Alternative Schemes Find Favor Over Z

BOSTON--Just one week before it will issue its final recommendation, the blue-ribbon committee convened as an advisory board to the state on its Central Artery Project formally decided against the controversial Scheme Z interchange design.

The 37 members of the bridge design review committee met for three hours downtown here Friday, in an effort to hammer out their recommendation about the controversial Charles River interchange portion of the artery.

The committee of citizens and state and municipal representatives, which has been meeting since February to look into improvements to the state's recommended Scheme Z design for the I-90/Route 1 interchange over the Charles River in East Cambridge, voted to recommend an alternative plan. The group is now considering a number of alternatives, all of which vary from Z by converting one or more of its overhead loops into tunnel form.

Because of the expensive tunnelling, the alternatives all carry price tags larger than Scheme Z's estimated $427 million. However, according to committee member and Cambridge architect Hugh Russell, "It's very clear that everything that's being studied now is enormously superior to Scheme Z."

Ever since state planners added blueprints for the 11-story, 16-lane interchange to their designs for a revamped state highway system more than two years ago, Scheme Z has come under fire from all sides.

Citizens and environmental groups called the proposed 70-acre interchange an eyesore and potential environmental disaster. And in March, the Cambridge City Council and the Charles River Watershed Association, a citizens' environmental advocacy group, filed suit against the state Department of Environmental Affairs for its approval of plans for the $5 billion central artery and Scheme Z.

But both the city and the Watershed Association agreed to wait before serving the suits to allow the bridge design review committee enough time to deliberate the plan.

Former Secretary of Environmental Affairs John P. DeVillars formed the committee at the beginning of this year specificially in response to the controversy surrounding Scheme Z.

Robert L. Zimmerman, executive director of the Watershed Association and a bridge committee member, said yesterday that his group would continue to delay action for the time being. "We've been quite pleased, by and large, with what's been going on with the committee," he said.

And Russell said at the meeting that, from Cambridge's point of view, "there's been enormous improvements."

When the City Council in March voted to file suit in order to block the project, the councillors had vowed that Scheme Z would never see the light of day. According to Russell, it now appears that "somewhere there's going to be a best deal," even though the committee has discarded the interchange design that environmentalists and city advocates considered optimum.

Expensive Tunnels

That design would have put the Charles River crossing entirely underground, eliminating aesthetic and environmental side effects. However, the all-tunnel plan would have cost the state and federal governments at least $1.6 billion--there times the price of Scheme Z and most of its close relatives.

Bridge design committee chair Stanley Miller '52 said Friday that the group has moved forward efficiently, considering goals and views of its members.

"If we can pull this off in the next few weeks I think we'll...have done a historic thing for a volunteer group that we can all be proud of," Miller told committee members Friday.