Boston began planning for compact development and rail transit in the early 1970s under Governor Francis Sargent. Sargent appointed Alan Altshuler, a transportation professor at MIT, to be his Secretary of Transportation.
Sargent and Altshuler decided that freeways were destroying Boston, so in 1972 they cancelled almost all new highway construction inside route 128 (a beltway around Boston). They convinced Congress to allow states that cancelled urban interstates to spend the federal money allocated to the interstates on transit instead.
Since the money could only be spent on capital improvements, that meant rail transit; buses just weren’t expensive enough. ($100 million buys a lot of buses that the local government then has to operate, but it may buy only one rail line, so the operating cost obligations are a lot lower.)
