Strolling the interstate that never was

This is fascinating and a great job. I am new to this particular area and was wondering if you wandered into the Wheelabrator reserve? They set up an area for birds and birders and I wonder if you were in that area. I'm trying to figure our where your pictures were taken..although you seem to have kept in the Revere area and hadn't gotten as far up as Saugus.

I'd love to check out where you were.

Thanks again for sharing.

As best as I can tell, what we see today was built around 1956-1958. The plan view shows four possible expressways :

(1) Route 1 in Saugus, built in 1946 or earlier, with tight exit ramps

(2) Route 1 between the Tobin Bridge and Copeland Circle, built 1956-1958.

(3) The Revere Beach Connector, planned back in the 1950s when Revere Beach was booming and became a major visitor attraction. The connector was never built.

(4) The faint remains of the fill placed across the marsh for the (unbuilt) I-95 expressway -- planned to be 8 lanes wide.

It looks like four major roads converging on ... a rotary!!

In the 1950s, the Copeland Circle area was planned and built for just the first three of these roads. Having Route 1 to the north and south plus the Revere Beach Connector made some sense locally in terms of handling traffic, except for the short weaves that exist on the circle to this day.

The original plan was absolutely ruined in the late 1950s when the Interstate Highway system was introduced, with 90% of the costs paid for by the Federal Government. The incentive was to build many lanes at great expense, and that is what Route I-95 north became -- eight lanes coming down from Lynn and .... trying to connect into the stub ramps planned for the Revere Beach Connector.

Physically, the design was possible but it made no sense. It was not a smart thing to do : take a 1950s interchange with an awkward rotary, and plug in an eight-lane expressway. The traffic would never work. It would be the traffic bottleneck to end all bottlenecks. Too many ramps getting tangled up. Too many short weaves on Copeland Circle.

In short, the highway designers had a humongous traffic mess on their hands. The Revere Beach Connector was delayed and not built. The traffic mess delayed I-95 construction, but the publicity was mainly about the Lynn Woods and the marshes. At the time, I remember no controversy over the traffic failures at Copeland Circle .... if I-95 were plugged into it.

Along came the Inner Belt controversy in Cambridge and Boston. Cambridge offricials made a decision in 1967 to defeat the Belt plan no matter what. With no Inner Belt -- there was no logic for the Route 2 extension or Southwest Expressway. A well-organized opposition worked to get all the new highways stopped completely. That issue was on Governor Frank Sargent's desk when he took office in January 1969. Sargent put a hold order on the road plan in 1970, and by 1972 the restudy plan said no to highways and yes to transit. Except for completing I-93 into Boston, all of the proposed expressways were killed. That included I-95 north.

I don't know what killed off the Revere Beach Connector, but I suspect that with the strong concern in the 1970s for conservation and the environment, building in the Saugus Marshes was not seen as a great idea.

Sargent's decision on I-95 north was probably an easy one. Any enginer with 25 cents of smarts would say you don't take a rotary interchange designed for three roads .... and try to jam a fourth road into it.

This does not mean that the Copeland Circle bottleneck was the design flaw that brought down the entire Boston area highway plan. Copeland Circle was only the second worst bottleneck in the system. The worst bottleneck was on the old Green Monster, the six-lane elevated Central Artery in Boston. In 1957, a Wall Street firm was hired to look at traffic on the artery and figure out if investing public funds in the road made sense. They took a look at the whole system, including I-95 north and the Inner Belt, and concluded the road system WOULD NOT WORK. In order to handle all the traffic in Boston, the six-lane section of the Central Artery would need to be eighteen lanes wider --- for a total of twenty-four lanes!! All of the numbers from the Wall Street firm said the highway plan was a traffic disaster. The traffic analysts stuck by their conclusions and refused to back down. So when the Master Plan for state highways was issued in 1962, here was a plan arguing for the construction of all these roads, and it included the traffic analysis that said the plan would not work.

At Copeland Circle, how many more lanes would be needed on Route 1 to make it work with an eight-lane I-95 connecting into it? Maybe another eight lanes on Route 1need to be added on to make the traffic numbers work out. But that idea would mean a possible 32 lanes on the downtown Central Artery.

Yes, the state highway plan was an absolute mess. The traffic engineers were the heroes because they stuck to their guns and said it wouldn't work. The Governor put a halt to the whole scheme. What we see today is the remains of a mid-1950s monument. On all the connecting roads heading towards Revere Beach none of them saw a single vehicle from the driving public use the pavement. Unused pavement and remains of 1950s cable guardrail are the monuments that are left. Copeland Circle remains intact, one of the last rotaries built by the state highway department before they adopted a policy not to build any more rotaries.

Indeed, Copeland Circle is an historic monument to the kind of planning that went on the the 1950s and 1960s ... and was wrong simply because no one could get it to work right. It is shame that in the 21st century very few people know the story behind the plan.

Stephen H. Kaiser, PhD.
Cambridge