Thread by @TracyNovick

How is it that I haven’t read this til now? #mapoli must read!

(Okay, I always intended to tweet about this!) #amreading

What’s it about? Route 128
Or:
“...demonstrates the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in the labor union halls of northern cities, and towards white-collar suburbanites in the postindustrial metropolitan periphery.”

“Suburban knowledge workers tended to be less party loyal at the state level, which illustrates the complexity of both electoral patterns and the definition of liberal politics.”

(And why we keep ending up with Republican governors?)

“...affluent families with ties to universities and Route 128 companies sought out communities that had cultural, social and political markers of open-mindedness and a commitment to education...”

“Suburban liberals achieved the greatest victories in campaigns that proposed individualist solutions to rights-related issues, required limited financial sacrifice, and offered tangible quality-of-life benefits.”

“Issues that challenged structural inequalities and threatened residents’ property values and the entitlement of homeownership met greater resistance and far less success in the Route 128 suburbs.”

And THAT explains METCO!

(Seriously, it has never made sense to me that a state with about a million kids in public schools, with the STARK segregation by municipal lines that we have, can ship about 3000 kids across a line and talk about our state desegregation effort.)

“The same forces and policies of postwar suburbanization also produced systemic residential segregation by race and class that largely prevented minorities from gaining the privileges of home ownership.

“Yet as several scholars have powerfully proven, the state-mediated real estate market fortified by the ideals of postwar liberalism and popular culture popularized a ‘free market’ discourse that encouraged white suburbanites to understand their decisions about where to live

“...as individual choices and rights, and not see how such actions perpetuated forms of racial and economic privilege and inequality.”

“The directives and incentives of state-sponsored suburbanization simultaneously prompted homeowners to adopt a more market and consumer-minded attitude toward government services—from federal tax policy to local public schools—

[ahem]

—that further fostered an individualist outlook.”

(The throat clearing of course is me, not the author)

“...postwar liberals demonstrated a renewed commitment to working within the political system to solve the problems of racial inequality, but tended to advocate for civil rights policies that created ‘equal opportunity’ and ‘individual rights,’

“rather than those that focused on eradicating the structural underpinnings of racial segregation and economic inequality.”

“...a larger suburban politician ethos predicated on low taxes, high property values, quality education, and the security and safety of children”

“The persistence of racial segregation in white-collar occupations and suburban neighborhoods meant that the majority of white Route 128 residents had rare sustained contact with African Americans

“and did not confront the realities of systemic racial inequality in their daily lives.”

Yikes, here it is:
“Individualist and rights-based programs like METCO that advocates for one-way busing and did not threaten property values or inconvenience white children, therefore,

“were not posteconomic or postmaterialist but directly complemented the material priorities of suburban liberals as well as their forms of political activism.”

And, wow, this whole paragraph:

Also, I did not know this:
“By 1962, the federal government accounted for fully half the sales of Route 128 industry, and Massachusetts ranked third nationally behind California and New York in Pentagon spending.”

“With few exceptions, the office parks along Route 128 lacked access to adequate public transportation, and likewise most transportation schedules served suburban commuters going into the city instead of the reverse.”

(No kidding!)

“State tax policy compounded this socioeconomic hierarchy.”

There’s a whole good thing here but:
“The dependence on property tax to finance local education and town services and the increased demand for housing made it more economical for low-density towns to remove land from the market entirely

““rather than risk an increase in the number of families that could not share the tax burden.”

And then Lincoln, and Newton, and Concord pat themselves all on the back for their good planning.

Next paragraph:

“The US Civil Rights Commission came to a different interpretation of the land use policies of towns like Lincoln and Newton.”

Wow. Scan here: harborlightcp.org/wp-content/upl…

From that report:

Testimony of a Mrs. James Jones to the Commission:

—

“The result of Boston’s suburban development has been increased racial isolation.”

“And it may be that the housing crisis in the Boston area, instead of being just one more obstacle to full minority participation, Will in the process of its own eventual resolution bring about an indefinite postponement of racial equality.”

Yikes on suburban governance

“It is not the bigots, however, who constitute the primary obstructive force against racial inclusion. It is the indifference of average citizens.”

The report was 1975...I assume the MLK echo is deliberate.

“It would be a Herculean task to catalogue all the justifications and rationalizations used by Boston’s suburbs for minority exclusion.”

