Boston 2024

The Brattle Group was paid to produce a report. They delivered what they were paid to produce. It will be useful in the postmortems and case studies.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...ficials-say/U0664w7BMeTVCMtY3mSXbO/story.html
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Having glanced at several sections of the report dealing with costs, the Brattle Group basically says that Boston 2024 pulled numbers out of the air, or, if you will, out of their ass.

I assume the Brattle Group gave a 'heads up' to Baker, which caused him to be ambivalent about the bid. It would not surprise me if this was also informally communicated to the USOC, and thus they issued the ultimatum, which neither Baker or Walsh were willing to meet. Pulling the Boston bid gave the USOC about a month lead time if getting a second city ready for the bid.
 
2024 responds:

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Edit:
Source: https://twitter.com/KyleClauss/status/633759728502501380
 
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What a truly pathetic response by B24. Unsigned, and appears to have been written by a junior staffer or maybe a volunteer. And why does it exist as a png image file?

With respect to their particular point about budgeting only $50 million for the broadcast and press centers, the issue was, as pointed out in Davies' interview with the Globe, that B24 had not found a building to lease, and were having great (and understandable) difficulty even identifying potential buildings. Thus, the bid would go forward to the IOC without a building(s) to be constructed, or a building(s) under lease, i.e., no media buildings whatsoever. And if B24 became the host city, what was to happen in 2020 if there was still no press/broadcast building to be leased?
 
stellarfun said:
What a truly pathetic response by B24. Unsigned, and appears to have been written by a junior staffer or maybe a volunteer. And why does it exist as a png image file?

With respect to their particular point about budgeting only $50 million for the broadcast and press centers, the issue was, as pointed out in Davies' interview with the Globe, that B24 had not found a building to lease, and were having great (and understandable) difficulty even identifying potential buildings. Thus, the bid would go forward to the IOC without a building(s) to be constructed, or a building(s) under lease, i.e., no media buildings whatsoever. And if B24 became the host city, what was to happen in 2020 if there was still no press/broadcast building to be leased?
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I pulled it from Twitter.
 
stellarfun said:
I know. I saw the usual twitter pbs.twimg address string for tweeted images.

However, there is no such tweet on the Boston 2024 twitter account.
https://twitter.com/Boston2024

nor any news release,
https://2024boston.org/news-events/newsroom/

so whomever wrote the response either was not authorized to post anything on twitter or the newsroom, or those sites are effectively disabled, and nothing new can be posted.
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My source was Boston Magazine's Kyle Clauss, who was their main Olympics reporter. Presumably, they sent the release to the media via PDF or something and he screenshotted it for the public.

https://twitter.com/KyleClauss/status/633759728502501380

I'd recommend following him. He's very entertaining.
 
Oh well. Until you can lease existing dorms for the Olympic Village, Boston gets a stadium of some sort that could be used for an Olympic stadium and the IOC shows some flexibility with the host city guarantee, then I don't see any Boston bid being viable.
 
data, thanks for the source. Both the Globe and Herald articles take a few quotes from the Boston 2024 response. The Globe provides no link to the response, so perhaps they also received the response as an image file.

The full response on the Clauss twitter account is even more of a professional embarrassment, and reveals a high level of incompetence of at least some on the B24 staff. E.g., the Brattle Group compared B24's cost estimate for a temporary stadium with Chicago's estimate for a temporary stadium. Brattle chose not to compare the B24 stadium cost in version 1.0 ($350 million) with the cost in 2.0 ($175 million); the version 2.0 stadium had 15 percent more seats.

As the Brattle Group noted, nobody has ever built a temporary stadium of that size, and the B24 2.0 estimate was unrealistic and a high risk for over-run. B24 never explained in the 2.0 bid how the cost of the temporary stadium was halved. (They did shift the cost of the platform from the organizing committee to the master developer.)

To say that B24 provided Brattle with its estimates for the cost of steel, plumbing, electricity, HVAC for various venues is meaningless, if one doesn't have a venue design, or even a site. Most are special purpose facilities, and often the only good measure is the cost of comparables. IMO, that B24 seems so blind or ignorant of this speaks volumes about a bid that increasingly looks to have been put together by amateurs.

