Boston 2024

If the IOC were to pick the United States, it would be a travesty, yes TRAVESTY, if the games were not in NYC or Chicago.

New York City has no room , so it would be Jersey or Connecticut they had there chances and blew it. The last remaining parcals will be redeveloped as High Density Developments.... Philadelphia , Chicago and many other cities still have land to build on.
 
New York City has no room...

This is simply untrue. Yes, the proposed parcels for the 2012 olympic bid are being redeveloped, but there is much more land to be used, you just need to look for it. I am not going to spend a while looking so I will just name one site off the top of my head: Sunnyside Yard in Queens. It's multiple times the size of West Side Yard and certainly big enough to hold the Olympic Village and the Main Stadium if need be. It also has great transit access. Maybe parcels in Manhattan are hard to come by, but there is certainly a lot of opportunity remaining in NYC.
 
This is simply untrue. Yes, the proposed parcels for the 2012 olympic bid are being redeveloped, but there is much more land to be used, you just need to look for it. I am not going to spend a while looking so I will just name one site off the top of my head: Sunnyside Yard in Queens. It's multiple times the size of West Side Yard and certainly big enough to hold the Olympic Village and the Main Stadium if need be. It also has great transit access. Maybe parcels in Manhattan are hard to come by, but there is certainly a lot of opportunity remaining in NYC.

Except Sunnyside Yard is the layover yard for Amtrak trains in New York, and is not going anywhere any time soon.

Good try, though. Anywhere else? Hey, I bet Central Park is large enough to hold the Olympic Village and the Main Stadium!
 
Except Sunnyside Yard is the layover yard for Amtrak trains in New York, and is not going anywhere any time soon.

Good try, though. Anywhere else? Hey, I bet Central Park is large enough to hold the Olympic Village and the Main Stadium!

Even that will be developed on ,and that's a complex decking process...
 
Except Sunnyside Yard is the layover yard for Amtrak trains in New York, and is not going anywhere any time soon.

Good try, though. Anywhere else? Hey, I bet Central Park is large enough to hold the Olympic Village and the Main Stadium!

No need to be condescending. I was referring to decking it over which is what they are doing with the West Side Yards. The area around CitiField in Flushing is another example. The notion that NYC has NO developable land is untrue. You just have to be creative. It's not going to hit you over the head like some cities. Developing hard to develop areas seems like far smaller of an obstacle than all of the infrastructure upgrades that would be needed in Boston, not the least of which would be expanding our unexpandable airport, building something that resembles a state of the art transit system nearly from scratch.
 
Thread started as a discussion of how Boston might be able to get the Olympics but is now a game plan for NY to try again. If that isn't a vote of no confidence in the Bean don't know what is. NY=player Bean=water boy
 
No need to be condescending. I was referring to decking it over which is what they are doing with the West Side Yards. The area around CitiField in Flushing is another example. The notion that NYC has NO developable land is untrue. You just have to be creative. It's not going to hit you over the head like some cities. Developing hard to develop areas seems like far smaller of an obstacle than all of the infrastructure upgrades that would be needed in Boston, not the least of which would be expanding our unexpandable airport, building something that resembles a state of the art transit system nearly from scratch.

No more condescending than the notion that it would be a "travesty, yes TRAVESTY, if the games were not in NYC or Chicago."

At least using the Olympics as leverage to build a state of the art transit system in Boston would provide something of legitimate worth to the city and pay huge dividends well into the 22nd century. Better still if we could spend someone else's money to make it happen.

Our airport doesn't need to expand, either. Washington has three airports, New York has three airports, we have three airports. Our problem is that it's extremely difficult to get into Boston from two of those three airports. (KPVD, KMHT.)
 
I've always thought Boston would work better for the Winter Games. We already have all of the required indoor facilities, and the only transportation upgrade we'd need would be a high speed rail line to some place in New Hampshire for hosting the Alpine events. We would still need a stadium for opening/closing ceremonies, but that could be built above the Southbay interchange, and then repurposed for soccer.
 
I've always thought Boston would work better for the Winter Games. We already have all of the required indoor facilities, and the only transportation upgrade we'd need would be a high speed rail line to some place in New Hampshire for hosting the Alpine events. We would still need a stadium for opening/closing ceremonies, but that could be built above the Southbay interchange, and then repurposed for soccer.