(Seriously, this report is AMAZING)

“The belief that the private system can generate sufficient housing to assure a decent home for every American without inconveniencing suburban residents persists.”

Okay, that was stunning. It’s here:

harborlightcp.org/wp-content/upl…
(And I am not going to feel terrible about not knowing about it; it was published when I was two.)

BACK to the book...what a rabbit hole to fall down!

“The end result of this deliberate land use agenda enabled many white affluent professionals to see their towns as exceptional and themselves as exempted from many of the consequences and ideology of mass suburbanization.”

“The majority of the new families that decided to buy a home in towns like Lexington and Newton possessed the ability and the willingness to expend additional tax dollars to ensure that their children received a first-rate education.”

“By the mid-1960’s, school financing became by far the largest municipal budget item in all the Route 128 suburbs.”

(This made me laugh)
“The Newton School Committee and its counterparts in the Route 128 communities included engineers, lawyers, professors, and former teachers who were alumni of esteemed institutions, such as Harvard,!Princeton, Dartmouth, and Mount Holyoke,

“and prone to quoting James B. Conant or David Riesman during meetings.”

(Now wondering if I am letting someone down in my lack of quotations during meetings...)

And sorry, Princeton...not sure where the ! came from.

"Similar to the land control agenda that led to the implementation of exclusionary zoning codes, residents often saw local educational policies in terms of hard work, expertise, and forward thinking, not the simultaneous ways that the initiatives produced forms of inequity."

"Residents in Newton, Concord, or Lexington in the late 1950's and early 1960's rarely discussed how economic mechanisms positioned their community's schools over others,

" or how the loss of their tax dollars and gains of federal funding and expert consultants might have an impact on public education in the city of Boston."

(FWIW, incidentally, Concord's my birthplace; I feel affectionate amusement for their and Lexington's determination to, throughout this book, drag in Revolutionary War references every single place possible)

Was not aware of the state and national importance of the 1962 MCAD v. Colangelo case, concerning an African American member Air Force, Maurice Fowler, who was turned down for an apartment in Waltham;
one assumes he was stationed at Hanscom Field, as my father was.

See? Battle Green? Minuteman Statue?

"The case [of the Parker family, the reason for the Lexington protest], nevertheless, punctuated the fact that the fair housing law and movement more broadly were really only effective in challenging overt discrimination against individual middle class African Americans,

"and helping the same constituency move into affluent suburbs. The grassroots and legal tactics of the fair housing groups had little impact on changing the racial demographics of these communities."

oooh, chapter 3 is entirely on METCO!

Okay, here we go:

"...many of METCO's most salient features, particularly its limited size, voluntary commitment, and state government funding, actually complemented the political agenda of most upper-middle-class homeowners in the Route 128 suburbs and their counterparts..."

"METCO represented one of the most imaginative, far-reaching voluntary integration schemes in the United States, and, like the fair housing movement, provided benefits and opportunities to a small number of African American children."

...you can feel this one coming, can't you...

"Yet also similar to the fair housing movement, METCO's success was due in part that it did not create any significant financial or personal hardship for participation on the part of white suburbanites."

(still doesn't)

"The one-way busing program appealed directly to the worldview of many liberal-leaning suburbanites who supported racial and educational equality in principle,

"...but not routes to achieving those goals that could potentially increase local tax rates or have a potentially negative impact on the education of their own children."

(this has some interesting overlaps with the debate over Q2 across the state, doesn't it)

"The program's proponents emphasized that white middle-class youths needed to understand the realities of the larger world in order to achieve future success. This consumer-oriented claim about the value of diversity presaged a key rationale for affirmative action policies."

(however)
"...the claims helped to marginalize from public consciousness or debate the structural dynamics that created school segregation and racial inequity."

"The argument also concealed that it was not an abiding commitment to integration or diversity that primarily motivated black families like the Williams to enroll their children in METCO

"but a desire to circumvent the interlocking forms of inequality that prevented their children from achieving adequate education."

"While METCO offered a rare example of interracial and urban-suburban cooperation, its focus on collective benefits rather than collective responsibility had wide-ranging consequences."

"This strategy...fortified the consumer-based and individualist dimensions of the Route 128 political culture.

"It ultimately made community members more resistant to grappling with the systemic and historical circumstances that necessitated programs like METCO and affirmative action in the first place."

