Interstate 695 (Massachusetts)

Interstate 695
Inner Belt Expressway
1955 Yellow Book plan for the Boston area showing the Inner Belt and related highways
Route information
Maintained by MassDOT
Length:	7.3 mi (11.7 km)
Existed:	1955 – 1971
Major junctions
From:	I‑93
To:	I‑95
Highway system
Interstate Highway System Main Auxiliary Suffixed Business Future Massachusetts State Highway System Interstate US State ← I‑495 I‑895 →

The Inner Belt in Boston was a planned six-lane, limited-access highway that would have run through parts of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville.

The highway would have been called Interstate 695 and would have provided a circumferential route inside the Route 128 corridor. A 1955 plan suggested this routing:

(A 1948 plan called for the Southeast and Southwest Expressway to meet the Inner Belt at the same point.)

The project was canceled in 1971 after intense protests organized by community activists, and following Gov. Francis Sargent's 1970 moratorium on highway construction inside Route 128. It would have displaced some 7,000 people from their homes and created what opponents at the time called a "Chinese wall" dividing long established neighborhoods, and would have gutted large parts of the city of Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury. There was also speculation that the construction of the Inner Belt would essentially bypass downtown Boston completely, resulting in economic stagnation in a city that was already having considerable financial problems. It was one of the first large highway projects to be blocked by local opposition. Unresolved traffic problems resulting from the cancellation were among the factors eventually leading to Boston's Big Dig highway project, decades later.

The Northwest Expressway was to carry Routes 2 and 3 along a four-lane highway from the north-west (the current outer intersection of U.S. 3 and Route 128 in Burlington) via Cambridge to connect with the Inner Belt in Union Square, Somerville. Instead, the Route 2 highway was never re-routed to the Fitchburg Line right of way, and alternately now terminates along the right of way of the old Concord Turnpike (Route 2). That intersection left the highway terminating at a traffic circle in northwest Cambridge, where it intersected Route 16. In the 1980s, the rotary was replaced by a traffic light and the highway was connected to the park-and-ride garage at the Alewife station on the newly extended Red Line.