10 years later, did the Big Dig deliver?

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10 years later, did the Big Dig deliver?

The $15 billion project is a road paved with failures, successes, and what-ifs.

December 29, 2015

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It was our obsession spanning three decades, the kitchen renovation that would never end, fodder for late-night television jokes. The Big Dig was no mere act of public works, never talked about in the way New Yorkers refer to the Lincoln Tunnel or the George Washington Bridge?—?infrastructure that cleanly does its job. Ours was the mega project of faulty epoxy, light fixtures dropping like pine needles, Ginsu guardrails, and sea water leaks. The boondoggle, good money after bad, the white elephant.

As the most expensive highway in US history, the Central Artery and Tunnel project had a special, contradictory destiny: an engineering marvel deemed to be ill-conceived from the start. We stood on the sidelines darkly, shaking our heads, exercising Yankee pessimism honed by generations of not winning a World Series. This thing would never work out. There was too much opportunity for incompetence and corruption. They’d blow the save in the ninth inning and we’d all go home unhappy.

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