Next big highway project?

[Jahvon09]

The Big Dig was a ripoff.

A $26b piece of crap!! There were so many things wrong with this project on so many levels that it stunk to the highest level of stinking!!

A report came out several years ago that said that the Big Dig not something that other major U.S. cities would like to try. Ever!!

 

[George_Apley]

RAR VENTING!

 

[davem]

I just spent the past half hour trying to find an old post of mine to quote, but my google-fu failed me.

To paraphrase, in a generation no one will remember the cost overruns, or the piece of the roof that fell. Sure the CA/T has some deficiencies, but the same can be said for all of the rapid transit lines, or the interstates as built. I'm sure if you dig through the globe archives people were bitching about corruption, shoddy workmanship, blown budgets, etc in the 1860s just as much as today. No one riding the green line says "what a waste Adams Square station was, and I cant believe how many people died digging it!"

The point is, the CA/T is one of the best things to happen to Boston, and in 100 years when people are going through it, that's all they will see; everything else will fade into the background. It's unfortunate that the most remarkable project of the last generation was a repair of one of the biggest mistakes of the past century, but it is what it is. Sure it could have been managed better, but I'd love for someone to argue that a surface highway, an open cut, or a replacement viaduct would have been better.

The debt will eventually be repaid, the N/S link provisions will eventually be used, the greenway will continue to grow and evolve, the ramp parcels will be dealt with, buildings will continue to reorient themselves towards the scar, and new development will continue. Even with all of the negatives, the big dig is an overwhelming win for Boston in the long term. Nothing that's happening along the waterfront, in the seaport, or Bullfinch triangle would be happening if the CA/T hadn't. I would argue it's a large part of the reason the city is currently immersed in the biggest building boom since before the great depression.

It's time to move on. (Well, we are. I'd say the Beacon Park realignment, Rutherford Ave/Sullivan Square reconstruction, and overpass demolitions are the next step in what the big dig started. Without it I doubt you'd see the energy and enthusiasm for these projects. I think the overruns also helped to curtail excessive spending, MassDOT is certainly operating much leaner than it did in the 90s.)

 

[atlantaden]

Nice summary, Dave! The Big Dig was the best thing that happened to the city of Boston in recent years.

 

[paperless paul]

Agreed Davem. Well put.

 

[kjdonovan]

It's unfortunate that the most remarkable project of the last generation was a repair of one of the biggest mistakes of the past century, but it is what it is...
It's time to move on.

Boom. Well said. The gift of the CA/T is that healing other highway scars across the city now appears measly in comparison. In the next 15 years the area between Rt 28 and Rt 99 (and the roads themselves) will undergo dramatic change. Despite stagnancy on air rights projects, there is much development adjacent to the Pike (Fenway projects, South End projects, New Balance). Lower Allston is ripe for redevelopment with a Pike straightening.

Though not grand in scale, I'd suggest Soldier's Field Road and Charlesgate as two pain points that market won't fix on its own. Untie the Soldier's Field spaghetti around the Harvard's Allston campus and connect the Emerald Necklace to the Charles. And while we're dreaming, throw in a westbound Turnpike exit at Fenway to lower Storrow traffic.

 

[mass88]

The Big Dig was a ripoff.

A $26b piece of crap!! There were so many things wrong with this project that it stunk to the highest level of stinking!!

A report came out several years ago that said that the Big Dig not something that other major cities would like to try. Ever!!

Seattle is currently in the process of burying the Alaskan Way Viaduct in downtown Seattle.


While the Big Dig did have some issues, by and large it has gone a very long way to making downtown Boston a heck of a lot nicer. It's a night and day difference, imo. I struck up a conversation with a person visiting from Houston the other day and he was blown away by what a difference burying the Central Artery has made for Boston. The last time he was up here was in 1999.

 

[Jahvon09]

In essence, and to me, the only thing that they did was take all the traffic jams & other problems that were upstairs and put them downstairs.

There were cutbacks, kickbacks, bribery, thievery, trickery, sloppiness, crappy construction and every other monkey wrench that was thrown into the program actually was.

An innocent woman on the way to the airport to catch a flight and be with her family was killed in the I-90 connector tunnel because of crappy epoxy cement that was used to secure the ceiling panels in place.

