INT: Please talk about the inner belt?

FS: The inner belt was proposed initially as part of the interstate highway system and it would have basically gone around the center of Boston but it would have done that by going through several neighborhoods in Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, the South End, Cambridge, Sommerville, South Boston, and East Boston. So from the point of view of the center, it was a ring but the ring was in a whole bunch of neighborhoods that were very valuable to the people who lived in 'em. So initially the transportation theory was that the cars would come in and distribute off of this road, but the transportation theory never dealt with the question of where were the cars gonna go when they got off of this road? We've got a city with narrow streets, not much parking and if you try to build more parking you're going to destroy a lot of what's valuable of the city.

So those of us who were working against the highways were, in first instance, doing it out of sympathy with those neighborhoods. Some of us lived in those neighborhoods and feeling this is a wrong thing to do to these neighborhoods, but there was also a second feeling that there was a much better way from a transportation point of view to provide access into the city with public transportation and refurbishing our commuter rail system so that we wouldn't knock down half of what was valuable in the city, that we'd be able to celebrate the history of the city and add to it. I think that theory really has worked, you know. The basic facts are the inner belt did not get built. Most of that money got shifted into public transportation investments like the Red Line extension and the Orange Line and the refurbishing of the commuter rail and the City of Boston economy has done fabulously well. So I think there's substantial evidence that this was both good for the neighborhoods that avoided the demolition, but also very good for the downtown and for the economy of the City of Boston.

INT: How did you and Dukakis join together?

FS: I first met Michael Dukakis when he was a state representative from Brookline and he called me 'cause he had a radio talk show. Mike was a real leader in the anti-highway movement. He was the first elected representative who really began putting a coalition together to say, "This is crazy. Let's move towards public transportation." And he had heard that there was a civil engineer at the BRA who sounded a lot like him, and he was looking for someone that had sort of civil engineering expertise that would support this view, because most of the civil engineers were making a living off of these highways and nobody would say anything critical. So he called me and said, "Gee, I've heard about you. Would you be willing to come on my radio show and talk about it?" So that's when I first met him and you know, we were just on exactly the same wavelength on a whole number of issues philosophically, but particularly within transportation the emphasis on public transportation, the opposition to the destructiveness of the highway program in the neighborhoods were items that brought us together emotionally right from the first time I met him. But he was there before me. I mean he was out there and organizing when no else was speaking out.

INT: Do you remember your major victory when Frank Sargent publicly reversed his policy on highway building?

FS: Yes, of course. In many ways the most thrilling moment in the history of the anti-highway fight was when we won. And then Governor Sargent went on television and said, basically, he had been the public works commissioner who had fought for the inner belt earlier in his career and, as governor he said it was a mistake and "I'm going to admit that mistake and stop the program and we're going to shift towards public transportation." I mean it was thrilling. It was thrilling for us that had worked hard on it, but also, in fairness to Sargent how often do you see a public official who gets up and says, "I was wrong"? I mean it was an incredibly courageous thing for Frank Sargent to do, and I'm a Democrat. I don't say many good things about Republicans. But he was a great man. I mean he had worked for this program. He always had an environmentalist bent to him. [A] lot of people do political analysis as to why he did this or that. I think he just believed what he said. "This was a mistake and we're going to go in a different direction." It was a thrilling moment in the history of it.

And then we actually moved in that new direction. I mean we shifted the funds, partly under Governor Sargent, partly under Governor Dukakis. Those monies that were going to go into destroying those neighborhoods or building the highways were shifted into refurbishing the commuter rail system, extending the Red Line, relocating the Orange Line, basically rebuilding the public transportation infrastructure of the city. That came out of that decision and another component of the same decision -- you can go check that speech that Frank Sargent gave -- was that the only highways that would continue to be studied within Route 128 would be the depression and widening of the Central Artery and the extension of I-90 over to Logan in an additional tunnel, the two components that are today called the Big Dig. Those were really part of that, if you will, anti-highway -- "anti-highway's" probably the wrong name -- pro-city decision that was made by Frank Sargent to shift towards a transportation strategy that would build the city instead of destroying it.

And a major component of that was, stop building destructive roads. Another major component was, put a lot of money into improving public transportation, and the third component that we're seeing built now is, take the existing Central Artery that's there and fix it. I mean fix it both from a transportation point of view, because it doesn't work, but also fix what it did to the city by getting it underground and knit the city back together again. That was a very thrilling moment in my life, when Sargent did it. And I've always respected him a great deal because of the courage that it took to do that.

INT: So you think the Big Dig is a direct result of the anti-highway movement?

FS: Yeah. There's no question. The initial project began to be studied literally as part of the Boston Transportation Planning Review as a different kind of highway that would be positive rather than negative. So the very beginning of that project came out of the restudy of highways, which culminated in stopping the inner belt. Those studies started, the depressed Central Artery and the tunnel directly to Logan not going through the neighborhoods -- those were conclusions of that anti-highway movement, if you will, so it's a lot of highway construction for an anti-highway movement; [that's] the way I would characterize it.

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