The most wasteful infrastructure megaproject that wasn’t

How much would you spend to transform the lives of every denizen of one of America’s great cities? What if we could dramatically improve the quality of life of every person in New York City, or Miami or Atlanta or Los Angeles? Are we even daring enough to think that boldly?The answer, at least in Boston, is yes, we can dare that boldly, and my god, we are willing to spend so much to make it happen. That’s the punchline of the Big Dig, a megaproject that eliminated a traffic-clogged and ugly elevated highway that cut through the core of downtown and buried it through a series of tunnels. It’s a project whose gestation and implementation took decades, and estimates of its final cost range from 10 to 20 billion dollars.The megaproject is derided as one of the great boondoggles of history, but my guest today, Ian Coss, sees something very different. Ian spent months interviewing, researching and ultimately producing a nine-episode series for Boston’s NPR affiliate GBH News on The Big Dig, and his conclusion is that when considered in its totality and with the benefit of history, The Big Dig was a steal — and the good type too.We talk about the merits of the Big Dig megaproject, the complicated construction policies that made the project seem like a loser in front of the public, and just how hard it is to measure the true impact of a project that forever transformed one of America’s founding cities. Let’s dive in with Ian now about the history of the Big Dig.

Danny Crichton:
Maybe we could just get started with how did you get into the Big Dig, because it's not a popular subject in general. It's maybe studied in a couple of history textbooks, Boston history, et cetera. But what drew you to the project maybe arguably of the century?

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Ian Coss:
Yeah, I mean, it was such a big story when I was growing up. So I'm of the age of people who grew up in Massachusetts during the Big Dig. It was just getting started around the time I was born or maybe when I was a toddler, and it was still going on when I graduated high school. So it was just in the background the whole time. And I'm actually kind of amazed in a way that there hasn't been, since then, books and documentaries and more of a kind of retrospective of the project because there was so, so much written and said about it at the time as it was going on. But then the legacy of it has never really been examined with distance and in that perspective. So my entry point to the story really comes from see I grew up kind of hearing about this terrible thing going on in Boston. It was over budget, it was behind schedule, it was a boondoggle fiasco. Pick your terrible word, it was called it.
Fast-forward, I moved to Boston as an adult. I live in the city now. I see with adult eyes really for the first time what the project was, what the fruits of it were. And it was really a disconnect for me to see this thing that had transformed the city and was also this thing I had heard all these terrible, terrible stories about as a kid. So it's like how are these the same project? And that was really the entry point for me of trying to connect the dots between what it had done and what I had heard about it when it was going on.

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Danny Crichton:
And maybe a great way to start out here would be, I mean, let's talk about how terrible it was and what the Big Dig was trying to do. So the Big Dig, massive freeways to the center of the city. I think there are, what, four or five lanes wide? Double-decker in several parts of the city, right through the center. I mean this doesn't really exist. In New York and Manhattan, we have the Hudson Parkway, we have FDR on the east side. They don't cut through. This was stopped in the kind of famous Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses fight to prevent the highway going through the center of the city. But that did not stop Boston. Boston puts highways right through the center of town. People live right next to them. How did the Big Dig get going? How did get started? What was the trigger for folks to start to reconsider this action?

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Ian Coss:
Well, I would say that Boston did have an anti-highway movement, like New York, like D.C., like San Francisco. All around the country you had this pushback to the freeways really that grew, kind of gained momentum in the '60s. And arguably, I mean I do argue in the podcast, that the Boston anti-highway movement was more radical and transformative than any of those other cities because it really did manage by the early 1970s to totally transform the highway building policy of the whole state in a way that no other state did. And the big dig really grows out of that era, out of that activism. So you have all these roads that get canceled, but the road that did get built is this thing called the central artery, and that is the road we're talking about.
It goes right through the historic downtown of Boston. It's three lanes in each direction. It's this hulking elevated barrier between the City Hall and the financial district and the Boston Common and the waterfront, the historic harbor that built this city. Those things are cut off from each other by this interstate. And so coming out of the anti-highway movement, this radical moment of re-imagining cities and re-imagining transportation, there is this idea that gets born. What if we could do better than just stopping highways and resisting highways? What if we could actually correct the mistakes of the past, tear down that highway that was built and replace it underground? And that really is the genesis of the Big Dig. That is the idea at the heart of it, to restore the heart of the city.

