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Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

Short answer: yes. I've lived in or around Boston for ~36 of my 41 years. The word "expressway" is no longer farcical, and the hideous rusted green monstrosity that used to cut off the waterfront from the rest of the otherwise very walkable city has been replaced by the aptly-named "greenway" linear park.... it's so much better I can hardly believe it. Yes, public transit needs more and better investment. Yes, the BD suffered from corruption and inefficiency. But, this lifelong Bostonian sees it as a messy, expensive, insufficient but necessary step in bringing this awesome little city into modernity.

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I lived in Boston in the mid nineties for about three years, doing shipping logistics that served the downtown & surrounding areas. I didn't have a frame of reference, and really only ever knew the city in the midst of that debacle, having to design courier routes throughout the area. Needless to say I was intimately familiar with the Big Dig.

I had the pleasure of returning to the city in 2015 for a brief bit of work with my current company and was utterly blown away at the transformation of the boulevard, the green spaces, the visual beauty...and just the sense of openness and lightness. I felt like I could breath easier just walking down the street.

It's a shame to have had to overpaid so dearly for that, but what an amazing result. It was a great city before, but this just felt next-level.

As a new resident of Boston I have to say the linear park is great. Food trucks + eating in and walking through that park during the summer transforms what would be a soul-crushing concrete jungle into a pleasurable place to unwind during lunch.

I completely agree. I returned to Boston after 10 years away and was floored by the transformation.

I see it as flushing away a huge amount of technical debt that we had incurred over the last 100 years, hopefully setting us up for modernization on many fronts - which is quite a big deal when you consider it's competing to be a top tech hub.

"Expensive" spans a whole range of values. The Big Dig was $24 billion.

For point of comparison, the population of Boston is around 700k, and the per capita income is 33k. That's... $23 billion.

I support infrastructure projects, and at this point think we should consider the Big Dig a learning experience and not a political punching bag. But can we really say it's a success, considering the countless other uses of the money that we had to pass on?

What about the increase in property value, and all the other ways it improved Boston's air quality and overall look?

A fair question, but any benefit from property value increases is limited to the landowners.

I assume there are property taxes (and capital gain taxes?) in Boston...

If you're suggesting that the tax gains offset the costs, you're welcome to demonstrate that.

That's really disingenuous. The greater Boston area is 4.5M people [1]. For comparison, it's like saying New York City is only 1.6M (the population of Manhattan [2]) when the population of New York city is 8.5M total.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan

How is it disingenuous? The point is to give a sense of scale of $24 billion, since it's pretty easy for people not to know what $24 billion looks like.

Because the number of people it aids is much larger than the population of people in the confines of Boston proper.

It's always worth pointing out that the only reasonable way to compare or talk about regions is at the level of the MSA. Every "city" has its own weird (often very silly) political boundaries, but they are basically irrelevant when talking about regional issues.

Edit: I don't think it's disingenuous, though. People genuinely do get confused about the difference between what a thing really is and what a thing is officially called.

Saying all of greater boston benefits from the big dig is equally disingenuous. I technically grew up in greater boston and I live a 45 minute drive from Boston with no traffic. With traffic that can be 90 minutes. I live a 10 min drive from Providence RI. As with most things in life, the answer is probably in the middle somewhere. :)

The big dig made a dramatic and historic transformation of a major city. In terms of a public works project, it was enormously successful.

It was expensive, but so are lots of other projects and practices. How many unnecessary & duplicative military bases do we operate in the South?

The benefits of the Big Dig are confined to the excellent removal of the hated green monstrosity. (Not to be confused with the beloved Green Monster) The new greenway park brings the city back together and makes us ache once more for the West End that was raped and smashed and destroyed by so-called Urban Renewal.

The new underground freeway is a waste. Twenty billion dollars were buried for a road that does little for outer suburb traffic and nothing at all for Boston. The best thing would have been to knock down the Central Artery and replace it with nothing at all.

