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EARLY LAST WINTER, IN A TUNNEL under Boston’s
Fort Point Channel, Federal Highway Administrator Mary Peters
stood before a crowd of construction workers, engineers, and
dignitaries and spoke the words many Bostonians had longed
for: “I-90 is now complete.”
The January celebration, replete with brass band and ribbon
cutting, marked the finish of a 3 1/2-mile roadway, most of
it in tunnels, extending the Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90)
to Boston’s Logan Airport. The new roadway represented
an engineering feat that created a highway tunnel that, among
other challenges, stretched under railroad tracks near Boston’s
South Station and over a subway tunnel (built of unreinforced
concrete) in Fort Point Channel, a small waterway adjacent
to downtown Boston.
The event also signaled, after almost two decades of planning
and construction, fruition of the region’s $14.6 billion
Central Artery/Tunnel project (CA/T or known locally as the
“Big Dig”) — the most expensive public works
project in the nation’s history and perhaps the most
technologically complex highway ever built as well. The project,
which, in addition to the I-90 connector tunnel, also includes
an eight-to-ten lane stretch of underground highway in the
heart of downtown Boston and a major new bridge across the
Charles River, is scheduled for completion in 2005.
While enthusiasm for the project’s incredible technical
achievement ran high that day, some of the project’s
more difficult realities were left unstated, according to
the Kennedy School’s Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff,
authors of the recently published Mega-Projects: The Changing
Politics of Urban Public Investment. Co-published by the
Brookings Institution and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,
the new book reviews and analyzes the history of many major
projects, including the Big Dig project.
In particular, say Altshuler, a Kennedy School professor
and director of the school’s Taubman Center for State
and Local Government, and Luberoff MPA 1989, associate director
of the center, contrary to the conventional wisdom of the
mid-1970s, the unstated question posed by the project is not
whether we can build big projects, but whether the projects
we are building are worth the money we are spending on them.
Lessons Learned
Interviewed in Altshuler’s office, the authors explained
that while the project’s scale and cost are unique, its
history offers many important lessons about what it now takes
to build major projects in urban areas.
“Perhaps the project’s most important lesson,”
says Altshuler, “is that project planners and supporters
today face tremendous pressures to ‘do no harm.’
The rise of environmentalism in the 1970s made it difficult
for mega-projects to proceed if any significant group or area
might be adversely affected. No longer is doing the most good
for the greatest number of people an acceptable paradigm.”
Such was not always the case. In the 1950s and 1960s, states
and localities built new highways in urban areas, tore down
whole neighborhoods for urban renewal projects, and greatly
expanded existing airports (or built new ones on much larger
sites). In Boston such projects included the original elevated
Central Artery (to be torn down when the Big Dig project is
completed) and the Massachusetts Turnpike (see map). It also
included an entire new residential community (Charles River
Park), built on what had been Boston’s West End, a densely
populated residential neighborhood, and new runways and terminals
at Logan Airport, most of them built on land that had been
parks and houses a few years earlier.
While the construction boom had enormous cultural and economic
consequences, the projects were highly disruptive, often displacing
thousands of people and devastating urban parkland. “The
thinking back then,” says Luberoff, “was that the
impact should be sustained for the greater good. As Robert
Moses, New York’s famed master builder who oversaw the
construction of many highways and urban renewal projects was
fond of saying, ‘You can’t make an omelet without
breaking eggs.’”
Altshuler, who was Massachusetts secretary of transportation
in the early 1970s, played a central role at the time in stopping
many highways then planned for greater Boston and approving
the first planning studies for the artery depression. “Massachusetts,
like other states,” he recalled, “profited greatly
from the new highways but, also like them, it saw the extensive
disruption that major road building often causes, especially
when done within a major city.”
By the early 1970s, he added, public backlash against such
impacts, combined with new environmental laws, made it virtually
impossible to build such projects in urban areas.
In response, some public officials began to seek ways to
build projects that had fewer negative impacts and that mitigated
any remaining impacts. In the early 1970s, for example, Frederick
Salvucci, then a transportation advisor to Boston Mayor Kevin
White KSGP 1958, proposed replacing the elevated Central Artery
with a depressed highway whose construction not only would
not take any houses but also would allow the removal of an
elevated eyesore. Salvucci went on to pursue the project as
Governor Michael Dukakis’s secretary of transportation
in the mid 1970s, and, in 1983, when he and Dukakis returned
to office, Salvucci combined the artery depression idea with
the concept of building a third Boston Harbor tunnel connecting
Boston and its airport — a project long desired by the
region’s leading business groups.