Managers were Donald Trumped because basically, the program was mismanaged poorly supervised. Not to mention that the city & state's taxpayers and motorists had to foot part of this snafu through no fault of their own!

If you haven't been inside the I-93 tunnel, then you probably haven't seen the deplorable conditions there and the fact that it is being so poorly maintained. The walls of the tunnel look like they haven't been washed in decades!!

And now, the ceiling lights have to be replaced in all three tunnels because the supporting brackets onto which they are mounted have all rusted prematurely and need to be replaced.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Did you even drive the Elevated Artery pre-BD? The traffic jams are in NO WAY comparable. There were so many poorly-placed exit ramps and bad merges that traffic locked 18 hours a day. And zero breakdown lanes anywhere to absorb an accident or breakdown, while the O'Neill has strategically placed turnouts and constant monitoring to quickly drag a disablement out of the way. All that with considerably smaller overall traffic loads because Boston has grown so much in the 11 years since the O'Neill opened and 19 years since the Ted opened.

Stratospheric difference. 93 is taking on incredibly bigger loads with all the area growth, and the traffic jams are now limited to rush hour, a lunchtime spike, and a late- Sat. morning spike instead of all-day, 7 days a week. And truck traffic--and more traffic overall--is now shaped around 128, much more capable of absorbing it, instead of blasting through the heart of downtown without stopping in town.

The only things really borked about traffic right now are the deficient interchanges intersecting 128--Braintree split, Canton split, Burlington, Reading (I wouldn't even group Weston/Pike in the same universe as those Big 4). And the SE Expressway's lack of breakdown lanes making it fatally vulnerable to end-to-end locks with a single accident. That's pretty much it for major deficiencies.

• North of town the backups don't extend beyond the Somerville decks unless something goes really really wrong.
• The Tobin's not as bad as it used to be with the 93/1 interchange fixed, and should get better still with speed-limit tolls.
• The BD has cleaned up most of the downtown street grid jams that used to result from the excessive Artery exits.
• Leverett Connector pries off the Storrow and North Station jams from affecting the mainline highway. It sucks, but it's a self-contained suck and that was the entire goal of it.
• Sumner/Callahan Tunnels are pretty much free-flowing all hours of the day with the direct 93 connection not requiring city-street connections and the Pike sharing the Airport load. And that'll get better still WB with speed-limit tolls replacing the booths.
• The Pike rarely has any backups whatsoever at 93. It used to lock into the Pru tunnel EB because the interchange was so awful and so much traffic had to pile onto the Artery for 1A and Logan. It is now under-capacity downtown and has fungible expansion potential for displacing Storrow traffic. That was never the case before.

 

[Shepard]

Here's a little thought experiment: what if instead of the CAT, 93 through downtown was made discontinuous? Traffic from the Zakim dumped out at North Station or Leverett Circle, and SE Expressway traffic dumped out onto the Pike and South Bay city streets? Would the freeway dismantlement have, on its own, accomplished everything the CAT has at tremendous expense?

(Note that I'm not asking about other Big Dig projects like the TWT, City Square Tunnel, the Zakim Bridge itself, etc)

Another way to put this question: is (or was) a north-south highway artery through downtown actually necessary or even desirable?

 

[datadyne007]

Here's a little thought experiment: what if instead of the CAT, 93 through downtown was made discontinuous? Traffic from the Zakim dumped out at North Station or Leverett Circle, and SE Expressway traffic dumped out onto the Pike and South Bay city streets? Would the freeway dismantlement have, on its own, accomplished everything the CAT has at tremendous expense?

(Note that I'm not asking about other Big Dig projects like the TWT, City Square Tunnel, the Zakim Bridge itself, etc)

Another way to put this question: is (or was) a north-south highway artery through downtown actually necessary or even desirable?

Seriously? I... can't even...

 

[bigeman312]

Here's a little thought experiment: what if instead of the CAT, 93 through downtown was made discontinuous? Traffic from the Zakim dumped out at North Station or Leverett Circle, and SE Expressway traffic dumped out onto the Pike and South Bay city streets? Would the freeway dismantlement have, on its own, accomplished everything the CAT has at tremendous expense?

(Note that I'm not asking about other Big Dig projects like the TWT, City Square Tunnel, the Zakim Bridge itself, etc)

Another way to put this question: is (or was) a north-south highway artery through downtown actually necessary or even desirable?

