California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has introduced legislation forbidding the state department of transportation from building or expanding freeways in poor neighborhoods. She noted research showing that freeway expansions allowed more people to travel more, and apparently she doesn’t want to extend such mobility options to low-income people.

Another legislator, state Senator Sydney Kamlager, agreed that the state should focus on “alternative modes of transportation” such as public transit in poor neighborhoods. Transit can’t reach as many places as automobiles and only goes during certain hours of the day, so encouraging poor people to use transit allows more control over when and where they travel.

Don’t tell Garcia and Kamlager that the 2019 American Community Survey found that more than 80 percent of California workers earning less than $25,000 per year took automobiles to work while only 5 percent took transit. The thought of poor people having all of that mobility would probably be downright frightening to them.

Seriously, what kind of a sick society do we live in when people who call themselves progressives think that the right thing to do is limit the mobility of the people who need it most? Someone needs to start a social justice movement demanding that low-income people and minorities have the same access to automobiles and highways as middle-class whites.