Whoa...okay, so maybe you know about the June 1963 Boston school boycott? About a third of the secondary school students stayed home.

...and then Louise Day Hicks was swept back into office with 68.8% of the vote...

BUT, I did NOT know there was a SECOND "Stayout" the following February, AND that about a thousand white students from the suburbs CAME INTO BOSTON to create integrated schools!

"Cheered by the tide of support, Thomas Atikins, NAACP executive secretary, told a group of suburbanites, 'I only wish some of you still lived in town!'"

...truer words...

"The major newspapers in Boston made the Stayout front page news..."

TRUE! Check it out!

Yes, that is the Chair of the Boston School Committee Louise Day Hicks advocating for the Committee to sue the organizers, commenting, "It was the most emotionally disturbing day of my life."

(I do so appreciate newspaper archives!)

The next article down, BTW, covers a meeting of civil rights leaders with Mayor Collins, at which the civil rights leaders were willing to shake his hand, but not to pose with him behind his desk.
(That's Mrs. Eleanor Mitchell shaking his hand in the photo.)

(from the Globe article)
"Mrs. Hicks had told reporters that the boycott was 'an intimidation' of the School Committee. 'We try to do a good job and get a slap for our troubles.'"

(oops, sorry, apparently Day Hicks wasn't chair then)

"Chairman O'Connor said the boycott could be termed a success 'if it kept many children away from school.'"

"'If you say it was a success because it taught them discipline, respect for law and order and the value of education, I'd say no,' O'Connor said."

"'When it becomes necessary for citizens to take such drastic action as urging a boycott of the public schools it is indeed a poor commentary on the state of educational affairs,' Thomas I. Atkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, said."

"'We are no longer interested in hearing about your good intentions,' Atkins said, addressing his remarks to the School Committee. 'Your actions speak so loudly that we cannot hear what you are saying.'"

"The majority of the Board of the Catholic Interracial Council of Boston asked of the Freedom Stay-Out 'What will white members of the community learn from it?'"

"'We can regard the Stay-Out itself as some sort of civic 'catastrophe' or we can admit that the real catastrophe is the combination of our hostility, indifference and temporizing which brought it about,' the council asserted."

(and there ends the article)

Okay, then, here's what is very cool: the School Committee (and the Superintendent, incidentally) was wrong: it DID matter.
The very next day, Governor Peabody announced plans for a blue ribbon advisory committee to study racial imbalance

...and they wrote "Because It Is Right--Educationally"

(you've read that, right? archive.org/details/becaus…) #MAedu

The Kiernan Commission (named for its chair, the Commissioner of Education) recommended a law banning racial imbalance.

(I did not know, BTW, that Richard Cardinal Cushing was on the Commission)

"The BSC voted to reject the claims of the Kiernan Report within hours of its release."

Hicks (who was always good for a quote, clearly) "reflexively dismissed the report as 'pompous proclamations of the uninformed'

"and dubbed the Kiernan Committee 'a band of racial agitators, non-native to Boston, and a few college radicals who have joined the conspiracy to tell the people of Boston how to run their schools and their lives.'"

The report was released April 8.
On April 22, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came (back) to Boston.

I still had the Globe archives open. Here's the next day's front page:

The headline under the article about the Common rally is "Vision of New Boston must reach Roxbury"

And here is a sequence that current #MAEdu watchers will find bewildering: the newly elected Republican governor John Volpe says state legislation.
And who proposes it?

The state Board of Ed

(I'm going to remember this the next time someone timidly suggests that perhaps they might consider taking a stand on an important issue.)

"the proposed act sought to empower the Massachusetts Board of Education to withhold state funds from any town that had not adopted a reasonable plan to eliminate racial imbalance."

and so to the legislature, and so back to our suburban activists...and in August of 1965, the Racial Imbalance Act passes the Legislature. Many "identified the suburban groups as the driving force behind the legislation."

It made Massachusetts the first state to outlaw racial imbalance in its public schools.

(you can see this one coming, too, right?)

"The law classified as a racially imbalanced school as one that had 50 percent black students."

...surely we can see the problem here?

Remember all those racially imbalanced towns we spent the past two chapters expanding? Yup, nothing that they have to do!

"As with the purportedly landmark fair housing law passed six years earlier, the communities and children of the Brookline, Newton, and Lexington activists who had been most enthusiastic in their lobbying effort fell outside the new statute's jurisdiction."

