INT: At over a billion dollars a mile, is this feasible to do?

FS: I guess I'd argue that you can't afford not to do it. I mean, transportation is an essential part of the infrastructure that makes our cities work. The transportation facilities are aging. They have got to be renewed. We don't really have a choice. And, yes, it'll be expensive. On the other hand, the flip side of the expense is it'll generate a lot of jobs for people in the construction industry. So that's a two-edged problem. Yes, the Central Artery has been a very expensive project in Boston and, yes, it's been essential to have a support of the federal government in doing that, but that's not new. It was the federal government's support that led to the creation of the interstate highway system to begin with. So I think it's reasonable to expect the federal government to stay in there and, secondly it's very important to do it right. And I think that involves this sort of two-way communication. Thirdly, if you do it right, there are a lot of jobs in doing that and that's a useful thing for the economy to maintain a construction activity. I happen to think this is a good thing because I'm a civil engineer and I like to build things, but, more fundamentally, even if you're not a civil engineer and you don't like to build things, the bottom line is this is a necessity activity. The alternative of letting transportation simply fall apart is not, I think, an acceptable alternative for the future economy of the United States.

The question of cost of the project is one that often comes up. It's, I think, important to understand that there was not a low-ball estimate at the front end of this project. The way the interstate highway program has always estimated cost is to estimate cost based on the current Construction Cost Index. In the real world, projects are built over time. Big projects take decades and by the time you finish them, they cost much more, because of inflation, than the original cost. That's not a low-ball cost. It's a cost estimate that was carried out with the proper federal highway sanction procedures, with the oversight of the Federal Highway Administration. I mean I'm a Democrat and pretty proud of it. The Reagan Administration didn't even like this project. They reviewed our cost estimates. So if we were low-balling the cost estimates, one would expect that they would have blown the whistle that we were low-balling the cost estimates.

The fact is we were using the proper procedures according to the law at the time, which was not what will this project actually cost out to year 2000, or whenever it's complete, but what will this project cost if it were all built today? That's the way every major highway project in the United States has been estimated. Now the problem with that style of cost estimating is that it leads to misunderstanding and cynicism. People say, "I know they said that the project was going to cost less and -- and it now costs more." There is a different philosophy that you ought to estimate the full cost, including inflation, at the front end of the project. And that's an acceptable point of view. The problem with that is that then if there's any delay in the project, the number's going to change on you all the time and it's also going to lead to confusion. But you need to pick a convention and stick with it.

The artery project used the exact same style of estimating cost that every interstate highway in the United States was done. Now the law has changed. So now the philosophy has changed to going to full cost estimating, and that's fine. But I think it's unfair to say the original cost was low-balled. It was not. The full cost estimate, including all of the mitigation in 1991, was estimated at $6 billion. It is costing much more than that. So there are two components in the change in cost, and I think you have to be clear about the two components. And we ought to learn from the experience. One component is simply recognizing inflation, and you have to deal with that one way or another. You either do the old style interstate cost estimate based on current costs, not including inflation, or you allow for inflation. And the current philosophy is, "Let's allow for inflation. That'll confuse the public less." Since the public [perception] is so important to these, I think the new system is better. It'll lead to less misunderstanding.

A second issue is, above and beyond inflation, there have been increases in cost, dramatic increases in cost during this project. They substantially came from delays in implementation. The cost estimate that said this project was going to cost $6 billion full was a cost estimate that assumed that you started work in 1991 and moved it expeditiously right through. That did not happen. There was a delay at the beginning of the project while they reconsidered how to cross the Charles River. I happened to disagree with that decision. I was not in the government at the time they decided to review it. That involved three additional years of delay. That's a huge amount of money. There were delays occasioned on the southern side of the project because of some issues with soils.

So the second lesson to the degree that we're trying to say let's not just cast blame here, let's understand what happened and let's learn from it. I think the second lesson is, especially with large projects, it's extremely important that once you go through a process and have decided what you're doing, that you then implement it in an expeditious way, because delays drive your costs up dramatically and on a complex project, delay in one part of the project causes a delay on another part of the project and then it kind of doubles the effect. So these are inherent parts of complex and I think the real lesson to draw is you do that communication process, you involve the neighbors, you involve the users, you make some decisions, then you need to important effectively and on time or you will pay much more money than you originally expected to pay.

FS: In 1978, I had been working on the project since 1970 -- that's 17 years. We had been through a four-year fight with the Reagan Administration. We had finally gotten the congressional approval that clarified the funding. And we had turned the major hurdle in the federal environmental process and we were doing serious engineering and getting ready to construct. And some people from Bechtel come to me and say "This section past the Fort Point Channel and the Gillette Company, we don't know how to build it." I said, "What do you mean you don't know how to build it? We've been through 17 years. We've been through dozens and dozens of hearings. We've done all this environmental analysis. You've gotta build it. We've got approvals. Now you're telling me there's a problem building it? You've gotta solve this problem." And they said, "Well, we're just havin' trouble with it." I said, "Well, you've gotta," you know. "Between you and your partners at Parsons Brinkerhoff, you're the best in the world. You've got to come in with a solution. Don't come in with a problem."

So they went to the New York office of Parsons Brinkerhoff and there got Lou Silano, who's a terrific guy. He saved the project. You know, I could have kissed the guy. He came in with this elegant, simple, conceptually simple, solution to very difficult problem. It is, I think, the major engineering challenge on this project and it's a project that has a lot of major engineering challenges, but the section by the Fort Point Channel where you've got the Red Line subway tunnel under this new highway tunnel, but the Red Line subway tunnel was built in 1910 in the early days of reinforced concrete. And if you put any stress on it, it might crack and fill the subway with water. So you can't touch the Red Line subway tunnel. And Silano came up with this really elegant solution for solving the problem.

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