Interstate 695 (Massachusetts)

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The Inner Belt in Boston was a planned 6-lane, limited-access highway which would have run through parts of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville. The highway would have been called Interstate 695 and would have provided a circumferential route inside the Route 128 corridor, connecting:

Interstate 93
Route 2
the Massachusetts Turnpike
a closely related project, the Southwest Expressway, which would have extended Interstate 95 into Boston.

1955 Yellow Book plan for the Boston area showing the Inner Belt and related highways.

The project was canceled in 1971 after intense protests organized by community activists. It would have displaced some 7,000 people from their homes and created what opponents at the time called a "Chinese wall" dividing long established neighborhoods, and would have gutted large parts of the city of Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury. There was also speculation that the construction of the Inner Belt would essentially bypass downtown Boston completely, resulting in economic stagnation in a city that was already having considerable financial problems. It was one of the first large highway projects to be blocked by local opposition. Unresolved traffic problems resulting from the cancellation were among the factors leading to Boston's Big Dig highway project.

Route 2, a 4-lane highway from the north-west that was intended to connect with the Inner Belt, instead was terminated at a rotary (traffic circle) where it intersected Route 16. In the 1980s, the rotary was replaced by a traffic light and the highway was connected to the park-and-ride garage at the Alewife station on the newly extended Red Line.

An outer belt, Interstate 495, was eventually completed around Greater Boston.

With the cancellation of the "Southwest corridor" route for I-95, Route 128 between I-95 South and I-95 North was made part of the Interstate system as I-95. The right-of-way for the I-95 portion of the beltway in Roxbury had already been cleared and now contains a surface street, Melnea Cass Boulevard, a linear park and the new route for Boston's Orange Line subway. The older elevated Orange line right of way along Washington Street was subsequently torn down, and, controversially, replaced by the Silver Line.

Remnants of the Inner Belt were visible for many years on Interstate 93 at what is now the Leverett Circle Connector interchange (Exit 26 southbound) in Somerville (which would have been the northern terminus of I-695) and at the Massachusetts Avenue interchange in Boston (which would have been the Route 3/I-95 junction at the southern terminus of the beltway). Some, but not all, of these remnants have been demolished as part of the Big Dig; in particular, the Leverett Connector uses the northern pair of ramps in Somerville and had to be built around the southern pair of ramps.

An industrial park in Somerville near the intended northern terminus of the highway is built around a street known as Inner Belt Road.

[edit] External links

http://www.bostonroads.com/roads/inner-belt/ - Historical overview

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