...and so, to the creation of METCO, which we will take up later this week.

And wouldn't you know it, the formal proposal for METCO came from a Brookline School Committee member, Leon Trilling.
"Trilling's view aligned with many knowledged-based professionals who believed education offered the best means for advancement

"and that the opportunities that flowed from merit should be available to everyone."

And here is ANOTHER thing I didn't know: when Prince Edward County, VA closed all their schools rather than desegregate them (yes, really), the American Friends Service Committee arranged for a few students to attend school in and around Boston.

"The success of the experiment had convinced Trilling that if the suburbs could offer spaces to students from Virginia, then they could provide for African American children with a far shorter commute."

So Trilling pitches his plan in December of 1965 (at Brookline High School), where it receives a favorable response AND

"several members of the audience wanted to expand the proposal to include the possibilities of a two-way exchange and comprehensive metropolitan school system."

I had WONDERED if that had ever come up!

"While the majority of the gathering's...participants shared a sense that this could be the ultimate goal of the project, they recognized that such an undertaking was currently 'impractical politically' and instead decided to pursue a 'short-range' plan of one-way busing."

(but that as a possible long-term goal did make it into the founding documents)

The founders managed to wrangle $265K out of US DoE through Title III to cover two years of the program, plus they got $100K from the Carnegie Corporation.

They then needed to make it legal for students to attend school in communities in which they did not live (it wasn't).

The bill that passed into law as an extension of the Racial Imbalance Act not only did that; it also allowed the Board of Ed to "financially support any program where one town adopted a plan to assist in the elimination of the racial imbalance of another town."

(of course, this goes back to the same "whose racial imbalance counts," as Boston certainly would be assisting in the 'racial rebalancing' of the suburbs!)

...then they had to sell it to everyone, and the pitches made, not surprisingly, were different to the suburbs than they were to the families in Boston.

Okay, back to the book!

"The case that METCO's white advocates made to enlist participating communities combined the individualist and therapeutic ideals of racial liberalism

"with the issues of low taxes, high property values, and quality education that represented the main planks of suburban political culture."

"The contentions underscore the distinctly consumer-based terms in which many Route 128 residents approached not just participation in the program but their attitude towards municipal services more broadly."

KEY POINT:
"Proponents never mentioned any possibility that METCO could potentially serve as a model for a two way program."

(and of course, it never has)

and supporters made a point of noting that it would be supported by federal (then) and state funding, so it wouldn't bear on local taxes.

Recognizing they couldn't just argue that it would be good for the Boston students, advocates "suggested to members of their towns that the inclusion of a few African Americans in each suburban classroom would help prepare white students to succeed in a diverse society."

(and this argument is still used)

"This rationale was notably absent in most of METCO's applications for funding from the federal government and the Carnegie Corporation, even those drawn up by Charles Brown and other suburban school administrators."

"In his case about why the suburb should participate, Superintendent Brown argued to the Newton School Committee that the admission of black pupils would aid in the education of local white children

"who were in fact 'deprived' in the sense that 'they have no realistic contact with other parts of our society.'"

"The discursive shift of the terms disadvantage and deprivation from Boston children to white suburban ones also shifted the presentation of METCO's goals

"away from addressing many of the forces and factors that had created the problems of residential segregation and unequal resources. The emphasis now was towards a cause and a solution that was much more individualistic."

"The facets of the program that most suburban residents praised in endorsing their town's involvement in METCO were often the ones that least forced them to confront residential segregation and metropolitan fragmentation."

"Articulating his support for METCO, Lexington engineer Arthur Bryson, Jr. stated that he favored how it was a 'person-to-person' initiative

"as opposed to 'impersonal programs like welfare, urban renewal, and anti-poverty programs,' which he did not approve of and believed to be ineffective."

"The METCO program's careful navigation of these ideas about federal and local funding combined with its emphasis on individual ideals played a critical role in solidifying support throughout the suburbs and across the partisan divide."

And then we move to the Boston end of the equation.

...and Ruth Babson whose "commitment to alleviating the inadequacies in the BPS had been so long-standing that it had earned her the reputation as the 'de facto lady.'"

(as in: segregation was de facto even if not de jure; it was fact even if not law or regulation)

Babson "candidly acknowledged that transporting two hundred children to the suburbs would do nothing for the vast majority of African American students remaining in Boston.

