was planned in 1925 by Moses to improve access for motorists to his newly constructed Jones Beach. Sid Shapiro, one of Moses’ closest associates, speaks to the construction of the bridges in the iconic 1974 Moses biography The Power Broker, ”too low for buses to pass. Bus trips, therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach." (p318) This anecdote has been widely repeated, but what is its validity?
...the Southern State bridges were substantially lower averaging just 107.6 inches (eastbound) with four under 8 feet tall.
While there may not be definitive proof, the verification that the Southern State bridges are substantially lower, Caro's anecdotal evidence from Sid Shapiro and Moses' successful attempt to prevent the Long Island Railroad from constructing a line to Jones Beach all make it clear that Moses likely ordered the bridge heights lowered to keep lower-income and minority New Yorkers from accessing Jones Beach. The example is one of many built environment strategies used by planners to racially discriminate.
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