Posted on 12/19/2003 11:51:27 AM PST by theDentist
BENEATH BOSTON With a tellingly simple ribbon-cutting ceremony, the last underground segment of Boston's Big Dig project opens Friday - completing major construction on one of the most complex and controversial engineering projects in human history.
It may not look as dramatic as the Hoover Dam, but the revamp of traffic flows in one of America's oldest cities rivals any past US public-works project in complexity - and outpaced them all in cost.
Its effects will be felt for decades and far beyond Boston: It is changing commuting habits here, may influence the prospects for any similarly large-scale efforts in the future, and has hit the pocketbook of almost every taxpayer in America.
But the Big Dig's scale - at its peak it employed 5,000 construction workers - was rivaled by high costs that have been a source of controversy since the project's inception in 1987 - after President Reagan tried unsuccessfully to wield a penny-pinching veto pen.
That's one reason the city will celebrate this weekend with a whimper rather than a bang - or even a pop. The Boston Pops concert scheduled for underground Thursday was canceled. After spending $14.6 billion (up from an initial forecast of about $4 billion in today's dollars), leaders and taxpayers weren't in the mood to shell out an several hundred thousand dollars for the show.
"It will be a mixed legacy," says David Luberoff, associate director of Harvard's Taubman Center for State and Local Government. "For a lot of people in the region it will be seen as a major positive addition. The farther you move from Boston, the less positively people will view the project."
The two-mile-long underground road will ease commutes - at least for a while - reconnect the city with the harbor, and replace an eyesore of a highway with a necklace of green spaces. Already, the spindly Zakim bridge over the Charles River has become a landmark on the city's skyline.
The city won't reap the full benefits for at least another year, when the hulking overhead highway is finally torn down and traffic patterns are completed. But this weekend's opening is surely the end of an era here. And as traffic flows underground, the city can finally assess whether it was worth the wait - or the price.
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Well, it's like this: Every rinky dink "organization" held up the project for stuff like [neighbor] [ethnicity] [chip on
shoulder] a statue for something that didn't really have anything to do with the neighborhood, Boston, MA, or the US
taxpayer in return for not opposing the project.
Then, there's the shakedown by LEO's for paid details.
Then, no sh*t, if they came across a sh*t hole from pre-1950, they would have to shut down the work until archeologists
could sift through it.
That's in addition to all the expected delays, like weather, graft, and corruption.
Hey - They need something for Teddy, too.
Maybe they can leave a dirt road and a bridge.
Six months from now, the Boston Globe will be wailing, "they told us 'mission accomplished six months ago, and they're still working!! They lied!!"
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