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Danny Crichton:
And when we think about it, so in San Francisco's case there's a pullback on the Embarcadero Expressway on the east side of the city similarly cut off the bay, this beautiful azure treasure if you will, from the city. And in that particular case, it was actually knocked down by the forces of nature, right?

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Ian Coss:
Right, took a force of the act of God.

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Danny Crichton:
Act of God to get it down. But Boston actually does this through civil work. So what was the story? So you have this across America kind of an anti-highway movement. So the interstate system comes in the 1950s, environmentalism kind of gets triggered, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson. People are starting to connect the dots. And I think it's also appropriate for maybe a younger generation to always remind that leaded fuel was still common at this time. I think we only moved to unleaded sometime in this era.
So, all those cars spewing leaded fumes and pollution, it's not a low emissions vehicle like we have today [inaudible 00:05:36] a city. You have all these triggers, and in Boston you have this thing, the central artery cutting the entire city. But that usually doesn't stop this because the car culture and once you have it built, it's very, very hard to take anything down. And so it's exceptional when we do. What got the momentum to actually make that go forward?

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Ian Coss:
Yeah, I think I really appreciate you drawing attention to that because it's important to emphasize that nobody else is doing this. If you look around the major cities of America, the Embarcadero comes down by an act of God. Nobody else is tearing down highways and putting them underground. So why does this happen in Boston? And that was one of the questions that I had never considered as a child, for sure, and really started to think about as I looked at this story as a historical subject, like, "Why did this happen here at this time? How is it possible?"
I would make two arguments here. The first is that the central artery was especially bad, as far as downtown elevated highways go. It was not only ugly and disruptive, it was also truly dysfunctional. It was one of the first elevated highways built anywhere in the country, and so there are a lot of just nuts and bolts aspects of this that the highway planners had not really figured out. It was windy. It had these tight turns. It had no breakdown lanes and shoulders. It had all these on-ramps and off-ramps that were just incredibly close together. And all this combined to produce a road that was just gridlocked constantly for hours a day.
And so there was in addition to all the lefty neighborhood activists types pushing to tear down this road, there were also business leaders who wanted to do something about this road and suburban commuters who wanted to do something about this road. So that's one thing, you have an unusually bad road here that needs to be dealt with somehow. The other thing you have is just a remarkable alignment of political leaders and political power that is able to drive this idea from conception to completion. Number one among those people who you'll hear about very quickly if you listen to the podcast, is a remarkable Secretary of Transportation named Fred Salvucci, who was just dogged and unstoppable in his drive to complete this project.
But you also have to think about the kind of unique political power that the state of Massachusetts was wielding at this time. This is the 1980s. You've got Tip O'Neill, the Speaker of the House, in the middle of the longest single tenure of any speaker in House in American history. You've got Michael Dukakis, the governor, who I know some people today might think of as the guy who lost the presidential election. But before he lost the presidential election, he was a nationally known, very popular, very powerful governor. You've got Senator John Kerry, you've got Senator Ted Kennedy. You've got a lot of very powerful people in key positions who could take on a big idea like this and get the local support, get the institutional support from the bureaucracies, and then crucially get the federal support to get the funding through Congress.
It's just hard to imagine most cities mustering that kind of muscle. And in fact, you mentioned you're in New York, New York City had its own version of the Big Dig, something called Westway. And the idea, maybe you're familiar with this project, was to put the West Side Highway underground. Very similar concept, reconnect the city with its waterfront, improve transportation, public space, et cetera, et cetera. And that project just died in the same time period, in the 1980s. It died a thousand deaths from environmental permitting and lack of political will. And so the Big Dig is the one that survived. It's this weird outlier that just had the right combination of people aligned behind it to make it happen.

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Danny Crichton:
And is there officially a kickoff date? I'm always curious about this. I actually don't know, having lived next to a big dig, but is there a day that was like, "This is the day that's going to start, and two years from now a glorious tunnel is going to come out"?

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Ian Coss:
There's a great quote by William Weld who is a governor of Massachusetts in the '90s, and he said, "This project has had more starts than Nolan Ryan." Nolan Ryan being the famous pitcher, starting pitcher, of the same era. So it really is, it's one of these things that there were so many ribbon cuttings and press conferences and bill... There's so many moments when you could draw a line and say, "This is it. It's starting." I can offer a quick timeline of possible start dates. Take your pick.
Idea's first proposed 1972. It's first fully embraced by the governor, Michael Dukakis, in 1983. So that's in some ways the kickoff point of, "We are doing this." However, it then takes a while to get funding, to get the permitting. And so Dukakis has another kickoff, "We're doing it," in 1989, when they actually... It's soft of a groundbreaking. They break out the blow torches and start cutting down some stuff that they're going to have to clear away to do the project. That's 1989. And then I would argue that really construction begins in 1991. That's when they break out the TNT, dynamite and start blowing holes in the ground.

