This is by design, sadly, because the "wrong people" might benefit from them. But hey we have MLK Day and Juneteenth now so we fixed racism :)))))
I'm not trying to pressure you or anybody else to agree with me, but personally it was really shocking for me when I realized how segregated the Bay Area actually is: http://radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea
There's no way I can look at a divide like the one at the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and not think that ease of access to irl mobility is an issue. Once Upon A Time it was imagined that Phase 2 of BART would run alongside that bridge. There is a bus, but it's not of much use for anybody who needs to work later than 9PM, like many service jobs: https://www.goldengate.org/bus/route-schedule/del-norte-bart...
150 years ago...
I don't see what the rest of your comment has anything to do with the discussion at hand. DMVs are terrible everywhere. The DMV in a rich zipcode suffers from the same issues as a DMV in a poor zipcode. Both rich and poor have to use the DMV.
The problem is not that racist white people are trying to run the DMV into the ground to keep black people poor. The problem is that many of our government institutions are run like shit. In many cases, fixing these institutions would benefit the wealthy more than the poor. Yet it doesn't happen. Why? Well, like with any other question regarding complex systems, there are different reasons depending on the case. Trying to distill it down to "racism" does not get as any closer to identifying the cause, nor fixing it.
But is it, though? I get the impression these complaints run mostly on inertia. In the last 5 years I've been to DMVs in Missouri, New York, and Rhode Island and I've never waited long (they take appointments now at many branches), the people were friendly, their websites explained exactly what I needed to bring, and so on.
The experience was fine.
And yet I keep hearing about how awful the DMV is. I get it; nobody really wants to be at the DMV, but I didn't walk away from those experiences aghast at the dysfunction.
for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground
I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is out of control and the political funding system is a scandal