Boston's Dirty Secrets.

The Mammoth Big Dig Highway Project Shortchanges Transit

Depending on who you ask, Boston's Big Dig, a mammoth undertaking designed to replace the city's aging central highway infrastructure with an eight-lane underground tunnel, is either one of the wonders of the known world or a colossal boondoggle, the biggest waste of $13.6 billion ever conceived. Not up for debate, however, is that the project has run massively over its original $2.5 billion budget, and is now so late that the last hard hat won't get removed until 2005, 14 years after the first spade went into the ground.

So big is the Big Dig that, according to Dick Bauer, a Greater Boston Legal Services attorney and bike enthusiast, "There's now no money in Massachusetts for any other transportation project." This is the largest public works project in U.S. history.

There's no question that Boston-area commuters need some relief. The city's Central Artery, an elevated six-lane highway running right through the heart of the city, was built in 1959 and was basically obsolete before it was even completed. The highway, typical of neighborhood-destroying urban renewal projects of its era, cuts the city in two, isolates the waterfront, and mindlessly bypasses Logan Airport. The Big Dig is supposed to sort all that out with a tunnel to the airport, an underground highway with 30 acres of parkland above, five new interchanges and two new bridge crossings over the Charles River.

The press has been merciless about the Big Dig, daily bannering headlines about new corruption investigations, lawsuits, construction delays and cost overruns. The project was included in The Boston Phoenix's "Best of Boston" issue--as "Best Waste of Taxpayer Money." Congressman Tom Petri (R-WI) awarded it the "Porker Award." And Fred Salvucci, former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation and one of the project's central architects, derides it now as a "violation of environmental justice." He bristles with vitriol as he points out that transit links have been cancelled, low-income neighborhoods have been violated by 50-foot ramps that were supposed to be underground, and park expansions have fallen by the wayside.

The state's own attorney general, Scott Harshbarger, teamed up with Boston's Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) and sued every agency involved in the Big Dig for their failure to keep their promises about improving the city's bus and transit lines. Seth Kaplan, a CLF attorney, says the suit, now settled, demanded that the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority (MTA), the project's overseer, live up to its commitments with upgrades to subway service, cleaner buses, improved ferry service and better park-and-ride facilities.

Last June an unnamed whistleblower also filed suit, charging that the project contained at least $10 million in "false claims." According to Ron Killian, the MTA'S manager of environmental permits and procedures, just to get the Big Dig approved the contractors had to make more than 2,000 individual commitments to get through the bureaucratic hurdle of 1,000 different permit actions.

Given all that, it's not surprising that Sean O'Neill, MTA's spokesman, was somewhat defensive when he led a tour for 12 interested Bostonians last summer. O'Neill, who calls himself a "professional spear catcher for the biggest show on Earth," says, "There's a hulabaloo around this project because it's not happening in a field in Kansas, but instead right in the heart of an historic city."

O'Neill assured the visitors in hard hats and safety vests that simply fixing the Central Artery as it is would cost $6.5 billion. "We're trying to improve air quality in Boston," O'Neill contends. "Right now it's like sucking a tailpipe with all the idling cars stuck in traffic."

Population increases, urban sprawl and an ongoing love of the automobile have produced massive infrastructure bills that are now coming due in America's central cities. Don Chen, director of the Smart Growth Program at the Surface Transportation Policy Project in Washington, points out that Washington is itself undergoing similar headaches with its improvements to the notorious Springfield Interchange, a/k/a "The Mixing Bowl." Originally projected to cost $300 million, the early-stages project has already ballooned to $450 million. "Cost overruns are a matter of course with highway projects," Chen says. "To get the Big Dig built, a lot of commitments and promises were made early on that were not upheld. This is becoming politics as usual."

"What's your biggest gripe?" O'Neill asked the group. "Traffic and the fact that it's taking too long," they said, almost in unison. Complaining about the Big Dig has become almost as much a ritual in Boston as baked beans. Also vocal are residents of western Massachusetts, who have seen their transit projects wither as $8.5 billion of state money was committed to the Dig, now a clanging construction site that runs the length of central Boston, 7.8 miles of infrastructure and 161 lane miles.

Huge steel girders were being dropped into place by 10-story cranes, and hundreds of cables were being readied for the seemingly impossible feat of lining up 45,000-ton concrete tunnel sections to within a sixteenth of an inch. Men clung to metal gridwork on the tunnel walls like flies caught in spider webs. "Proud to be Union Tunnel Workers," read a truck bumper sticker. O'Neill looked around admiringly. "If we didn't do this project, we might as well shut down Boston," he said, ignoring the fact that the city was practically shut down anyway.

Even so, there is much to admire in the Central Artery Project. Sergiu Luchian, MTA'S intelligent transportation systems manager, explains that the new high-tech highway will boast 430 closed-circuit TV cameras, 300 lane control signals and 10 variable speed limit message boards so the equivalent of air traffic controllers can keep the cars and trucks moving. There are fire alarm pulls every 150 feet in the tunnels (with five-minute dispatch times), the world's most sophisticated ventilation system, and even a radio system that re-transmits local radio stations underground (and can be interrupted to send drivers emergency messages). A specially designed MIT traffic simulator helped to create a system that can (at least on paper) handle 300,000 vehicles every 24 hours, 13,000 an hour. "It's all in tunnels, so it's even crazier than what air traffic controllers do," says Luchian.

For all its splendor, however, the new interchange will probably end up illustrating the smart growth principle that you can't build your way out of congestion. In July, Massachusetts Environmental Affairs Secretary Robert Durand said that what the Boston Globe called "a glittering new neighborhood on South Boston's mostly desolate waterfront" would probably be doomed to failure because of nightmarish projected traffic congestion. And that's with the addition of a planned Silver Line underground bus system, the transit crown jewel in the multi-billion-dollar Central Artery Project. Even if the Silver Line is filled to capacity, he said, it "will not be enough." CONTACT: The Central Artery/Tunnel Project, [phone], www.bigdig.com; Conservation Law Foundation, [phone], www.clf.org.