Boston 2024

What's the practical limit on distance for the mountain events? Could all other winter sports be held in Boston and the mountain sports be in Vermont?
 
bigeman312 said:
These would need to be 110 miles+ (not to mention with massive investment in infrastructure such as highways and rail to get to and from the locales of the events). This proposal is D.O.A.
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Isn't this whole thread about the summer olympics anyways? I know in the last page it jumped to the winter games (understandably so), but for the summer games, this proposal is hardly D.O.A.
 
It does raise the question of how big the "metro area" can be for Olympic host city purposes.

Both Sydney and London permitted themselves to scatter the football (soccer) venues around the host country (Brisbane, Melbourne, and Adelaide, in Sydney's case). For London, the sailing venues were 125miles away.

For Boston, I'd reckon that a plausible bid could have some venues as far away as Portland, Worcester, Providence, and Hyannis (sailing!) based on frequent rail access.

And with buses (bus access is OK, y'a know) perhaps especially evocative things like tennis in Newport RI, and whitewater sports in/along/tapping the Blackstone or Merrimack
 
Arlington said:
Both Sydney and London permitted themselves to scatter the football (soccer) venues around the host country (Brisbane, Melbourne, and Adelaide, in Sydney's case). For London, the sailing venues were 125miles away.
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Just for the hell of it I wanted to see where a 125mi radius gets us

http://www.freemaptools.com/radius-around-point.htm?clat=42.35816337240789&clng=-71.06205940246582&r=201.17&lc=FFFFFF&lw=1&fc=00FF00&fs=true

we get, all of Mass, with the exception of the town of Mt. Washington, Ma., we can reach as far south as New Haven, as far up I-95 as Freeport Maine, We get North Conway and Attitash-Bear peak, and just barely get Loon mountain. Which is unfortunate because I like cannon a lot better than Loon, and it's just about 10 miles outside of the 125mi radius
 
Good read as to why Boston should NOT hold the Summer Olympics

http://www.boston.com/sports/column...winter_a_boston_olympics_is_a_ridiculous.html

And one point that I want to really emphasize is upgrading the infrastructure. Imagine if Boston wins the Olympics and has like what, less than a decade to upgrade the transit system. It's going to take 2 years to rebuild G/C. It took decades to just plan the extension on the Green Line. Imagine if the whole city has to shut down a good 30% of the MBTA to make infrastructure improvement in phases over a course of around half a decade. For nearly a decade, the city will see congestion probably as bad as pre-Big Dig all for what? Three weeks? No thanks. The city already had to put off upgrading Government Center for months because of the Callahan Tunnel renovation. I would hate to live in Boston if they have to do similar projects all in a tight window.
 
We'd have to suffer that pain regardless of whether the olympics were happening or not. The olympics just forces us to rip the band-aid off rather than do it over the course of 30 years.
 
KentXie said:
Good read as to why Boston should NOT hold the Summer Olympics

http://www.boston.com/sports/column...winter_a_boston_olympics_is_a_ridiculous.html

And one point that I want to really emphasize is upgrading the infrastructure. Imagine if Boston wins the Olympics and has like what, less than a decade to upgrade the transit system. It's going to take 2 years to rebuild G/C. It took decades to just plan the extension on the Green Line. Imagine if the whole city has to shut down a good 30% of the MBTA to make infrastructure improvement in phases over a course of around half a decade. For nearly a decade, the city will see congestion probably as bad as pre-Big Dig all for what? Three weeks? No thanks. The city already had to put off upgrading Government Center for months because of the Callahan Tunnel renovation. I would hate to live in Boston if they have to do similar projects all in a tight window.
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You are getting cynical with age. Another 10 years and a mortgage and you'll be a dyed-in-the-wool NIMBY.

You don't do infrastructure upgrades for "three weeks." You do infrastructure upgrades to have better infrastructure in perpetuity. Day 1 of the "three weeks" is the deadline to get stuff done. The last day of the "three weeks" is not the last day the infrastructure gets used.

The key, essential linchpin is to ONLY propose to build things that have a chance of finishing on time and to ONLY propose to build things that the city really needs or can legitimately repurpose. If the USOC or IOC doesn't like the proposal, then they can reject us.
 
KentXie said:
Imagine if Boston wins the Olympics and has like what, less than a decade to upgrade the transit system.
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By what evidence do you conclude that Boston needs to upgrade its transit system to have one better than Los Angeles did in 1980, or Atlanta in 1996?

Do not cite crowded rush hour trains. Your transit-life may be full of woe, but the reality is that the MBTA is a large system that works.