"Still, she recognized that the program offered both improved educational opportunities for the small number of children involved and a means to publicly shame the [Boston School Committee] into addressing the racial inequities of the city's schools."

This is fascinating:
"Babson pitched METCO as a temporary rather permanent program with only a few years of funding and assured parents that the students would return to the city's public schools 'as soon as Boston straightens out.'"

"From the outset, many of the African American participants interpreted the goals of METCO differently from their white allies, although both were invested in quality education."

"Many parents understood that the particular value of METCO rested on the fact that it offered children the superior educational resources of the suburbs."

The release of the Kerner Commission report and the assassination of Dr. King in 1968 took a program of 368 and took it to 1200 seats being offered in 35 communities.

While suburban adults said that the program challenged their perspective on Roxbury, several Boston parents said it likewise changed their assumptions.

however...

Mrs. Stroudt of Lincoln, who served as part-time local coordinator, noted "that the black children, more than the white ones, had developed the ability to 'live in the two worlds that do exists much earlier than their parents do.'"

And of course (as has been noted by @ATErickson, @mattdelmont, and basically anyone else who studies this?), the burden wasn't equally borne: the Boston students were bused out to the suburbs and were often the only non-white children in their classes.

Some METCO students felt guilt for leaving their neighborhoods for school. Some protested the inequity of resources between the city and the suburbs.

In the late 1960's, METCO added tutoring and psychological supports for METCO students.

(is this still done?)
Staff also pressed METCO suburbs to add more diverse curriculum and school staff.

in most districts, METCO students remained less than 1% of student enrollment, and it never created larger acceptance of school integration nationally or locally.

"It is unrealistic to expect a small program to provide the solution to the structural problem of school segregation."

"The particular dynamics of the program and reasoning that its proponents used to promote it, however, meant that METCO did not force the vast majority of suburbanites to acknowledge the systemic problems that had produced school segregation and their own roles in that process."

"Instead, by providing residents in the suburban municipalities that participated with a means to distinguish themselves as more open-minded than whites in the South or South Boston,

"it made them even less willing to consider more comprehensive solutions to the interrelated issues of residential segregation and educational inequity."

(here, as they say, endeth the chapter)

oh, dear...
Poor Claire Ellis who wrote a letter to the Concord Journal opposing expansion of Route 2 in 1972 would probably not be pleased at what happened to that Concord curve...

Okay, so an urban and suburban coalition convinced Gov. Sargent to declare a moratorium on highway construction and redirected the state's transportation policy to mass transit.

How do we redirect again?

Sorry, we sort of left poor Claire Ellis here at the beginning of Chapter 4 for awhile, didn't we?

"localist measures that residents took to protect their communities elevated both a sense of their own distinctiveness and a focus of on their own individual standard of living and quality of life,

"further obscuring an acknowledgement of their role in perpetuating many of the problems of environmental and social inequity."

And SO in 1953, we have the founding of the Sudbury Valley Trustees, which starts from the rather novel idea that swampland is worthy of preservation.

"The SVT represented a departure from earlier conservationist efforts, which had focused primarily on exceptional tracts of forest, beach, or wilderness removed from urban life."

...and also...
"Members of the group believed that vigorous open space protection, not unbridled growth, ensured white middle-class homeowners the high quality of life they deserved."

(which as a TOTAL aside, is an interesting contract to Worcester having a land trust)

Anyway...

"The SVT contended the land in the trust would actually enhance local property values by both reducing the damage caused by annual flooding, and adding to the pastoral aesthetic of the area."

and also

"Similar to large lot zoning, the members argued, the trust would also limit population, lessen the demand, for municipal services, and reduce the overall local tax rate."

By 1969 over 275 Massachusetts cities and towns had conservation commissions, created via legislation in the mid-1950's.

In 1960, the Massachusetts legislature created the Self-Help Conservation Program, in which the state reimbursed up to 50% on local land acquisitions for conservation.

(now it goes higher, based on poverty of the community)

In 1965, the fed created the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which would reimburse up to 75%.
As you might imagine, this broadened who would benefit (also still does), but when created, towns along 128 disproportionately benefited.

