Bridwell Allows Inner Belt Study

The City won another battle in its never-ending war against the Inner Belt expressway yesterday.

Federal Roads Commissioner Lowell K. Bridwell agreed to allow a two-part review of the Belt. A six-month "feasibility" study will decide if the $300 million highway is still needed. A concurrent "joint development" plan will try to find ways to use the Model Cities and other federal programs to cushion the blow to the City if the road is built.

Bridwell announced the outline of the compromise in Washington after a four hour meeting with the City Council and the Massachusetts Department of Public Works (DPW). The Council was pushing a more extensive review of the Belt, while the DPW "wanted a road and wanted it right away," as Cambridge City Councillor Daniel J. Hayes Jr. put it.

Hayes felt that the roads commissioner understood the damage which the DPW-approved Brookline-Elm route, (displacing some 1200 Cambridge families), would do to the City. "He's not one of those hardnosed road people who just wants to pour concrete," Hayes said.

Two Key Points

He noted, however, that Bridwell has not yet revealed his final decision on two key points of Belt review--who will control the feasibility study, and which alternate routes, if any, will be considered in the joint development study.

Yesterday, it appeared that the pro-Belt Eastern Massachusetts Regional Planning Project would determine if a Belt is necessary, though Bridwell's office and the City would have some as yet-undefined control over the project's work.

At a previous meeting in Cambridge on Tuesday, Bridwell apparently agreed that the joint development project should examine both Brookline-Elm and the Portland-Albany route on the edge of M.T. to decide which would be less harmful to the City. But the commissioner--probably under pressure from the DPW--now seems less enthusiastic about considering Portland-Albany, according to those present at the meeting.

Under present federal plans, any construction of the Belt would begin in two and a half to three years, with completion scheduled for 1973 at the earliest.