I would say necessary, but not desirable. Here is my guess (if there are number that prove me wrong, so be it):

There were enough people already driving between points south and north of downtown for which 128 would have been enough out of the way that they would have taken city streets between points. This would have hurt their quality of life and the quality of life of people living in and around Downtown Boston. I would say the fairy tale option would have been to improve transit options including the North Station-South Station connection to the point where the CA/T would only have needed to be 2 or 3 lanes with fewer ramp parcels along the Greenway. Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I think there needs to be a North-South highway through Boston of some kind to carry traffic, sadly.

 

[Shepard]

I... can't even...

Really? Why? Isn't the downtown freeway concept one tremendous induced demand trap? Far larger cities like London get by well enough without an end-to-end central artery. In London, you drive into the city on motorways that end miles from the center, then become divided roads that look quite a bit like Route 9 into the center, and then typically jumble out the way Huntington does at Copley.

 

[Equilibria]

Here's a little thought experiment: what if instead of the CAT, 93 through downtown was made discontinuous? Traffic from the Zakim dumped out at North Station or Leverett Circle, and SE Expressway traffic dumped out onto the Pike and South Bay city streets? Would the freeway dismantlement have, on its own, accomplished everything the CAT has at tremendous expense?

(Note that I'm not asking about other Big Dig projects like the TWT, City Square Tunnel, the Zakim Bridge itself, etc)

Another way to put this question: is (or was) a north-south highway artery through downtown actually necessary or even desirable?

This has been discussed many times before. What you have to remember is that through traffic doesn't only mean trucks from New Hampshire going to Providence. That's being carried by 128 and 495. Through traffic is people from Medford and Malden going to Logan (and how exactly would you access the Sumner and Callahan in this thought experiment?) or South Bay, or people from Quincy accessing North Station.

The Central Artery isn't just a through route. It's also a distributor.

This is, in my mind, the damage wrought by the Embarcadero. It's beautiful. It's also not applicable to many other cities. The Embarcadero Freeway was a glorified on-ramp, the stub of an unfinished interstate killed by a freeway revolt. It went nowhere and carried very little traffic. It also was damaged beyond repair by a natural disaster and the city simply decided not to replace it, because doing so would have been pointless. The other oft-cited example in Portland is the same story without the earthquake: fairly minor road with only one end connected to anything. These are not relevant examples to I-93 (or, for that matter, to Seattle, which is why they're building a tunnel just like Boston did).

Really? Why? Isn't the downtown freeway concept one tremendous induced demand trap? Far larger cities like London get by well enough without an end-to-end central artery. In London, you drive into the city on motorways that end miles from the center, then become divided roads that look quite a bit like Route 9 into the center, and then typically jumble out the way Huntington does at Copley.

London and Paris have spectacular traffic problems. Monumental ones. They "get by" only because they (A) have equally spectacular transit coverage, and (B) people there accept traffic as part of the landscape and a necessary evil to maintain the historic character of those cities.

 

[CSTH]

The Central Artery isn't just a through route. It's also a distributor.

.

Right on the money. This is the whole ball game.

The original sin was placing the Sumner Tunnel portal in the middle of downtown. Everything since has been an attempt to accommodate that placement.

 

[datadyne007]

Really? Why? Isn't the downtown freeway concept one tremendous induced demand trap? Far larger cities like London get by well enough without an end-to-end central artery. In London, you drive into the city on motorways that end miles from the center, then become divided roads that look quite a bit like Route 9 into the center, and then typically jumble out the way Huntington does at Copley.

You want to dump all of that traffic into the neighborhoods of Boston? This seems absurd. As others have said, I-93 is not a through-route by any means.

Also, why did you change 007 to 009?

 

[paperless paul]

Really? Why? Isn't the downtown freeway concept one tremendous induced demand trap? Far larger cities like London get by well enough without an end-to-end central artery. In London, you drive into the city on motorways that end miles from the center, then become divided roads that look quite a bit like Route 9 into the center, and then typically jumble out the way Huntington does at Copley.

London does have the layout you describe, with very few limited access highways running through the city.