"Open space acquisitions experienced little opposition from local residents in these towns partially because state and federal subsidies made land acquisitions a small fraction of their annual budgets and tax dollars."

by the late 1960's, there was some expressed concern (even by Mass DNR) that this was fostering "forms of ecological and political isolationism"

And now to the "Inner Belt" which would have connected Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline, with Roxbury, Charlestown, and the Fenway...which drew opposition across neighborhoods and racial and economic lines to create the Greater Boston Committee on the Transportation Crisis

Two days into Governor Sargent's term, 2000 people held a rally at the State House (in what the Globe reported as a "festive, almost carnival mood").
Sargent came out to address the crowd--remember when we had governors who did that?--and said:

"Never, never will this administration make decisions that place people below concrete."

The GBC joined forces with the suburban groups opposing construction across Fowl Meadow (in Milton, Canton, Dedham, and Cohasset), pushing for a stoppage of all highway construction and a complete restudy of the state's transportation policy.

Sargent eventually came out with a balanced transportation policy: "Four years ago I was the Commissioner of the Department of Public Works...Then, nearly everyone was sure highways were the only answer to transportation problems for years to come. We were wrong."

This also overlaps with the first Earth Day (1970), the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, and the National Environmental Policy Act (those all during the Nixon administration).

NEPA gave us the requirement of Environmental Impact Statements for all federally funded projects.
(ah, EIS's...I have spent so much time reading these!)

And so to Claire Ellis and her Concord and Lincoln neighbors, fighting off an expansion of Route 2 (that would make it the size of 128).

If you're familiar with this section of Route 2, catch this:
The eleven miles between Acton and Lexington would double the road to eight lanes, adding a 64-foot wide median, overpasses, and a cloverleaf.

You may note that did not, in fact, happen.

"The outcome showed that citizen opposition to state-sponsored growth was particularly effective in communities that contained residents with backgrounds in science, engineering, law, and business."

And so to the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which, true to its name funded...highways. In part to due lobbying from Massachusetts, the fed opened up federal funding to mass transportation.

...bringing us to the Red Line ending at Alewife (wince)

The idea in part was to replace parts of what had been a highway plan with mass transit: a rerouted Orange Line, extended the Red Line south to Braintree, and getting it northwest to the Route 2/128 interchange.

The proposal was to use the Boston and Maine right of way through Arlington.
Cambridge and Somerville supported it.
Arlington and Lexington...not so much.

"The response of Lexington and Arlington residents revealed that the term 'quality of life' and goals of environmental protection were open to conflicting interpretations."

"For many...the expansion of the mass transit system posed a thread to the privileges of suburban residency."

"The parallels between the antisprawl arguments that residents used to oppose the Red Line and those that antihighway activists used to promote mass transit exposed the flexibility of environmentalist logic in the types of battles surrounding transportation and development."

Plus:
"Even more than the battles over open space and the highway extension, the reaction to mass transit made explicit the racial and class-based fears animating antigrowth politics"

"A few people raised fears about 'roving gangs on the transit system invading the clam of the suburban lifestyle' and increasing the incidence of crime.

"More terrifying to many Lexington citizens than 'roving gangs,' however, was the prospect of low-income people moving into their community because of the subway."

There were attempts to combat that, including a study which argued that transit would make Lexington an even more desirable place to live "and might actually raise property values and make it even more economically exclusive."

"Most residents remained skeptical."

Arlington residents organized a group called "Arlington Read Line Action Movement" [gosh, aren't these folks all strong on acronyms]=ALARM

"The leaders included MIT economist Vincent A. Fulmer, who reduced the movement's goals to preserving 'quality of life' and preventing 'irreversible transformation' to the community's character."

"Transportation official Fred Salvucci saw through this rhetoric, publicly accusing the group of using 'racial fear and blatant mistruths' in the campaign against the proposal."

And the idea that it would improve the overall region only strengthened resistance.
"A resident from Arlington confronted head-on the arguments that the town must share responsibility for social and spacial inequality.

"'Arlington has contributed its share to the Metco experiment,' H.H. Seward scoffed, but its 'neighbors seem to feel that Arlington should take on even more of the burden.'"

"A Lexington resident similarly lamented that the proposal would make the town a 'sacrificial lamb on the altar of regional interests.'"

And so, as you probably know, the Red Line ends at Alewife.

The right-of-way became the "Minuteman Commuter Bikeway" running from Bedford to Alewife,

which is, of course, a "woefully ineffective means for inner-city residents to reach the service sector jobs concentrated in the industrial parks and shopping malls along Route 128."