Or we could have had a North Station-South Station connector. You could have that as a cheap cut-and-cover subway for 1% the price of the Dig. You could find a way to demolish the new City Hall along the way; that hideous thing has to go. It would be a bit slow and have a turn or two at that price but would be fantastic for transit service.

A major reason putting that underground was a goal was to capture and filter emissions, which has definitely helped. Keep in mind too that the whole projects was designed decades before many newly modern construction techniques.

Just demolishing the Central Artery and replacing it with nothing would reduce emissions even more.

I've read that some of the old cities of Europe are so difficult to get around in as to constitute a significant drag on economic activity.

Same here. It was expensive and fraught with issues in making it (including poorly glued ceiling panels when they opened it), but now it seems pretty great. I can get from Somerville to Dorchester or the airport in minutes on 93.

Sure, it's "worth it" when taxpayers pay for most of the price, but would drivers thing it was worth it if the tunnel had a $5 toll to pay for it?

I personally hate traffic enough that if I had to chose between a commute in bumper-to-bumper congestion in the late 90s across an entire city or paying a $5 daily toll to avoid it, there is no question I'd go with the later, and I imagine a lot of people would agree.

This is the kind of project that makes much more sense to be paid for by taxes than tolls. The primary goal wasn't to make commutes faster, it was to improve the city and boost the economy on a significant scale. Tolls are a regressive tax, they tax the working and middle class who have to commute, and the shipping companies who just pass on the expense to retailers and consumers (I'm not sure what the distribution of industrial/commercial shipping volume is, but I imagine that food and other consumables account for the majority).

When it's paid for by taxes, you have the corporations who can now hire people from outside the city more easily, the tourism industries, and other entities that are actually reaping the most from the project paying for a proportionally larger amount than your average driver. Not only is that more fair, that the only way such a project could ever get funded.

Isn't requiring driving itself a form of regressive tax? Forcing people to purchase and maintain expensive cars, pay for gas, pay for expensive downtown parking, etc?

"Here's this nice shiny new road, it's yours for free! All you have to do is pay $500/month in car expenses to use it. For Free!"

And improving one road requires further improvements to other roads as traffic increases due to induced demand. City streets (and parking) is extremely expensive to improve, so after you spend billions of dollars to feed cars into downtown more efficiently, how do you address downtown congestion and parking?

As someone who works a block from the big dig, I can say that street traffic is generally not an issue. People generally use the big dig to commute through Boston, or to get to the airport, not to get downtown. (There's not much downtown for tourists!)

Those in the suburbs (of which I was one) drive to train/subway stations on the outskirts and take those in. You'd be an absolute fool to try to drive into the mess of one-way streets that is downtown Boston unless you have a really good reason.

Public transit used the same roads, no one "requires" one to drive.

Ahh yes, "Here you go, since you can't afford a car, you should ride this nice shiny bus! Picks up you blocks from home, drops you off blocks from work, and guaranteed to take at least a long as a car commute, but probably much longer!"

Buses make good feeders to trains, but aren't so good for main routes. If you want people to use transit, it needs to be usable.

BRT is a good compromise.

I've done a cross-town bus commute and that was a good commute, the bus was crowded, but tolerable for 15 - 20 minutes. But then I moved and tried a longer distance bus commute from the suburbs to work, but didn't stick with it as it took 45 minutes longer than driving (30 minutes by car, 75 minutes by bus), and dropped me off a 15 minute walk from work. I could bike in about the same amount of time as taking the bus. A road accident meant that the bus could take even longer since it had to sit in the same traffic.

My current commute is much farther by miles, but shorter by time because I now live where I can take a train. Limited stop express trains are great. Full grade separation would be even better (to reduce delays due to accidents), but taking the train is faster than driving so I wouldn't even consider taking the car.

In all fairness to the parent, Boston-area tolls are rather patchwork and a periodic political football. There are tolls in the tunnels, on the Tobin Bridge, and the Mass Pike (which connects to 93, the main highway in the Big Dig from the West). There is, however, no toll on 93 in Massachusetts--there is in NH. So drivers coming in from the West or the North Shore get hit by tolls. Those coming in from 93N or 93S don't.

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