Given the squeeze on the BPR's funds, some paring of highway project became inevitable. The Inner Belt, which will take five years to build, would not have to be approved until 1970 in order to be built under the Interstate System. It was a logical candidate for delay. In one stroke, the BPR was able to put off both a noisy group of opponents and a potential multi-million dollar expenditure.
The new study is expected to take at least six months; its exact cost has not yet been determined. A "technical committee" is now planning the study; it will report to the overseeing committee within a month. After that, the city will name consultants to do the actual work of the study. Finally, the overseeing committee will evaluate the conclusions reached by the consultants.
During their meeting with Brid-well, the City officials agreed to concentrate the study in three areas.
* First, a review of the overall desirability of the Inner Belt in light of metropolitan Boston's present-day population, traffic distribution, and the impact of the Belt on the areas through which it passes. (This is the problem in which Moynihan and Nash have said they are chiefly interested.)
*Second, an analysis of an alternate route through Cambridge--one which would go from the B.U. Bridge along Memorial Drive to the B&A railroad yards in East Cambridge. Among the various routes proposed for the Cambridge link in the Belt, the Memorial Drive route was usually rejected rather quickly. According to Mayor Hayes, the rejection was due "more to verbiage than actual studies." Hayes said that the DPW had turned down the route as "one-sided"--it would only be accessible on one side; its other side would run along the Charles River. The City has argued that the location of interchanges--two of which are planned for Cambridge--not the location of the road, will determine its serviceability.
"Air Rights"
*Third, study of "air rights"--construction of apartments on a platform above a depressed highway. The apartments would hopefully be used to house families dislocated by the Belt.
Bridwell promised last month that the federal government would pay 100 per cent of the cost of the supports for the platform, but the City would have to pay for the platform itself. The cost of the platform--perhaps as much as $8 to $10 a foot--might make the construction of any but luxury apartments an impossibility.
Both Moynihan and Nash insisted that the new study would be totally objective--not a propaganda attempt to persuade the federal government to abandon the Inner Belt. "When we're all through, we may come to the conclusion that it would be best to build the Belt right down Brookline-Elm," Nash commented.
This avowal of objectivity did not impress the Boston Globe--a longtime supporter of the Belt--which next day editorialized against the study and called for the building of the Belt. The paper noted that both Moynihan and Nash had last spring led a group of 528 Harvard and M.I.T. faculty members calling for a restudy of the Inner Belt and other transportation plans for the metropolitan Boston area.
However, even at that time, Moynihan and Nash emphasized that their primary interest was not the Inner Belt per se, but rather the entire procedure by which the government chooses highway routes. They even declined to answer questions about the merits of the various Inner Belt routes.
At the very least, the re-study should give Cambridge a breathing spell of a year, but the ultimate fate of the Belt remains open. Even if the committee reports against the entire idea of the Belt, the City's battle would not necessarily be won.
The officials of surrounding cities--principally Boston and Somerville--still favor the general idea of an Inner Belt, though not necessarily the Brookline-Elm route. Mayor Hayes is "positive" that the new administrations in those cities will "review the problem of the Belt" after the November elections, but there is no guarantee that they would then join Cambridge's opposition to the highway.
The DPW and the state planning establishment have fought long and hard for the Belt; they might well continue fighting for it even after an unfavorable report by the new committee. And Governor Volpe--who was the first Federal Highway Administrator back in 1956--said flatly last May, "The Belt was needed 20 years ago, and it's needed more today."
A report against the Belt by the new committee will give Cambridge another talking point in the battle of the Belt, but political power can always over-rule professional reports. The City has been granted a reprieve; but the threat of the Belt is no less real than ever, only a little more distant.