https://www.wbur.org/news/2015/07/27/why-boston-olympics-bid...
But, at the end of the day, it was a huge improvement for Boston even if traffic is still mostly pretty bad. Just getting rid of the elevated highway to reconnect downtown to the North End is a big improvement for the city--as is airport access which was pretty ridiculous before.
Money spent ensuring that some jerk in his apartment downtown didn't have to look at a highway is money not spent improving the T or fixing other highway problem points for a sum total of the same or better economic effect.
Making transit options not suck increase property values regardless of how you make them. It's the results that matter. Green Monster V2 that yielded the same transit times between various points would have had the same economic effect.
And this ignores the fact that the state let all sorts of infrastructure go into disrepair over the course of the project and we're still digging out of that hole.
You also have the ongoing Seaport buildout and, as you say, Boston (and Cambridge) was well-positioned in any case to take advantage of technology/science industries and many educated young professionals moving back into cities. (The Cambridge biotech/pharma buildout had very little to do with the Big Dig for example.)
On the other hand, the Big Dig did improve downtown and airport access in various ways so I'm not sure the degree to which the Seaport expansion would have been possible without fairly large-scale road work. (And, yes, the public transit infrastructure done to service the area is sub-optimal.)
I was hoping they would get it for that alone… but I want nothing to do with ever hosting it locally.
Most countries have plenty of athletic facilities. Adding / expanding local facilities seems wasteful.