At about the time Salvucci was first proposing the artery
depression, planners in New York City were suggesting a similar
scheme, later named Westway, to replace Manhattan’s aging,
elevated West Side Highway. This project was highly controversial
and was abandoned in the mid-1980s after a series of adverse
court decisions about the project’s environmental impacts
— specifically project efforts to ignore data showing
that Westway would harm fish in the Hudson River.
In a slightly different vein, in the late 1970s, California
officials broke a longstanding impasse over the Century Freeway,
a planned highway in Los Angeles. The project’s planners
agreed to reroute some of the road so it would not destroy
as many houses and to build (or renovate) more than 4,000
units of housing in partial replacement of the approximately
8,000 units of housing lost in the course of building the
road.
Other regions, in contrast, dropped highway plans and instead
chose to build new rail transit lines, which were much easier
to site. Meanwhile, few airports and runways were built after
the 1970s. Most airports did rebuild terminals to better accommodate
wide-body planes and new hub-and-spoke route systems. Similarly,
after urban renewal and its strategy of tearing down neighborhoods
came to an end in the early 1970s, most localities turned
to projects that were easier to site. Festival markets located
in historic buildings, such as Boston’s Quincy Market,
and new stadiums, arenas, and convention centers often located
in older industrial areas close to downtown office districts
became the new projects, all of which, note Altshuler and
Luberoff, exemplify the “do no harm” planning paradigm.
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Another lesson from the Artery/Tunnel’s history, they
say, is that projects are easier to build when local taxpayers
are not asked to pay a substantial portion of their costs.
Instead, projects are funded by higher-level governments or
(as is the case with many stadiums and convention centers)
via levies that fall most heavily on outsiders, such as taxes
on hotel rooms and meals.
“The Big Dig project,” says Altshuler, “illustrates
the quest for outside funding at a particularly grand scale,
but also shows how the best-laid plans can go at least somewhat
awry.” After an intense lobbying campaign in the mid-1980s,
the project’s advocates — mainly state political
and local business leaders — secured federal legislation
adding it to the Interstate Highway system. This meant that,
if all went well, the federal Interstate program would cover
about 85 percent of the project’s cost, then estimated
at $3.1 billion — funds over and above the state’s
normal allotment of federal highway aid.
In 1991, however, the project’s estimated cost having
risen to $5.2 billion, and with Massachusetts now the only
state in the nation still at work on its Interstate system,
Congress capped the project’s Interstate aid. Future
cost increases were now the state’s responsibility, says
Altshuler, and the project’s cost eventually rose to
$14.6 billion. “The result is that whereas special Interstate
funding was once expected to cover 85 percent of the cost,
the current estimate is 29 percent. Another 29 percent will
be drawn from federal aid streams allocated to the state by
formula, which could have been used for other state highway
and transit projects.” (See graph, right.)
The lesson, says Luberoff is that “while the Big Dig,
by almost any conceivable measure, is a wonderful project,
it would have attracted virtually no support if its ultimate
costs to Massachusetts had been known at the outset. More
generally, it seems true that when state and local taxpayers
expect that outside benefactors — whether higher-level
governments or merely visitors from other jurisdictions —
will cover most project costs, they pay little attention to
the question of whether benefits and costs are commensurate.”
In fact, he adds, most economists find that the rail transit,
stadium, arena, and convention center projects built in recent
decades are “hugely expensive in relation to likely benefits.”
In general, says Luberoff, there have been two responses
to this situation. Advocates of the current projects maintain
that the economists’ critiques are invalid because they
miss intangible project benefits such as fostering community
pride. Proponents of the kinds of projects stymied by current
rules, in contrast, have pressed in recent years for the federal
government to relax the environmental laws that prevent new
runway and highway projects, which benefit-cost analysts tend
to rate more favorably.
Moving Forward
Both Altshuler and Luberoff observe that there is no easy
resolution to these issues because they involve tradeoffs
between important, deeply held values. They assert, however,
that their review of a half-century of public works projects
in urban areas left them with two clear impressions about
good ways to proceed.
“First,” says Altshuler, “states and localities
should be required to bear half or more of the cost of projects
they undertake, because great windfalls of earmarked money
from higher levels of government tend to overwhelm serious
local deliberation.” Second, Altshuler adds, “there
are still no substitutes for strong environmental regulation
and vibrant local democracy in helping to ensure that, as
local growth coalitions proceed, they do not leave fouled
environments and devastated neighborhoods in their wake.”
For more info about Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics
of Urban Public Investment go to www.brookings.edu.
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