IN “AS tech hub grows, so do the traffic jams (A1, May 19),” it was shocking to see MIT professor Robert Weinberg imply there are not enough roads in Kendall Square when he lamented that “arterial connections into this area have not changed since I was a freshman at MIT in 1960.”
Weinberg must have been out of town when the Inner Belt was proposed and almost built, which would have decimated much of Cambridge and cut Kendall Square off from the rest of the city with an elevated highway and web of ramps next to MIT, taking up much of the land that is so valuable today. Traffic may have flowed better, but only because no one would have been getting off.
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Kendall Square is actually a story of successful transit-oriented development. Car drivers are in the minority, as the Globe has reported in the past. Congestion shows a demand that needs to be met with better transit options. But no one other than Weinberg is suggesting more highways; those were thankfully defeated in the 1960s. The unchanged arterial connections are a positive feature of Kendall Square, not a problem.