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Danny Crichton:
So 19 years from the first conception, first plan on the table to the launch, you could literally say there's real construction underway?

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Ian Coss:
Yeah, it's basically 20 years to get from idea to the starting line, and then it's another 16 years from shovels in the ground to the project is complete.

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Danny Crichton:
And the project complete date would be around 2007?

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Ian Coss:
Yes.

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Danny Crichton:
What happens in between here? Because this is notorious as one of the world's quote, unquote "most mismanaged projects". So let's get that on the table, we'll talk about its effects. But do you see we had this kickoff in the '90s, we closed in 2007 and a lot of things take place. One of which is the cost of inflation question. How did the budget start and how did it end up with the price tag that it got?

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Ian Coss:
Yeah, the cost of the Big Dig is... It's complicated. And it became such a big part of the story. It really came to kind of dominate the whole narrative around the project. And I think the most important thing to understand about the cost of the Big Dig is that the numbers, if you just look at the kind of, "This is what we thought, this is what it ended up being," they look really, really bad. They look just unforgivably bad. And yet there are many reasons why those costs went up. And most of those reasons are just like... They're not because somebody was corrupt and somebody was stealing the bacon. Most of the reasons they went up is kind of mundane, bureaucratic things that are endemic to the way we build infrastructure in this country. And so part of the reason I love this story of the Big Dig is it's a great case study for understanding why infrastructure in general is expensive, because the things that made it expensive are the things that make all big projects expensive.
If we look at the numbers, the earliest, earliest estimates, if we go back to 1983, this is the first... Mike Dukakis gets up on stage, points at the map on the wall and says, "We're going to build it." About $2.2 billion is the number that he floats that day. When construction is all said and done, it's almost $15 billion, 14.8. So that's a lot of billions of dollars of increase. And I think to understand that increase you've got to break it down into chunks. First off, inflation. Back in the 1980s, and this is actually kind of weird, when they estimated the cost of projects, they did not account for inflation. So this is a project that ended up taking more than... From that 1983 to 2007, do the math, 25 years pretty much. No inflation was accounted for. And that policy actually changed while the Big Dig was underway. Mid-dig, Federal Highway, the folks in D.C. who write the rules, were like, "Oh, by the way, all budgets now have to account for future inflation through the end of the project."
This is one of many ways in which the Big Dig just got kind of screwed. It was just terrible timing, where part way through like, "These are the numbers. These are the numbers. Oh, actually, sorry, we have to inflate the numbers." So that's a big one. Then the other big bucket you have to look at it what... I guess the technical word for it would be scope change. The project itself changed. And I think this again, this is true for Second Avenue Subway, it's true for any big project, infrastructure project in America, is that once these things get rolling, other things kind of get stuck onto them, other projects people want to see, mitigation projects that help improve the environmental impact or the community impact. And so the Big Dig becomes this rolling juggernaut of a snowball for decades, because it's got this federal money, it's got all this political will behind it.
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And so if all you're doing is looking at those numbers and saying, "Well, it's supposed to be 2 billion and it ended up being 15 billion, what a ripoff." But the thing is, that $2 billion price tag was a totally different project. And so that's a lot of what the story is that we tell in the podcast, is how these other things became part of the project, how it expanded and grew. And then I think the third category that you've got to just acknowledge as part of it is that it was harder than people thought. It was always going to be a weird bespoke project. No one had really done anything quite like this before. There were not good models that you could look at for estimates. There was a lot of political incentive to downplay, minimize the costs, to say, "It's not going to be so bad. Let's just get it through Congress." And so the reality was it was underestimated on many levels, technically and labor involved and everything.
And so the result of all these things, the ever snowballing scope, the compounding inflation, the fact that it had been underestimated from the beginning, those three things all come together in the 1990s and produce this series of cost jumps. And this is when the cost really becomes the narrative of the Big Dig, because it's like you've got reporters at The Herald, and you've got the reporters at The Globe. This is in a time where you actually had competing newspapers, local news coverage, beat reporters out going to the press conferences, talking to engineers, digging through the files and it just sort of becomes this slow drip of, "Is it 5.5? Is it 6.6? Is it 7.7? Is it 10.8?" There's just this series of cost increases really building to a crescendo in the year 2000, when the project takes its single biggest cost increase. It's a huge scandal. Resignations, investigations, people dragged down into Congress to testify in Washington. John McCain is out on the campaign trail at that time. He starts using it as a talking point.
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And so I think that 2000 moment is really the image where the Big Dig crystallizes in the public imagination as the boondoggle in Boston.

