INT: Bob Albee's described getting the community involved in large public works projects, something that you had fought for, and now that is the case. So this is now an albatross around your neck?

FS: I guess the way I look at a big project is you don't deserve to get it done if you can't convince people that it's worth doing. This isn't my project. This is the people's project. And if you can't go through a process of two-way communication and answer people's questions, then maybe the project shouldn't happen. I mean from one point of view, having a very large amount of community involvement makes it more difficult, but I would argue at the same time it also makes it simpler because through that process you understand much better what the problems are going to be and you can deal with it in advance.

If you ignore the community and you just do a traditional, "Oh, we know best, we'll build it our way," then you're halfway through it and you start bumping into real problems and you haven't thought through the solutions in advance. So, yes, it takes time, and … some people say it slows you down, I don't think it slows you down. I think in the end of the day it really expedites the project. You have to take the time to do it right. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well and you need the information that the community has in its head. You can't, as an engineer, look at a map and understand exactly what impact you're going to have when you do a project like this in the middle of the city. And I think this is something that is not unique to Boston. In a sense what we're dealing with here is a very old piece of infrastructure. The fact that we're in the Northeast with tough, cold winters and a lot of use of road salt has made that facility startin' to fall apart earlier than it should, but it's over a half a century old and it's time to replace it. That's not a problem unique to Boston.

The entire nation is going to be facing the problem of what do you do with old highways when they're no longer viable and they have to rebuilt? It's very complicated to rebuild and I think the standard part of the approach has got to be establishing communication with the neighbors, and understanding both the abutters and their needs and the users, the people who are traveling on that roadway, and their needs because both of those communities are going to be strongly affected during any reconstruction process. I mean I love the artery project; it's been fun to work on it. In some ways I think the project is exploring something that the rest of the country is also going to have to do. So I'm hopeful that people will take seriously lessons learned from this, because we've got to, as a nation, we've got to get better and better at rebuilding. Rebuilding's very different than back in the '50s when they initially built roads through cornfields and the construction was relatively simple. This is not easy in Boston, but it's not going to be any easier in any other city in the country and I think it's an approach that's really necessary to tackling these kind of projects.

FS: I think one way to conceptualize the construction of major infrastructure in the city is, in the '50s, mostly people were used to building things out in the countryside, where things were relatively uncomplicated and engineering factors were the whole ball game. So, the engineers would decide where to build the road. They'd take some land from a farmer, but the farmer had plenty of land. And generally it wasn't very controversial. In fact, people liked the enhancement of their land value. So the highway construction in the rural area tended to be a very popular activity. When those engineers, who were used to being sort of heroes, came into the city to do things like the Central Artery, they tried to use the same methodology, which was, "We're the engineers. We know what we're doing. This is what we're gonna do," and then you had a disaster. You had things like the original Central Artery, where no one was consulted, where people were treated very badly. I mean those engineers, they're not evil people. Their historical experience was relocating some corn plants. Now they're relocating people and families. They're not prepared to deal with that. So you had a very bad outcome. You had some very brutal projects that hurt a lot of people and left a real scar on the city. We've been trying to rebuild that facility, 'cause it does carry an important transportation capacity for the region.

FS: So what's going on now is we're rebuilding the elevated Central Artery below grade so it'll be compatible with the city and the environment in a manner that respects the need of people to continue using the facility while it's being rebuilt. That's a much more complicated process. It's more expensive. It's very difficult to do. I think it's being done reasonably well. That task is something that I think increasingly is going to be confronting engineers all over the United States. I mean Boston is not unique in having 50 year-old structures that are beginning to fall apart.

As people begin this very complicated task of rebuilding in an urban environment, there are two issues that ought to deal with. Number one, are we simply going to rebuild exactly what we've got as if it were petrified wood? You know, we had an ugly elevated Central Artery. We'll renew it and now we'll have a brand-new ugly elevated Central Artery. Or do you try to say how do we change this to better fit into the environment? Have we learned anything in 60 years? That's one question that I think should be asked and in Boston we asked that question and said, "Let's put this thing underground and really repair the damage that was done to the city."

Secondly, we're asking the question, how do we make it reasonable for both the abutters to live with the construction process and the people who use the road to live with the construction process? That makes it more expensive. It makes it more complicated. It makes it more time-consuming, but it's an essential part of the job. This is simply a more complicated job than building a highway out in a cornfield. And all over the country, as engineers and architects and planners begin to confront the absolute need to deal with these aging facilities that are otherwise going to fall apart -- I mean you can't simply wish this problem away -- I believe that the techniques that are being used in addressing the elevated Central Artery are techniques that are going to be useful across the country because they're very similar problems. Number one: How do you redefine the function based on what we now know? And I think part of that has to be communication with the community. And, secondly, how do we maintain reasonable functionality of the transportation facility while we renew the transportation facility? And that requires communication with the community that uses the facility. So, yes, this is much more complicated than it use to be, but it goes with the territory. If you're going to work on rebuilding these, and it's not an avoidable problem, I think it's something we have to do with, I think these are the kind of techniques you're going to find necessary all over the country.

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