DL: What you get by doing this is you get this enormous coalition in support of the project. There are lots of people who support the Central Artery Tunnel Project, not necessarily because they think or care that it's a great transportation project but because it's going to fund their park or their transit agenda or their jobs agenda. You know, job training program and you get this sense of everybody who's active politically in the Boston region has something in this project that they care greatly about and it makes for this enormous, extraordinarily powerful coalition.

DL: There's a real question as to whether or not this is a viable strategy that lots of people can repeat. The key in Boston was the fact that people believed for the longest period of time that the federal government was going to pay ninety percent of the cost of this project. So as long as you took cost off the table, all of the people in the region who might say, geez, that's a little expensive don't you think, aren't part of the conversation. As the project has faced more and more funding problems, it's been somewhat more cautious in making agreements and, in fact, has gone back and revisited some of its mitigation agreements to say, is there a cheaper way to solve this problem? Or is this really a problem? Now some people think that there's a double dealing in that they made agreements that they're now backing out of.

I think the logic of mitigation is one that all major projects have to follow now. The first point which is trying to minimize the harms to existing residents and the second saying that it's not fair that some people suffer so the greater good can be achieved--that we ought to find some way to leave the people who are hurt by this project, whole. And so some amount of mitigation is reasonable but it's also critical that the people who are making that decision are also confronted with some hard fiscal constraints so that at certain points they can say, we'd love to do that. We can't afford it. And then we have to make a choice about whether it's still worth going ahead or not.

DL: I think if you look at big construction projects going on today, we are no longer building major interstates through poor, urban neighborhoods. We no longer clear whole neighborhoods. We generally no longer clear whole neighborhoods for urban renewal projects. We're much, much more strategic in design and in citing strategies. So if you look, for example, where are all the conventions and stadium centers being built or all the convention centers and stadiums being built today? They're generally built in old industrial areas, not in old residential neighborhoods. If you look at where new transit lines are often cited, they're on existing rail rights-of-way. Now the question of what we're going to do with older, urban highways is really complicated because, as the artery has demonstrated, the strategy of rebuilding them underground is phenomenally expensive.

DL: The Big Dig is the last piece of the interstate highway system that Dwight Eisenhower and Congress put together in the 1950s. One of the things that happens to the Big Dig in the 1990s is as its cost is rising and there's no other pieces of interstate highway system, there's less and less appetite in Congress to keep providing more and more money for this project but lots of people in congress always thought it was a kind of boondoggle going away present for Tip O'Neill. And so as the ground rules of federal highway aid change, the funding structure of the project changes dramatically. There are two critical things that happened. First of all, Massachusetts, which throughout the sort of mid to late '80s and into the 1990s was getting much, much more money than we sent to Washington in gas taxes because we were paying for this last piece of the national interstate system. Congress, in 1997, says that's it. You know, we have no great incentive to help you. We think this project's a boondoggle. You're all Democrats anyway. We're a Republican Congress and so we're going to send you back about as much money as you send in gas taxes. That's a several hundred million dollar a year cut in the federal aid to Massachusetts.

More generally, starting in 1991 and continuing in 1997, Congress says this interstate idea was an interesting idea but it turned into this entitlement program and it set us up for people like Massachusetts getting their project eligible and then coming back again and again and again with cost increases. So what we're going to do now is, for most of the money, we're going to send a chunk of money back to the states and say, you decide how you want to spend it. You can build new highways. You can renovate old highways. You can build some transit but we're not going to make any of those open-ended commitments anymore, at least of the magnitude of the Central Artery. And so now projects like the Central Artery have to compete with all of the other projects in the state for money. Part of the beauty of the original argument for the Artery in Massachusetts was not only was the federal government going to pay ninety percent of the cost, but this is money we would not get if we don't build the Artery. It's not like we could get this money and spend it on something else. So it's found money. If we don't get it in Massachusetts, it's going to go to Arizona or Texas or some other place. Now Congress hasn't completely weaned itself of this because local congressmen like to be able to come back and say to their constituents, I got you a project and so you see, in federal highway and transit legislation, lots of specific projects getting specific funding. But they don't tend to be as big as the Central Artery. They tend to be several hundred million dollar projects, not several tens of billion dollar projects.

DL: Scheme Z is one of the great controversies of the project. It's a very simple problem. You have essentially a North-South highway, which is the Central Artery meeting a series of roads that together make up an East-West highway. If you built this in Kansas, you have a real simple solution. You build a cloverleaf interchange. You can't do that in Boston because you're in the middle of downtown Boston. And so they literally take all of the pieces of the cloverleaf interchange and they fold them on top of each other because there's one quadrant that's an old industrial area on the Cambridge Charlestown border, on the north side of the Charles River. And they create a ramp structure that's about a hundred and twenty feet high and they have this very, very wide bridge because you've got all of these traffic movements that are going on. And this turns out to be a fatal miscalculation for the project. There's the sense in Boston that the ramp structure is too big. You've just depressed this highway in Boston and you're sticking all these ramps over in Cambridge and Charlestown. You've got this bridge that's too big over the Charles River and the Charles River, yes, it's always been a transportation river but we also use it for recreation purposes. And it just becomes this enormous controversy.

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