Boston Transportation Planning Review

Boston Transportation Planning Review (BTPR), published in 1972, was a transportation planning program for metropolitan Boston, Massachusetts, which was responsible for analyzing and redesigning the entire area-wide transit and highway system in the 1970s. The major contractors involved were Alan M. Voorhees Company (Virginia), project manager; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (New York City), architect; ESL Incorporated (California), air quality and acoustics. The program had close guidance from the national Transportation Research Board (TRB), a division of the US National Academy of Sciences.^[1] The first director of the program reporting to the Governor was Alan Altshuler; the project manager was Walter Hansen.

Comprehensive re-evaluation of areawide transportation plans was a major theme in the last quarter of the twentieth century for large US cities. The US Department of Transportation has said "the prototype for these reevaluations was the Boston Transportation Planning Review"[1]. Scope of the BTPR studies included evaluation and upgrading of all four MBTA mass transit rail lines and examination of every major highway and arterial project in the region.