August is a traditionally very light commuter month in Boston anyway. Multiple factors suggest that the T would basically be sufficient as is:

1) Locals "break" their rush-crush commuting patterns during things like this (we see this for the Marathon and saw it for the Dem Nat'l Convention), and, it would be July/August, when enough people are out of town to decongest the rush.

2) Olympic events are staggered and do not create a single rush of even the size of a Boston rush hour

3) Altanta's MARTA (rail) moves 250,000 per weekday. T subways {light + heavy rail transit} moves 530,000, and has, beyond that, whole commuter rail system that Atlanta hadn't .

4) MBTA has 1000 buses. Atlanta? 600.

I believe we could make the Olympics work with (pretty much) what we have--and it should only be on that basis that we bid for it.

So I find it frustrating that both proponents and opponents assume somebody's going to build a gold-plated transit system "for us" and that on *that* basis the Olympics are either a good idea (if you like transit and don't ask where the money is coming from) or a bad idea (if you like setting up straw-men arguments against the Olympics).
 
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KentXie said:
Good read as to why Boston should NOT hold the Summer Olympics

http://www.boston.com/sports/column...winter_a_boston_olympics_is_a_ridiculous.html
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He spent most of the article building up the idea of the Winter Olympics only tearing it down in the last two paragraphs that can be simply stated "we won't sell enough t-shirts". He had 3 small paragraphs attacking the summer with actually 1 paragraph talking about reasons - and it just a list - no listing what bottlenecks or reasons it can't be modified or something like actual numbers showing no enough hotel rooms or extreme construction costs.

There's lots of reasons Boston shouldn't host, but he made a terribly structured argument. That was a terrible read.

KentXie said:
And one point that I want to really emphasize is upgrading the infrastructure. Imagine if Boston wins the Olympics and has like what, less than a decade to upgrade the transit system. It's going to take 2 years to rebuild G/C.
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A fair point. A bad sign of a mere station will take that long.

KentXie said:
It took decades to just plan the extension on the Green Line.
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Not so fair. How much of those decades were really "planning" versus the kicking and screaming to hire anyone to plan. This is an absurd point.

KentXie said:
Imagine if the whole city has to shut down a good 30% of the MBTA to make infrastructure improvement in phases over a course of around half a decade. For nearly a decade, the city will see congestion probably as bad as pre-Big Dig all for what? Three weeks? No thanks. The city already had to put off upgrading Government Center for months because of the Callahan Tunnel renovation. I would hate to live in Boston if they have to do similar projects all in a tight window.
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Now this is the part I wanted to write. Because this is the greatest irony.
That's the pretty much comprised the positive words for the Olympics: The idea it would make Boston build its long list of infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. And ironically your issue to the Olympics is the idea of building such infrastructure. I for one like the idea of at least seeing if not using such infrastructure (who knows where I'll be in 10 years) younger than older (if at all).

You know what would make it not worth it? If we do this Olympics, somehow spend a ton of money, but somehow mean no infrastructure project. Then all of this is a waste of money (unless it is somehow profitable, but I'm measuring this by infrastructure).
 
ant8904 said:
He spent most of the article building up the idea of the Winter Olympics only tearing it down in the last two paragraphs that can be simply stated "we won't sell enough t-shirts". He had 3 small paragraphs attacking the summer with actually 1 paragraph talking about reasons - and it just a list - no listing what bottlenecks or reasons it can't be modified or something like actual numbers showing no enough hotel rooms or extreme construction costs.
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First off, Eric Wilbur is a pathetic excuse for a sportswriter. I've been fuming at his crap for years. It isn't well-thought-out, adds nothing to the discussion, is usually filled with bitter fear mongering and bullying of players (or, in this case, the 2024 Committee), and is generally just an excuse to get an el cheapo version of something Shaughnessy wrote in front of the paywall. In this case, it's even more blatant, as Bob Ryan wrote basically this same piece last week.

The Winter Olympics discussion is not worth having. The USOC has now openly said that they're pursuing 2024 over 2022, in part because of the larger size of the event (and thus potential fundraising and sponsorship money) and in part because you really need 10,000 foot mountains to convince the IOC to give you the Winter Games. Only 2 cities in the US have access to mountains that big - Denver, which will never ever get a bid again, and SLC, which hosted in 2002.

Wilbur found a couple of fansites to use as strawmen for his rant, one of which said that Boston should simply go for 2026 if 2024 fails. Not possible. By the time a 2024 bid would fail, it would be too late to start planning for a completely different logistical effort in 2026. Boston will only get one chance at this anyway, since we don't have the luxury of a Paris or Rio or Pyongchang as the only viable hosting site in our country. If we fail, the US will make a 2028 bid with a different city. If DC or LA fails in 2024, we might get our shot the next time.

