1970: listen to the moment Boston highways were stopped, transit built

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(NOTE: Click on "Listen to the entire show", and fast forward to about minute 32 for a 6-minute segment with interviews of LivableStreets Board Members Ken Kruckemeyer and Steven Miller.)

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How Sargent Stopped the Highways
Posted by Meghna, Thursday, October 25th, 2007

“The Inner Belt would be a China Wall dislocating 7,000 people just to save someone in New Hampshire twenty minutes on his way to the South Shore.”
- Former Speaker of the House, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill

It was the late sixties. The federal government was building mile after mile of interstate highway, and pouring billions of dollars into making it easier for Americans to drive at 55mph on the open road. But not here. Not Boston…

“Hey, Ho… Big New Highways Have Got to Go!” As far back as 1948, state and federal highway planners dreamed of running major interstates through the urban core of Boston and Cambridge. Eight-lane elevated expressways would funnel a rush of 40,000 to 200,000 commuters around an “inner belt” through Cambridge, Brookline and central Boston. Five radial highways would go into the city.

This was also the civil rights era, and the tail end of an era of rampant urban development. Among a small, but vocal, activist base, highways were urban enemy number one. And this was the climate into which Governor Francis W. Sargent (official bio) stepped in 1969. He had barely taken office when anti-highway protestors beseiged the steps of the Statehouse (click on picture to right).

That pushed Sargent to a stunning decision. In 1970, the governor placed a moratorium on all new highway construction inside Massachusetts’ Route 128. All of it: the express feeders that would bring traffic into Boston from the suburbs, the multi-lane extension to I-95, and the “inner belt” that was supposed to bring cars around the center of the city. Plans for the massive transportation projects were near completion. And the federal government had already promised the state of Massachusetts some $700 million toward construction. The governor said, no thanks.

“Shall we forge new chains shackling us to the mistakes of the past?”
Sargent was a fisherman with deep environmental sympathies. He was a moderate Republican, opposed to the Vietnam war, with a genuine sense of noblesse oblige that welled-up from his long line of Massachusetts Brahmins. Former State Transportation Secretary Alan Altshuler says, ultimately, it’s not a suprise Sargent killed the highways. But Sargent also launched a commission to lay out a longterm vision for Boston’s transportation needs. Altshuler led the taskforce. The effort took two years. The plan was called, “The Boston Transportation Planning Review“, a flinty and unadorned title for a revolutionary document that set the tone for transportation planning around the country for much of the next 25 years.

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