(And if one is going to png a press release via twitter, put a link to the original on imgur, or similar, which can scale up the resolution.)

Finally, nobody at B24 was willing to put their name to the release. Why is that?
 
stellarfun said:
Finally, nobody at B24 was willing to put their name to the release. Why is that?
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Probably for the same reason newspapers don't put names on their editorials. It's an organizational statement. The lack of a name isn't particularly unusual or noteworthy.
 
jdrinboston said:
Probably for the same reason newspapers don't put names on their editorials. It's an organizational statement. The lack of a name isn't particularly unusual or noteworthy.
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Editorials appear in the newspaper, so one can reasonably assume that the editorial represents the view of the newspaper.

As for the Boston 2024 response, it does not appear on any of the following sites:

https://www.facebook.com/boston2024

https://twitter.com/Boston2024

https://instagram.com/boston2024/

https://2024boston.org/news-events/newsroom/

https://2024boston.org/news-events/newsroom/press-releases/

https://2024boston.org/news-events/fact-sheets/

As its unsigned and not to be found on an official B24 site, how is one to know whether the response is the position of the B24 leadership, or simply the handiwork of an unhappy and possibly unemployed staffer?
 
Why does Boston 2024 still exist as an organization? What do they do all day?
 
statler, shutting down an operation is not done overnight. There are leases, contracts, rentals to be terminated, property to be sold or disposed of. Records to be collected, retained, and sent/stored wherever. etc. I would expect those that are still there are quite busy, and will be so for months. .
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data, thanks. Though I find it interesting that a spokesperson presumably can't access any of B24's media accounts.
 
Well here's what Boston 2024 is doing post-bid... writing their own report:
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2015/08/21/boston-2024-rebuttal/

So what’s left to save? Face, mainly. (A spokesperson for Boston 2024 did not respond to Boston magazine’s inquiries regarding who is composing the responses, if they are being paid to do so, or if there are any plans to deliver on those one or two “signature projects.”)
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Please make a mental note of how empty all commuting modes are in Boston in August: both this past week and predicted for this coming. Also note how the line is shorter at your favorite coffee shop, and how Starbucks selections of breakfast sandwiches stays full all day (instead of favorites selling out before lunch)

This is the set of un-loaded Boston systems (including slow traffic on the ArchBoston site) over which the O's would have been overlaid, only lighter, just like the DNC in 2004. It would have worked just fine with tweaks, not billions on infrastructure.

Paradox is: by definition, nobody is here to witness the non-peak.
 
Okay. But, the "system" didn't work in 2004 - the Orange Line was shut down. And, some people have said that Route 93 into the city was, too.

Just last night, the Red Line was shut down due to a track fire, causing a mess of a commute for anyone taking the subway - and, anyone driving through downtown, as the roads were shut to traffic near South Station.

That can happen anytime, summer or winter, with the same public transportation system or a better one. The problem for Boston is that most of its activity takes place in a tiny area and what happens in one place dramatically affects what happens elsewhere.
 
JohnAKeith said:
Okay. But, the "system" didn't work in 2004 - the Orange Line was shut down. And, some people have said that Route 93 into the city was, too.

Just last night, the Red Line was shut down due to a track fire, causing a mess of a commute for anyone taking the subway - and, anyone driving through downtown, as the roads were shut to traffic near South Station.

That can happen anytime, summer or winter, with the same public transportation system or a better one. The problem for Boston is that most of its activity takes place in a tiny area and what happens in one place dramatically affects what happens elsewhere.
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Problems that disrupt city transportation systems happen in every city. You just don't pay attention because you don't live there.
 
I'm not trying to start an argument, just suggesting it's a complicated situation.

And, after I wrote what I wrote I started thinking about NYC and how it was able to (successfully?) handle transportation post-9/11 and post-Sandy. I think LA can handle the Olympics a lot easier than we could have. You'll be in one part of that city and hardly even realize it's going on in another part.
 
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