While the CA/T project (
The Big Dig is the media's name for it) has certainly had its share of problems (cost overruns, corrupt political fiascos, etc.), those who think that the Big Dig consists of just a big
tunnel and a couple of roads, consider what's actually being built, and the way it's being done...
- A 7.5 mile road (161 lanes miles) has to be built, half of it underground, by excavating 13 million cubic yards of earth and laying down over 3.8 million cubic yards of concrete. These new lanes of highway have to built directly underneath existing roads that service almost 200,000 vehicles a day, meaning that the entire infrastructure had to be moved onto new supports.
- The showpiece Leonard P. Zakim bridge - a mammoth 10 lane cable-stayed bridge (with two of those lanes cantilevered on one side) must be built next to the existing structure. This is the largest bridge of its type and the first built with an asymmetric design.
- The Ted Williams Tunnel, the third harbor tunnel, doubled Boston's harbor tunnel capacity when opened in 1995. Built on-time and within budget, the 1.6 mile bridge received the Excellence in Highway Design award from the U.S. DOT. It was built out of 300-foot steel tubes shipped from Baltimore, lowered into a trench dug by the world's largest dredging machine.
- Extensions must be built from the Mass Turnpike (I-90) and Route 1-A to the Ted Williams Tunnel. The extension of the Mass Turnpike required the construction of a dry dock the size of an aircraft carrier, and the tunnel itself is made from concrete sections, the first time this has been done in the United States.
- The four lane Leverett Connector Bridge, built alongside the showpiece Charles River Bridge, was completed in 1999 one week ahead of schedule. It was built from North America's largest box section girders.
- On top of that, countless access roads and tunnels have been built to keep construction vehicles off regularly travelled roads.
Aside from these massive construction efforts, most of which contain words like 'largest in North America' and 'first ever', the project also calls for a huge environmental undertaking...
- Spectacle Island, once a mountain of decaying garbage, leaking nastiness into the harbor, has been transformed into a recreational area. Over 3 million cubic yards was added to cap the island, a dike built to contain soil erosion, trees planted, walking paths construction, and visitors center built complete with docking access for public ferries and recreational vehicles. The 100 acre island will become a part of the Boston Harbor Islands State Park.
- Three land fills next to the Blue Hills Reservation have been capped to create the Quarry Hills Park. The new public park will feature two golf courses, four baseball fields, and two soccer fields.
- An artifical reef system, the northernmost in the United States, was installed between Spectacle and Long Island to create a new habitat for blue mussels and other shellfish. The reef system creates 88,000 square feet of new ocean floor surface area.
- The CA/T project is also responsible for the restoration of eighteen acres of wetlands at the Rumney Marsh in Revere.
- The removal of the rusting, green overpass that is Route 93 will create 27 acres of parks to add to the 140 acres that the CA/T is creating separately.
Now, when you consider that all of this going on in the midst of everyday traffic, and add to that the separate construction of the
North Station facility, the impending development of the
Seaport District, and the expansion and modernization of
Logan Airport, and you can see why a lot of people are pissed off at the
clusterfuck that Boston's infrastructure has become.
But step back and look at the big picture. They're doing this without bringing the city to a complete halt. They're doing this amidst notoriously corrupt politicians eager to get their fingers in the Big Dig pie. And they're doing this using techniques that didn't even exist when the project was first proposed with equipment that they had to invent. I think you should expect a few problems here and there.
Some people have called this a major embarassment for Massachusetts. I think of it as the opposite. When it's all done, this may be Boston's finest hour.