Wilbur and Ryan both cut to the heart of this issue, though. Whether Boston CAN host an Olympics is not, to me, in doubt. We can. The IOC might not give us the chance to do it right, but we can do it. London has broken even on their investment (quite modest as compared to Sochi or Beijing). There is, however the question of if we SHOULD.

That question is a visceral one either way. I tend to believe that if it can be done without blowing ourselves up financially and in a way that bestows permanent infrastructure bonuses on the region, then the chance to do something this singularly special - to bring the world's attention here, show off this region and represent our country as a matter of pride - is well worth the three weeks of headaches. Don't compare it to the DNC. This is so much bigger than that.

Now, you can also have the visceral negative reaction that Ryan, Wilbur, and so many others have had: "We don't need this headache and these stupid dreamers want to hassle us all." The hassle won't be as bad as that, since any traffic tie-ups outside of the Olympic weeks will involve projects you'll want to happen regardless (like the A-B straightening or Red/Blue). For the rest, there is no answer that will be persuasive. I would just rather that my city participate in the larger world and its traditions rather than sneering at "lesser" cities and countries that do.
 
A good article in the globe today about an alternative to spur development. Has anyone else heard of these international building exhibitions in Germany? I need to do some research, but it seems like a much better way to pump some money into improving sections of the city.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/02/25/boston-doesn-need-olympics-upgrade-hamburg-shows/NLZ9jJ1z1ysQ7oTIjThVdP/comments.html

BOSTON IS a city of broken subway cars and leaky highway tunnels, a city that hasn’t had the will and the money to make game-changing investments in housing and transportation for decades. And now there’s a movement to bring the 2024 Olympics to town. This is a monumentally bad idea for a number of reasons, from logistics to finances. But the biggest reason lies in the supposed benefit of hosting the Olympic Games, the billions in public investment in new transportation and housing.

The Olympics are the costliest, most roundabout way imaginable of remaking a city’s face. The Games are a weeks-long party at the far end of a grueling seven-year construction odyssey. The supposed public payoffs, like new subway cars and apartment towers, are incidental to the Olympic effort. They’re also far more expensive than they need to be.

Boston doesn’t need the Olympics to do big things. If the region is serious about spending gobs of money to modernize itself, it shouldn’t get mired in throwing billions of dollars at an athletic exhibition. It should look past London and Barcelona, and instead, take a hard look at Hamburg.


German cities have been hosting international building exhibitions for more than a century. The exhibitions, known by the acronym IBA, are years-long building sprees aimed at spurring innovation in real estate development. IBA exhibitions turn German cities into labs for new urban architecture. They’re building competitions aimed at tackling thorny problems and doing big things.

The first IBA worked to bring artistry to mass-produced housing, and subsequent exhibitions dove into repairing war-torn Berlin and breathing new life into post-industrial cities. IBA Hamburg, which wrapped up late last year, focused on urbanizing a disjointed, suburban-feeling island neighborhood through environmentally aggressive new housing. These are the Olympics of development, but it’s development with a purpose.

Without the cost of the Games, Hamburg spent far less than London and got more.


London sold the 2012 summer Olympics on a promise to use the games to transform the run-down neighborhoods of the city’s East End. The city sunk billions into new road and transit links to the area, and spent heavily to turn a dingy industrial wasteland into a shimmering collection of parks, stadiums, and apartments. It’s an impressive turnaround. But it’s also hugely wasteful.

Tacking this turnaround project onto the Olympics seems to admit that, in London’s case, investing in poor neighborhoods was only politically palatable as an add-on, as the 10-cent toy at the bottom of a box of cereal. The vast majority of the massive sum spent on London’s 2012 Games — it cost the equivalent of $14.6 billion — went toward the Games themselves, not toward the urban revitalization project the Games left behind.

Most of the billions London spent went toward stuff that didn’t last. And the things that did last — the new transportation system, the thousands of apartments that used to make up the Olympic village — came at a huge markup. Taxpayers ate the equivalent of $460 million just on the sale of the Olympic village. If Boston suffered the same loss on the same-sized Olympic village, it would be the same as the Boston Redevelopment Authority forgoing affordable housing fees on the construction of 2,300 new apartments.