That's actually a good idea. Particularly if the NH Capital Corridor can manage to get off the ground. We could run an extension out to Plymouth for access to the White Mountains, and run some limited-stop expresses from Manchester Airport to North Station (and T.F. Green to South Station) to funnel in people for the Games.
 
You could also have some of the winter events at Wachusett, which the new Wachusett station would be very handy for.
 
Boston 2024? Three words:

New. Brighton. Landing.

It's as if they know something they're not quite ready to share yet.
 
Boston 2024? Three words:

New. Brighton. Landing.

It's as if they know something they're not quite ready to share yet.

Huh??

I'm seriously at a loss here.

What are you trying to insinuate? No, seriously? "One new commuter rail station on a line that needs a hell of a lot of work (much like every other commuter rail line in Boston)" -> "gearing up for a 2024 Olympics bid" seems like a hell of a logical leap.

I mean, if Bev Scott gets up and announces the MBTA Transit Improvements equivalent of Fast 14 some time this month, then sure, I might be inclined to believe that someone was getting ready to make a play - but we've got a long ways to go.
 
New Brighton Landing is not just a commuter rail station. It's essentially an Olympic village, complete with "Olympic quality" everything, track, pool, courts, etc. Hotel, future residential, retail, comprehensive medical care... New Balance has repeatedly stated at community/BRA meetings that they are striving for a world-class venue. This is also evident in the PNF.
 
New Brighton Landing is not just a commuter rail station. It's essentially an Olympic village, complete with "Olympic quality" everything, track, pool, courts, etc. Hotel, future residential, retail, comprehensive medical care... New Balance has repeatedly stated at community/BRA meetings that they are striving for a world-class venue. This is also evident in the PNF.

World-class venues aren't necessarily Olympic venues, and considering what business New Balance is in, it makes sense that a) they'd want as many opportunities to showcase their products without resorting to direct advertising as they can possibly get and b) they'd want the free exposure and good publicity coming from a world-class venue that (in what I'm sure is a complete coincidence!) everyone seeking to use the New Brighton Landing station has to walk through.

And my point still stands that with the rest of the Worcester Line (never mind the rest of the network!) in the state that it's in, it's going to be a hell of a lot less attractive than it could be. I'm not convinced.
 
New Brighton Landing is not just a commuter rail station. It's essentially an Olympic village, complete with "Olympic quality" everything, track, pool, courts, etc. Hotel, future residential, retail, comprehensive medical care... New Balance has repeatedly stated at community/BRA meetings that they are striving for a world-class venue. This is also evident in the PNF.

Actually, now that SBW is built on, Beacon Park is one of the well-situated pieces of land where a temporary Olympic Stadium could go. By 2024 if you started today you could rebuild the A/B tolls and Turnpike into a Y-Interchange feeding into North Harvard St. with the Turnpike laid flat along the south edge of the property like so many of us want. Harvard's renovated stadium, new basketball arena and Agganis are all easy walking distance, along with athletic complexes at New Balance, BU, Harvard and MIT. Put a DMU station there and it's a 2-seat ride from the Airport on the SL/DMU. Put the Olympic Village at North Point (essentially build exactly what they're already building) and close Mem Drive to all non-Olympic traffic for 2 weeks with constant shuttles.

As I've said before, the Olympics are a massively wasteful enterprise that typically leaves cities in debt, but that plan isn't so bad. The A/B toll rebuild is necessary and the stadium site could be carved up into a city grid afterwards. The Olympic Village is an already-proposed and financed housing development with a new T Station already approved. There's plenty of venues in walking distance and along the river axis (you could run water taxis between them), so I'm not sure many new ones would be necessary. You'd certainly get SS expansion out of it, and maybe even a rethink of GLX to connect to a Riverbank Subway in a perfect world, since that line would connect the stadium and village.

Chicago didn't get the games in 2016 because of issues between the USOC and IOC that have apparently been resolved since. Frankly, their bid was better than the others and they should get another crack at it since they got cheated last time. I think San Francisco has ruled it out after the America's Cup thing went so wrong and the 49ers moved to Santa Clara. New York had enough after the 2012 bid and they have no stadium site. Boston's no Atlanta - it's one of America's most well-known and well-liked cities for Europeans and has an international profile as a center for learning, finance, and high-tech industry. It could work. I'm just not sure I'd want to try.
 
I'm just not sure I'd want to try.