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Danny Crichton:
It is a good exemplar of how hard a lot of this stuff is. So first of all, emphasizing on the part of inflation. One of the challenges in the US is most of our infrastructure does take a long time to build, particularly if you look at equivalent projects and the Big Dig's fairly sui generis. But if you were to look at a subway expansion, very common in East Asia, parts of Europe, usually does not take 15 to 20 years to go build one of these projects. So even in a relatively low inflationary environment, when you are compounding 2% or 3% a year over 20 years, those final dollars are significantly more expensive than those original dollars.
And then you go in reverse, you go back to the '80s when inflation was high in the early years of the Regan Administration, this is the Paul Volcker, when Volcker and then eventually Alan Greenspan take over the Fed and they try to do cold medicine and try to get everyone back to better inflation out of the stagflation years, these numbers are going up 10, 12% a year. And so those extra years really, really start to metastasize and increase really, really fast. So that is a huge challenge. I was actually shocked to hear that they didn't include inflation. That's ironic, particularly given the time. But you learn something over time. We're getting better at budgeting all the time.
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Number two, you talked about scope. You call it scope change, I like to call it scope creep because scoping is bad. But I always give this example, and I probably have lost the link, but there was a new swimming pool being built in San Francisco down the street from me where I used to live. Public pool was designed as kind of a community center, and it was something like $60 million or some astronomical sum. And people were like, "Well, how could a swimming pool possibly cost this much money?" And so I downloaded the site plan and all the stuff that was going on. And it wasn't a swimming pool, it was a swimming pool, a public park, public bathrooms, changes to four streets worth of street landscaping, the roads themselves, bike lanes, new parking. There was a parking deck attached to it, upgraded sewage.
And so similar to what you're talking about, I usually call them barnacles, but once one of these projects in the American system tends to get momentum, people are like, "That's the engine that's going, we're going to jump on that one over there." And then suddenly you realize the swimming pool is 2 or $3 million of the 60 that was spent. Everything else was some other choice, whether there was a mitigation for environment or a community benefit is usually under the category for this. And so oftentimes it's actually really hard to compare like with like. That's one of the reasons I personally love some of the research that looks at road construction costs.
If you were just building a two-lane country road in different states, you get a sense of the material's roughly the same, the rules are generally at the Federal level you need certain standards and so the quality can't be so divergent. It's relatively fungible and comparable as a weight of analysis.

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Ian Coss:
I always struggle to describe what the Big Dig is. Because on one level it was about tearing down an elevated highway and putting underground, like I described. But what it becomes is a kind of wholesale renovation, like kitchen renovation, of downtown Boston. Because it's not just that one highway. There are multiple tunnels, multiple bridges, it involves rerouting all these utilities, thousands of miles of utilities into downtown Boston giving this very old city a totally updated utility grid. It's about parkland, it's about there's some mass transit improvements. Some of the dirt that was excavated for the tunnel ends up being used to cap this island and the harbor that was basically a trash dump for many decades and restoring it to... It's so hard to describe everything it was because of that barnacle effect you described. And that's where, again, there's just this disconnect where we think of it as, "We thought we were just paying for a tunnel. Why is it $15 billion?" But we were also getting so much more.

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Danny Crichton:
And then this gets at a little bit, I think, of your part three there when you're talking about some of these costs, which is... I'm going to mispronounce his last name because it's Dutch. But Ben Freiberg, who has done a lot of work around mega projects... or Freiberg, I'll try to throw in a little... There you go. There you go.

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Ian Coss:
I spoke with him when I was working on the project.

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Danny Crichton:
Fantastic, yes.

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Ian Coss:
And he was in Boston in the '80s as... I don't know if he was a grad student or doing some research here, but he met Fred Salvucci. He heard about this project early on, so he was very familiar with it actually.