Hamburg’s IBA exhibition tackled the same sort of development agenda that London’s Olympic planners confronted in the East End. It confronted a poorer, heavily immigrant island of 55,000 across the river from Hamburg’s city center, and sought to turn it into a vibrant, mixed-use, mixed-income urban district that could create an alternative to suburban sprawl. Without the cost of hosting the Games themselves, though, IBA Hamburg was able to attack the city’s economic and environmental issues head-on. It created a network of schools and cultural centers to anchor existing residents, and attracted new middle-class residents with environmentally innovative housing development. It built new transportation infrastructure, bolstered the neighborhood’s flood protections, and built a new energy grid that puts the neighborhood on track to become carbon neutral by the 2020s. Hamburg did all this with a far smaller public investment than the one London swallowed. The city spent far less and got more.

The lesson for Boston is that a city shouldn’t need an excuse like the Olympics to build a better version of itself. All it needs is the will to challenge itself to be better.

Paul McMorrow is an associate editor at Commonwealth Magazine. His column appears regularly in the Globe.
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Arlington said:
By what evidence do you conclude that Boston needs to upgrade its transit system to have one better than Los Angeles did in 1980, or Atlanta in 1996?

Do not cite crowded rush hour trains. Your transit-life may be full of woe, but the reality is that the MBTA is a large system that works.
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Do not cite crowded rush hour trains? Why? Will rush hour suddenly disappear if the Olympics happen? Is rush hour not the two most important period of the day where, if broken, millions of workers are unable to produce any economic benefits? This is a lousy argument, which I'm assuming you're basing that it makes up a small amount of the day and thus skew the view. However, it's during these two periods that would affect the economic activity in Boston the most, and with millions of new tourists coming into the city without transit upgrade AND a growing population, in 10 years, the MBTA would NOT be able to handle the extra load.

Arlington said:
August is a traditionally very light commuter month in Boston anyway. Multiple factors suggest that the T would basically be sufficient as is:

1) Locals "break" their rush-crush commuting patterns during things like this (we see this for the Marathon and saw it for the Dem Nat'l Convention), and, it would be July/August, when enough people are out of town to decongest the rush.

2) Olympic events are staggered and do not create a single rush of even the size of a Boston rush hour

3) Altanta's MARTA (rail) moves 250,000 per weekday. T subways {light + heavy rail transit} moves 530,000, and has, beyond that, whole commuter rail system that Atlanta hadn't .

4) MBTA has 1000 buses. Atlanta? 600.
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1) Except that people will be coming into town for this occasion, not out of town. Not surprising, people will go out of Boston when there's nothing different to do (in a typical Boston summer), but we're talking about the Olympics here. That's the attraction, which can be said to be greater than a trip down the cape.

2) Regardless, a rush hour exist because business doesn't stop. You still will have to tack on the millions of additional tourists who would want to watch the Olympics or visit the city because the Olympics are being held here. The city has been seeing crush capacity on all four lines during these time whether they are holding the Olympics or not.

3 & 4) Here is where the misconception between Atlanta and Los Angeles and Boston. Both Atlanta and LA, when the city held the Olympics, were auto dependent. The people used their cars to travel around and the highways system were able to handle the additional traffic load. You're talking about the city of Boston where the majority of people are public transit dependent and the public transit as of now is insufficient to handle the additional load. Can they upgrade it by 2024? Yes but again that means 10 years of heavy congestion because a city so dependent on the public transit system have to overhaul nearly the entire system.

Arlington said:
I believe we could make the Olympics work with (pretty much) what we have--and it should only be on that basis that we bid for it.

So I find it frustrating that both proponents and opponents assume somebody's going to build a gold-plated transit system "for us" and that on *that* basis the Olympics are either a good idea (if you like transit and don't ask where the money is coming from) or a bad idea (if you like setting up straw-men arguments against the Olympics).
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And this is where you seem unable to comprehend how the IOC select their city. Yes it's fine if all you want Boston to do is submit a bid...and lose. The IOC isn't going to pick a city that's going with what they have. No, they want to choose a city that can provide them brand spanking state of the art facilities and infrastructures to hold their events. If another city is showing more effort to accommodate this, they won't give two sh*ts about the fact that Boston has a bunch of college sports arenas, few major sports stadiums, and a century old transit system.
 
I like Paul McMarrow and I liked the article. My question is - which is ultimately the root cause of me advocating for the Olympics - where is the political will? Who's ego is going to get fluffed by an IBA? Who is going to bring home some bacon? 1 or 2 state reps and congress-critters? I don't think that is enough.

If the governor's transportation bill got neutered, why would a housing initiative have more life? The whole point of the Olympics is that people's pride and ego get tied up in it and that creates a can-do, must-do attitude.

