Topography

More than ten years after the formulation of a plan for the Inner Belt highway, the most that has materialized is inaction and indecision. Particularly in Cambridge, where the road is a political deus ex machina for major urban renewal projects, indecision and factionalism prevail.

Although the state is to pass final sentence on the exact route of the highway, state officials have listened and will again to arguments for and against the several possible routes. Unfortunately, if action comes in this election year, it seems likely that the arguments will be both loud and irreconcilable.

The Inner Belt itself is part of a system of expressways which will facilitate movement between the center of the Metropolitan area and the suburbs. The Belt will extend in an are of approximately seven miles from a point in Charlestown near the Mystic River Bridge to Massachusetts Avenue in Roxbury, near the Boston City Hospital. It will penetrate Somerville, Brookline, and parts of Boston, as well as Cambridge. Because of complications on the Brookline side of the Charles, the road must enter Cambridge somewhere west of the Boston University Bridge. At this point the geographical tragi-comedy begins.

Until Governor Volpe started the uproar about highways, it seemed as though Cambridge had reconciled itself to marriage with the Inner Belt route--at an indefinite future time. With the furor, this reconciliation disintegrated. Where there had been at best a strained unity on the choice of one route in particular, now the champions of other routes and of no route at all are back in the battle.

Granting that the road must go through, it is the route which will exact the least from the city in terms of structural demolition and population relocation, over which the factions will wage war.

One path that was formerly considered seems now unanimously condemned. The so-called Lee Street route, which would cross the river near the Riverside Press and traverse Western and Massachusetts Avenues, would split the city almost exactly along socio-economic lines and probably hamper renewal in the Houghton Area.

East of the Lee Street, the River Street-Elm Street route would cross the river at approximately the same point, but would branch off to the east of Central Square. This route, also, might be harmful to renewal prospects. After crossing Massachusetts Avenue, it merges on the blueprints with a third route under consideration, Brookline Street, the favorite of the Cambridge Planning Board, the Chronicle, and various citizen groups.

Crossing the river quite close to the B.U. bridge, and cutting almost a straight path to Somerville, this route would neatly divide the residential from the industrial sections of the city. Since the Brookline Street road lies across two renewal areas--Donnelly Field and Cambridgeport--theoretically, at least, it would entail destruction of housing in many cases already slated for demolition. Thus, its apologists emphasize, this route would actually not take such an unnecessary human toll as some others.

Another plan pertains to the N.Y. Central tracks that cut through the city near M.I.T., a right of way which would appear to offer one of the least disruptive, but perhaps most effective routes. Considerable opposition here has and will probably continue to come from M.I.T., whose nuclear reactor would lie in the path of the road. This route would also split off some of the new land that Tech has been acquiring and developing in the area.

Then there is a group, led by Rep. John J. Toomey and Councilors Thomas M. McNamara and Alfred E. Vellucci, which is dissatisfied with all existing routes. Tentatively, they have championed their own route, a wider Memorial Drive which would extend to the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway in Somerville. It seems likely, however, that this line would mean merely the addition of more traffic to an already saturated road.

After visiting the governor with a city council delegation, enquiring about the Inner Belt, McNamara threw down his personal gauntlet: "If you think the fuss over the toll road led by Mayor Gibbs of Newton is creating a stir, it is but a lawn party compared to what will happen in Cambridge if a Belt highway on one of the routes now proposed is announced."

Despite whatever furor the Councilor and others can raise, the party in Cambridge is almost certain to be tragic.