Let me be certain enough for both of us, then - I agree with you in that the Olympics are a massively wasteful expenditure, and if other world-class cities want to piss away money on hosting them, who are we to get in the way of that?

If the IOC or the various sponsors of the Olympics want to spend their money on us, that's great, but that's not how this works, is it? I don't want us to spend money on them unless we're getting something of actual value from it - something like a world-class, state of the art transit system.
 
World-class venues aren't necessarily Olympic venues, and considering what business New Balance is in, it makes sense that a) they'd want as many opportunities to showcase their products without resorting to direct advertising as they can possibly get and b) they'd want the free exposure and good publicity coming from a world-class venue that (in what I'm sure is a complete coincidence!) everyone seeking to use the New Brighton Landing station has to walk through.

And my point still stands that with the rest of the Worcester Line (never mind the rest of the network!) in the state that it's in, it's going to be a hell of a lot less attractive than it could be. I'm not convinced.

They ARE being designed as Olympic-standard facilities. The track will be hydraulically controlled, one of ~6 in the entire world.
 
Let me be certain enough for both of us, then - I agree with you in that the Olympics are a massively wasteful expenditure, and if other world-class cities want to piss away money on hosting them, who are we to get in the way of that?

If the IOC or the various sponsors of the Olympics want to spend their money on us, that's great, but that's not how this works, is it? I don't want us to spend money on them unless we're getting something of actual value from it - something like a world-class, state of the art transit system.

How wasteful they actually are is a bit uneven actually and varies with which Olympics you're talking about. I believe Atlanta actually made money on the games, for instance. The concept of the Olympics as a huge debacle is buoyed by the times that was absolutely the case, primarily in Montreal and Athens (Montreal has the distinction of having the Olympic debacle give birth to an even bigger SNAFU at Mirabel, while the 2004 games partially led to the collapse of the entire Greek economy).

Obviously, the wastefulness of the games increases with every new structure you build and every new speculative risk you take. As I said above, I don't think an Olympic Village at North Point is that speculative - the developer is confident enough that those units will sell that it's building them even without the games. Temporary stadia are a big efficiency boost, and unlike Athens or Beijing Boston has a glut of 3,000+ seat venues which in many cases are kept in good states of repair by educational institutions with deep pockets.

Boston's advantage is that the major infrastructure costs for the Olympics would actually be on infrastructure, and locating the games in the city would mean that all of that investment would actually be useful after the games (unlike London's speculative new rail lines/stations, for instance). If you list off the projects that would likely cost the most - Turnpike improvements, refurbished GL stations, DMUs and SS expansion... which of those really sound wasteful to you? It's a whole heck of a lot better sounding than the Forbidden City of arenas in Beijing...
 
How wasteful they actually are is a bit uneven actually and varies with which Olympics you're talking about. I believe Atlanta actually made money on the games, for instance. The concept of the Olympics as a huge debacle is buoyed by the times that was absolutely the case, primarily in Montreal and Athens (Montreal has the distinction of having the Olympic debacle give birth to an even bigger SNAFU at Mirabel, while the 2004 games partially led to the collapse of the entire Greek economy).

Obviously, the wastefulness of the games increases with every new structure you build and every new speculative risk you take. As I said above, I don't think an Olympic Village at North Point is that speculative - the developer is confident enough that those units will sell that it's building them even without the games. Temporary stadia are a big efficiency boost, and unlike Athens or Beijing Boston has a glut of 3,000+ seat venues which in many cases are kept in good states of repair by educational institutions with deep pockets.

Boston's advantage is that the major infrastructure costs for the Olympics would actually be on infrastructure, and locating the games in the city would mean that all of that investment would actually be useful after the games (unlike London's speculative new rail lines/stations, for instance). If you list off the projects that would likely cost the most - Turnpike improvements, refurbished GL stations, DMUs and SS expansion... which of those really sound wasteful to you? It's a whole heck of a lot better sounding than the Forbidden City of arenas in Beijing...

I believe it would absolutely be a massive waste of money if the world's largest traveling circus rolled into town, yes. I also believe that absolutely nothing built in association with the Olympics would be "temporary." Fortunately, like you are saying, not very much needs to be built specifically for the Olympics.

And as I said, if we can milk this thing for a world-class transportation network, that'd be enough to get me to go along with this. In fact, that's the bare minimum of "what Boston gets from the Olympics" that I need before I can claim to support it.
 

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