When Gov. Sargent said no to more ‘expressways’
Southwest Corridor Park in Boston as seen looking south from Ruggles Street. This is along the route of the cancelled Southwest Expressway.
— Photo by Grk1011
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
A lot of people owe thanks to the late Massachusetts Gov. Frank Sargent, who on Feb. 11, 1970 declared a halt to the seemingly endless and destructive highway construction that was tearing up neighborhoods and making traffic worse (by drawing in more cars) in Boston. The same thing was happening in many other cities.
On that date, he was one of the first major political leaders in the country to call for a thorough reappraisal of our addiction to car culture as he cancelled the Southwest Expressway and Inner Belt highways. His action became a model for the country. Someone called him “anti-highway’’ but maybe a more accurate term would be “pro-city.’’
As he said at the time:
“Four years ago, I was the commissioner of the Department of Public Works – our road building agency. Then, nearly everyone was sure highways were the only answer to transportation problems for years to come. We were wrong. . . . Are we really meeting our transportation needs by spending most of our money building roads? The answer is no.”
Thus began attempts to rebalance transportation priorities, particularly by allocating a higher percentage of taxpayer funds to mass transit. As awful as is traffic in Greater Boston now (partly a product of its great prosperity for much of the past quarter century), think of how much worse it would be without the changes set in motion by Frank Sargent, an MIT-trained engineer. By stopping the destructive projects above and turning more attention to public transit, he helped protect and then raise the city’s quality of life as expressed in its vibrant neighborhoods and lovely parks and by eventually making it easier for many more people to move through Boston’s dense urban core, with its famously narrow, curving streets, without a car. This has been a boon for individuals and businesses.
This in turn helped make “The Hub” the prosperous world city it is today. Frank Sargent understood that the urgent need was to move more people, not more cars, and that only a much improved public transit system could do that. He also knew that relentlessly paving over green space for roads and parking lots was, to put it mildly, bad for the environment, as was the intensifying air pollution from vehicular traffic at the time.
Still, as former Massachusetts Transportation Secretary James Aloisi recently told Commonwealth Magazine: “We remain adrift on a sea of ideological resistance to raising the revenue we need to do the job, still fully in the grip of a stubborn auto-centric mentality that would prefer to see us all stuck in the worst traffic congestion in the nation rather than invest in a modern electrified regional rail system… that would entice many commuters to take commuter rail,’’ including from Providence, of course.
I covered Governor Sargent back then as a reporter for the Boston Herald Traveler, and fondly remember his high intelligence, his directness and his political courage, along with his humor, charm and ability to swear like a stevedore.
To read Mr. Aloisi’s piece, please hit this link.
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Trump wants to slash funding for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service, on which traffic has been booming, to $325 million from $700 million. (To stick it to Blue States?) He’d also cut funding for the quasi-public railroad’s long-distance routes to $611 million from $1.3 billion. Those long-distance trains tend to be underpatronized. So he may have a point there. But it’s unlikely that these cuts will take place: To address crippling car congestion, an expansion, not a contraction, of Northeast Corridor train service, is needed. And reminder: Northeast Corridor trains are very heavily used for business travel. As for those long-distance trains: They serve many Red State communities whence cometh some powerful members of Congress….