Word: highway
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...film's funniest episode stars Anna Magnani as a middle-aged mother hen trying to herd her brood of three children, her terrified husband and her aged mother-in-law across a highway. Screaming at policemen, interfering with drivers, Magnani is a law unto herself as she belts the offending cars with her purse and shouts epithets at everything that dares to move against her. In a series of bright sight gags, she dashes between wheels and fenders, rescuing children, husband, and finally her mother-in-law's shoe-only to find that the store she is seeking...
...Inner Belt was long enough to satisfy most people that the state had been "objective" and picked the best path for everyone. At the press conference called to announce the decision, Volpe was asked whether he thought he had wasted time by ordering the review of the highway. He wasn't happy over the lost months, the governor conceded, but now he felt that his conscience was clear because the decision had been carefully scrutinized...
...story as it actually happened is not so pretty. In March, 1966, the DPW first selected the Brookline-Elm St. route for the Cambridge section of the highway an sent the recommendation to Washington for federal approval. Volpe suspended the decision in October while campaigning hard for reelection. From Volpe's perspective, the campaign was placid. The polls showed him far ahead, and his opponent had yet to find vulnerable spots in the governor's record. But the Inner Belt issue was potentially disruptive. Opponents of the Belt looked menancing; they were threatening to make the highway a volatile election...
Proponents of Portland-Albany were not asking for this repeat performance. They wanted a deeper and more sympathetic review of the social consequences of the highway for Cambridge. They never got it, and, for that the Governor is to blame more than anyone else...
...location, design and construction of modern highways," the DPW explained in its recommendation, "require the skills of competent professionals. Involved in the process are not the sole efforts of any one profession, but rather the blending and combined efforts of the planner, the architect, the sociologist, and the highway planner to name a few." Almost everything in its report contradicts the logic of this rhetoric; the criteria the DPW relied upon are almost exclusively those of the highway engineer...