You can't just wish for all the results of a successful Olympics, minus the Olympics. We'll get business as usual. That is not the end of the world. This is a great city and it functions as-is and will continue to function with slow and steady improvements.

People seeking a shot in the arm have the Olympics to look to. No Olympics, no shot. Sorry. We will do fine either way, though I genuinely believe that bidding for the Olympics will be better for us than not bidding (force us to make a shopping list) and winning will be better than not winning (actually spend the money).

If Germany has a history of using this IBA thing and cities and politicians DO take pride in it, then it works for them. We have no such history here and you aren't going to impress a bunch of politicians with something they've never heard of.
 
KentXie said:
Do not cite crowded rush hour trains? Why? Will rush hour suddenly disappear if the Olympics happen? Is rush hour not the two most important period of the day where, if broken, millions of workers are unable to produce any economic benefits? This is a lousy argument, which I'm assuming you're basing that it makes up a small amount of the day and thus skew the view. However, it's during these two periods that would affect the economic activity in Boston the most, and with millions of new tourists coming into the city without transit upgrade AND a growing population, in 10 years, the MBTA would NOT be able to handle the extra load.
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You're doing emotions. You dream of infrastructure that nobody will buy you, and you fear an Olympic Committee that will shun you if you don't paint yourself gold, like a boy in a Medici pageant (who later dies)

You need to do math instead. Or actually just think quantitatively as a traffic engineer would.

The reality is that regular business *does* stop during the Olympics--it is part of the untabulated cost of hosting (and a reason to not host...the reality is cities do their profitable thing without bidding for an Olympics, and forego that when they host).

Atlanta was famous that its auto traffic dried up because regular 9-5 workers stopped working 9-5...they either left town or stayed home. They did studies on how air quality was so radically different because so few people were driving.

Or the locals went to Olympics events, which are not "rush hour" trip generators (they don't all start at 9am nor end at 5pm). The one biggie, 100,000 people at an opening ceremony is still only half a rush hour load, and occurs outside of working hours.

Instead, even with 1M visitors, the reality is they spread themselves across the day and across the two weeks, such that the Olympics generate a sustained busy-but-never-quite-peak load all day. 1M people making 100,000 trips per hour for 12 hours a day, is a busy day but not a crush-loaded system.

So rush hour becomes much *much* less of a factor (as we saw for the DNC...commuting dropped off just based on the general sense that it wasn't worth going into Boston unless you had DNC business).

It would be literally insane to size our transit system to handle "millions" of tourists and a full rush hour--to spend Billions sizing the system *as if* it was going to have to move 2x during it s rush hours. So let's put it this way, no serious traffic engineer is going to layer your hypothesized "millions" onto a normal Boston rush hour and say we have to size the system for that.

So, if, as you believe, the IOC will only pick us if we act insanely, well, then I suggest we not bid.

But I think you are wrong in that too. At some point, the IOC will realize that if they ever want to have a Summer Olympics in any North American venue ever again (and they do), it will have to be without some authoritarian national regime raining billions on the host city to gold plate itself.

So we're not going to be able to meet your needs for
1) A must-have Olympics
2) A must-have oversized transit system

Neither is realistic, and the two together only moreso.
 
The IOC isn't going to pick a city that's going with what they have.
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They did that in Los Angeles in 1984. That turned out pretty well, no? (It did help that this was LA's second Olympics.)
 
Concerns about the city's ability to develop the infrastructure necessary for an Olympic Games are a reason to not award the Olympics to that city, rather than a reason they should not bid for it.

Call me an optimist, but even I think that Massachusett's calcified political processes could get something done with the world's eyes on them.
 
bobthebuilder said:
Just for the hell of it I wanted to see where a 125mi radius gets us http://www.freemaptools.com/radius-around-point.htm?clat=42.35816337240789&clng=-71.06205940246582&r=201.17&lc=FFFFFF&lw=1&fc=00FF00&fs=true
we get, all of Mass, with the exception of the town of Mt. Washington, Ma., we can reach as far south as New Haven, as far up I-95 as Freeport Maine, We get North Conway and Attitash-Bear peak, and just barely get Loon mountain. Which is unfortunate because I like cannon a lot better than Loon, and it's just about 10 miles outside of the 125mi radius
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So, the interesting thing about Winter Olympics is that the Finalists for 2022 include Beijing, which proposes to do the alpine stuff in a city that is a 2h30min drive away (200km =~ 125 miles), and Krakow Poland with Jasna, Slovakia doing the Alpine (only 80 miles, but 2h45min drive on current roads)
 
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