However, I think you have simplified the view a little. Consider the following:

Compared to Boston, London has
(a) far worse intracity traffic - from 8am to 8pm
(b) arguably similar to slightly worse ex-urban regional highway traffic (i.e. M25, M1, M4)
(c) far greater population (i.e. 3x, 15m to 4.5m) (wikipedia)
(d) uses a $18 / vehicle/day congestion charge
(e) has far superior mass transit including underground, regional rail and bus

It is currently on course to spend (intriguingly) $25bn on Crossrail a East/West regional rail system.
Unquestionably London is far better off as a city off for not having driven large highways thought its urban core, unlike it's 19th century railway lines. And I would agree it 'gets along all right' as is.

But ultimately the question is the political and social choices we make to deal with the congestion which is a natural outcome of a successful urban area. London has chosen a congestion charge and mass transit. But also a fair bit of sprawl and restricted urban development.

Boston has mostly made different choices. CA/T was a very large and specific steel and concrete answer to this question. I think it's a healthy discussion to have.

 

[atlantaden]

Really? Why? Isn't the downtown freeway concept one tremendous induced demand trap? Far larger cities like London get by well enough without an end-to-end central artery. In London, you drive into the city on motorways that end miles from the center, then become divided roads that look quite a bit like Route 9 into the center, and then typically jumble out the way Huntington does at Copley.

Ok, so explain to those who live on the south shore how many hours it would take to get to the airport, say, from Bridgewater, if we drove into the city on old route 28 as you're suggesting those in London do now? 3 hours? 4? Before the Big Dig, it took at least 1.5 hours depending on the time of day and that was coming up major highways (24, 128, 93, Callahan/Sumner Tunnels). Post Big Dig, the drive from Bridgewater might take an hour during heavy periods and on light traffic days, 40 minutes. A huge difference.
The Big Dig was nothing less than an engineering marvel and, without it, Boston would have strangled itself on traffic. The building you see today in all parts of the city can directly or indirectly be attributed to the Big Dig. The Big Dig was the quadruple bypass that the transportation heart of Boston needed. Just my take on things.

 

[Shepard]

Okay, sorry everyone - no more thought experiments today... I promise!

Also, why did you change 007 to 009?

Unclear...

 

[mass88]

Did you even drive the Elevated Artery pre-BD? The traffic jams are in NO WAY comparable. There were so many poorly-placed exit ramps and bad merges that traffic locked 18 hours a day. And zero breakdown lanes anywhere to absorb an accident or breakdown, while the O'Neill has strategically placed turnouts and constant monitoring to quickly drag a disablement out of the way. All that with considerably smaller overall traffic loads because Boston has grown so much in the 11 years since the O'Neill opened and 19 years since the Ted opened.

Stratospheric difference. 93 is taking on incredibly bigger loads with all the area growth, and the traffic jams are now limited to rush hour, a lunchtime spike, and a late- Sat. morning spike instead of all-day, 7 days a week. And truck traffic--and more traffic overall--is now shaped around 128, much more capable of absorbing it, instead of blasting through the heart of downtown without stopping in town.

The only things really borked about traffic right now are the deficient interchanges intersecting 128--Braintree split, Canton split, Burlington, Reading (I wouldn't even group Weston/Pike in the same universe as those Big 4). And the SE Expressway's lack of breakdown lanes making it fatally vulnerable to end-to-end locks with a single accident. That's pretty much it for major deficiencies.

The fact that you can have a major freeway responsible for carrying a large volume of cars and almost all of it lacks breakdown lanes is a problem.

Apart from the current widening project on 128, the only major needs for this region's highways would be to rebuild and expand key interchanges that you have mentioned above. One of the biggest problems with the highways in this state are the interchanges themselves, and then the lack and proper merging and exiting lanes at key areas.

Here's a little thought experiment: what if instead of the CAT, 93 through downtown was made discontinuous? Traffic from the Zakim dumped out at North Station or Leverett Circle, and SE Expressway traffic dumped out onto the Pike and South Bay city streets? Would the freeway dismantlement have, on its own, accomplished everything the CAT has at tremendous expense?

(Note that I'm not asking about other Big Dig projects like the TWT, City Square Tunnel, the Zakim Bridge itself, etc)

Another way to put this question: is (or was) a north-south highway artery through downtown actually necessary or even desirable?

There's no way that would ever work. Boston roads are too narrow and out of whack to make that feasible. This is not a city that is laid out in a grid with a lot of roads being 3 and 4, or even 5 lanes. There are very few major cities in this country that do not have a freeway running right through its downtown, or very close to it.