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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

"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?

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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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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