DL: I don't completely buy the blaming the cost increase on the delay. This is one of the great controversies that Bill Weld inherits when he becomes Governor of Massachusetts in 1991. He has a permitted project but it has several very active controversies, the Charles River crossing being perhaps the most significant. And Weld says to his Transportation Secretary, go see if you can fix this problem because, on balance, I'd like to go ahead with this project. There's a very interesting point in the project because you have a Republican governor replacing a Democrat but saying yes, we're all on board for this project. They spend about three years trying to figure out if there is a design solution that is buildable, fundable, and will satisfy the Cambridge interests, the Charlestown interests, the Charles River advocates themselves, and some important Boston interests. The design they come up with is about a billion dollars more expensive than Scheme Z. So that's the big chunk of the cost increase in the project in the early '90s. There is some more cost that is just the cost of the way this slowed down the project. But we don't really know what that number is. Construction inflation generally in the early '90s was very low when the region was in a recession, there wasn't a lot of construction business going on. So arguably the cost of delay for a year in 1992 is not that great.

DL: One of the interesting ways they solve this problem is they recognize that they have to have a signature bridge but this is so big that you've got to make it something that's really appealing. And they come up with this design that, I think, as it's being built, people have come to appreciate as really a new icon in Boston. This is single tower cable-stay bridge that is really quite striking. And it's really a very good example of how sensitive engineering can take something that looks like a problem and perhaps not only solve the problem but actually turn it into a positive feature.

DL: It's actually very interesting because, in the early '90s, the critics of Scheme Z and some of its successors were saying, this is going to be the widest bridge, you know, ever built in the world. And … therefore it [is] a completely inappropriate solution for this problem of how to cross the Charles River. And it's ironic that now, as the bridge goes up and as people generally think positively about it, that its advocates are saying, it's the widest bridge in the world. Context, I guess, is everything.

DL: I think the question at the Charles River was, could you put some or all of the crossing and tunnels underneath the river, especially given that you put the artery in a tunnel and that turns out to have a bunch of technical and financial and perhaps environmental permitting problems. So although they looked at it, they could never really come up with a solution that they thought worked, particularly given the pressure that the rest of the project was ready to go. And so in the end, they basically instead built a better bridge.

DL: There are at least two good reasons to build the Ted Williams tunnel first. The first is you want to create a sense of momentum about the project. It had been in planning for years and needed to build something and it needed to be something that people could use and identify with. So politically it's a great success. The second is in the early '90s when the decision was made to go ahead with the tunnel, there were at least some people who were still not convinced that the artery depression was really going to happen, that it still looked like it had some political and financial problems. And the Weld Administration made a decision to decouple the artery from the tunnel and go ahead with the tunnel portion of the project figuring, worse comes to worse, even if the artery depression piece dies because of the Scheme Z controversy, we'll at least get the tunnel, which is what the business community, our core constituency, always wanted in the first place.

Apparently Tom Larson was very adamant about this. … Salvucci would never decouple these two pieces because he was always afraid the tunnel would get out too far in front of the artery which is what he really carried about. And once the Weld Administration comes in with strong support from the Federal Highway Administration, they began to break the project up into chunks that you can build now, which has good political reasons and also is a good long-term strategy for them.

DL: 1990, 1991 is a critical point in time for the project. Mike Dukakis leaves office with incredibly high unfavorability ratings. Massachusetts is in recession. He is replaced by a conservative Republican governor, William Weld. Now every time since 1970 that Massachusetts had a new governor, that governor had taken the previous governor's plans for highways in downtown Boston, put them on the shelf and taken down what they wanted. So Sargent really wanted to build a modified version of the tunnel. When Sargent leaves, Salvucci and Dukakis come in, they put the tunnel on the shelf and they take down the artery. They get defeated by Ed King. Ed King puts the artery on the shelf, takes down a different tunnel plan. Every governor since 1970 had seriously changed the transportation plans for downtown Boston from his predecessor.

DL: I'm not sure how the Big Dig is going to be remembered. I think, in the best-case scenario, people really won't notice it at all. If it works the way it's supposed to work, it will become part of the fabric of the city in a way that is somewhat invisible. Most of it is underground and you'll just drive on it. It'll just be something you take as a given as we take most infrastructure for a given. I think that the Charles River Bridge might become a symbol of Boston in the way that things like the Statehouse Dome or the Custom House Tower are symbols of Boston. It's very striking. It's visible from great distances when you're on the hills of the communities around Boston. It's one of the three or four things that really sticks out that you can see and point to. So it'll become something people in Boston use as a sort of visual reference to know where they are. My guess is, at least in the short-run, it'll be remembered as a phenomenally expensive project that may or may not have been a mistake. And that view will probably fade with time. I think students of engineering and urban planning will continue to study it to learn both from its successes and from its mistakes.

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