City Officials Hit Transit Proposal

Cambridge officials leading the City's fight against the proposed Inner Belt highway yesterday attacked a new transportation plan for Eastern Massachusetts that recommends building the Belt as part of a $576.9 million "short range" transit program for 1968-75.

Justin M. Gray, assistant to the City Manager for Community Development, said yesterday that the Eastern Massachusetts Regional Planning Project transportation study had made no real evaluation of the need for the Inner Belt--which would displace at least 1200 Cambridge families--yet the study still urged the building of the Belt.

"Given these Bridwell studies, to make a determination of this sort is premature," Gray said. Federal Highway Administrator Lowell K. Bridwell last February ordered a re-examination of the need for the Belt. It has not yet begun.

Gray said he was fearful that the state Department of Public Works--which first proposed the Belt in 1948 and had a large hand in the highway section of the EMRPP transportation plan--might turn around and use the EMRPP study to support its fight for the Belt. "It would be another turn of the lock," Gray said.

Gray said that the City would probably fight the acceptance of the EMRPP study by the Metropolitan Area Planning council, a regional planning device for 97 Greater Boston communities including Cambridge. "The cards are stacked against any opposition, but we certainly plan to play a strong role," Gray said. "We will be vocal."

John Cope, a planner who participated in the early stages of the EMRPP study but is now working for Cambridge against the Belt, said that EMRPP, acting under pressure from the DPW, had decided in 1962 against any review of the DPW's existing highway plans of which the belt is a part.

Instead, they merely reviewed the same highway network with and without the Belt and concluded that the road should be built, he said.

MAPC President Franklin Flaschner, defending the EMRPP study, said last night that he was "reasonably confident that some sort of review" of the Belt had been made. The technical staff of the EMRPP project were not available for comment.