New Group Forms to Fight Inner Belt

"This is the climax. It will be the most expensive highway. It will displace more people. Picture in your mind an eight-lane expressway running through the city, blighting everything on either side of it."

"For years nobody challenged the Inner Belt," the man continued. "It was accepted by everybody who wasn't in its path."

This man, like the others in the room, had decided to fight the Inner Belt. Together they have banded themselves together in a small group called the Committee for Balanced Transportation and have been meeting for several weeks under the leadership of former Cambridge Rep. William P. Homans Jr. '41.

What they oppose is an eight-lane highway that would pass through Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline and Boston. In Cambridge it would probably run through the heart of Central Square and displace about 950 families.

Cambridge politicians have been fighting the State Department of Public Works, which would build the Inner Belt, since time immemorial, but Homans' group may be the first organized effort to enlist support from the Harvard Square-Brattle St. area against the Belt Route.

Schism Healing

There has long been a split between the University-oriented part of the City and the rest of Cambridge, and the schism seems to have been widened by the controversy over the proposed Memorial Drive underpasses.

The pro-University people have led the fight against the underpasses. Supporters of the underpasses have continually challenged, "Why haven't you been fighting the Inner Belt?" The new organization may be an indication that a new--albeit temporary and still weak--coalition is forming.

In Homans' living room last Thursday night, the group, which includes City Councillor Alfred E. Vellucci from East Cambridge, state Rep. Thomas H. Doherty Jr. (D-Cambridge), as well as other residents of Brookline and Cambridge--discussed both practical politics and the problems of urban transportation.

"You cannot really have good transportation when you build a road to unclog roads. Then when it becomes clogged, you build another road," one man declared. "These roads will just clog up again. The real answer is mass transit."

Currently, the group is putting its energies behind a bill pending in the state legislature. The bill would prohibit the construction by state agencies of any new highways in the metropolitan area for a year.

"We've got to postpone it [the Belt] long enough so the establishment will stop writing editorials saying that the Inner Belt is essential," another commented.