DL: There are parts of the Big Dig that'll be a model for other cities and there are parts of the Big Dig that'll be a cautionary tale for other cities. I think it's a model in the sense that its planning process was very open. It's a model in the sense that extraordinary efforts were made to see if you could provide new infrastructure in a way that didn't seriously harm other people. It's a cautionary tale about how that kind of approach can get out of control if you're not also paying attention to funding mechanisms and making some set of judgments about whether or not whatever you're spending money on is something you would spend your own money on as opposed to this idea of federal money which is sort of politically seen as money from heaven. And so it has both some very positive lessons and also a great kind of cautionary warning. The other great cautionary warning is how hard it is to estimate costs correctly when you're going into something that faces serious, both technical uncertainty and political uncertainty, particularly in the very complicated environmental permitting process that projects like this have to go through.

DL: Well the official cost estimate of the project goes from the original idea of depressing one mile of the Central Artery in the mid 1970s [which] was costed at about three hundred and sixty million dollars. And the original estimates for building a two-lane tunnel to the airport, which was the proposal that the Sargent Administration put forward was a couple hundred million. So the original cost estimates for this were probably about a half a billion dollars. By the mid '80s, the price tag is up to about 2.4 billion when Congress finally says, yes, we'll make this project eligible for the interstate system which is really the critical go/no-go decision. The cost was estimated at about 3.1 billion. The price tag today is estimated to be at about fourteen billion and that doesn't include the cost of a whole bunch of mitigation agreements that are part of the project but not included as official price tag. There's about a two to three billion dollar transit agenda that became part of the project in the early '90s. So the total cost of the project is arguably somewhere between fifteen and twenty billion dollars.

DL: The cost increases are due to several factors. Some of it is due to inflation. That 3.1 billion dollars in 1987 is going to grow by the year 2000. And probably somewhere between twenty-five and fifty percent of the cost increase is just inflation over the life of the project. A good chunk of the rest is due to design changes. So as the project went forward, more and more elements got added to it. So, at some point in the mid-'80s, they added a new interchange at the southern end of the project and that adds several hundred million dollars to the project. And the other large chunk of the cost increase is all the mitigation agreements they made with all of these varying groups and neighborhoods and constituencies to allow the project to go forward. So one of the things that happens is once the project clearly got its funding and before it's permitted, lots of people were trying to make sure that all of their different kinds of issues got addressed. And that's substantially what drove the price of the project up.

DL: Projects like this have two great challenges. One is assembling the political coalition that allows you to actually go ahead with something of this magnitude. And the other is, then having assembled that coalition, actually going ahead and doing the actual technical work. Now the technical work of this project is phenomenal and extraordinarily complicated and amazing. But, in many respects, the political work that preceded it is even more amazing because it was so hard and the testament to that fact is that there are very few projects that look like this around the country. The projects that haven't been built are not built because people look at the engineering and said, well you can't do that. They were not built because people looked at the politics and they said, you can't do that. And so the great story here was assembling and holding together a political coalition in support of the project.

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