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Danny Crichton:
And he just published his book on mega projects. So he spent two, three decades collecting data on mega projects. Probably best well known for his work around the cost of Olympics and how they almost never, at least in his mathematics and calculus, never succeed for the cities, I think except for LA. In his book, he really emphasizes the importance of standardization. So this idea of like, "Look, if you do the same thing over and over and over again, you really start to save costs. People get trained up, people start to know what they need to do."
So for instance, I used to live in Seoul, South Korea, cheapest subway construction costs in the world. And part of the reason is that the crews who are working these lines and building these new stations and tunnels have done it so many times over and over again. They're quite standardized. There's some aesthetic differences from a public arts perspective, so a little bit of different tiling or whatever, but fundamentally, they're all identical. So the fire escape system and everything else that goes into this has already been preplanned. It's already optimized. It already follows the rules. And so you don't have as much of that scope... Or not scope change, but this sort of undiscovered, unknown unknown where you're like, "Oh, we had no idea, because we're tunneling here, we're going to have to think about a certain type of rock that happens to be on this side of the city versus that side of the city." They already have that knowledge prebuilt.
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And so I think this is where the challenge though, is how do you start to communicate these challenges to the public? So, on one hand it was miss-scoped narratively. You're talking about we're going to put this thing underground, we're going to get a tunnel. It's hard to sell, "We're going to have new utility wires." It's also hard to describe over time, and this is where we started the show of 20 years now from the... or almost 20 years from the final close of the project, how much the city has changed. I live near where that elevated highway would have been. I live near South Station in Boston, it would have been right there. That is now replaced with parks. Traffic is much less than it used to be. The cityscape is open. There's a ton of new buildings that are getting built.
And so the question I actually have always had is all that new residential and construction growth right on that park next to it, all of that additional value, all of the growth and the wealth that it basically comes into downtown Boston, was that enough to compensate for this project cost? It actually was a winner, it just took a little time to count it as a winner, but was it a winner?

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Ian Coss:
I mean, I have neither the skills or time to try and tabulate that. But what I'll tell you is this, we interviewed almost a hundred people for this podcast. I talked to a lot of very smart people who said that just in raw economic terms, this project was a bargain. In terms of the economic development that it kicked off, it was absolutely worth it. Because like you said, I mean the value of that real estate and the amount of businesses that have flowed in. If you look at, for folks who are here they'll know, there's this neighborhood right next to downtown called the Seaport. Now we call it the Seaport, I don't know... It's essentially a brand new neighborhood. If you rewind 20 years, it was basically docks and parking lots and a few warehouses. That area is now filled with biotech and hotels and art museums and concert venues.
And that's all because of the Big Dig. The Seaport went from this corner of the city that was kind of out of the way and really hard to access to becoming the most accessible part of downtown Boston because it's connected to the airport, it's connected to all the interstates, it's connected by mass transit. So the Big Dig really created the Seaport. So I mean, if you just added up the real estate taxes on every building in the seaport... I mean GE moved its world headquarters to right where the Big Dig was. That's the kind of economic development that this project stimulated.
I mean, I don't want to say that this is a total unmitigated good. There's obviously gentrification that comes along with this, changing neighborhoods. Aesthetically, design-wise, I think you could raise all kinds of critiques and questions about how the Seaport was built up, how the land around the old highway was redeveloped. I think there are a lot of valid questions and critiques. But yes, if you're looking at dollars and cents, this project has brought in an incredible amount of money for the city.

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Danny Crichton:
I used to live in Seaport. It has developed a lot. When I lived there, it was still mostly parking lots. It was starting to finally go through. And I recently walked through it last year and I was just shocked to see dozens of buildings, a little too much glass for me. It's a little too much. Talking about aesthetic concerns, I'm like, "This is a historical city, everything doesn't have to be glass to fight back." I think one of the big questions that comes up with these sorts of mega projects those, what you're getting at, is this concern around discount rates.
This was a popular theme in Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future. It's popular in a lot of climate change mitigation projects. But the idea of like, "Look, the benefits come. They're worth a lot. We built the New York City subway 100 years ago. Those train tunnels and those stations are still here." Now, they're barely here in some cases, but they are here and people use them every day and that investment continues to accrue because even though we have to maintain them, we don't have to build them. And so there's this fundamental infrastructure wealth, and physical and built environment wealth that comes to the city because we were willing to make those investments.
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And so the question always becomes these mega projects, yes, it was very expensive, it's upfront, but then these benefits accrue for generations. And the challenge is, is that in a lot of these models you're sort of budgeting for year and 15 year benefits or 20 year benefits, even though this tunnel theoretically has a lifetime of a century or more or forever if you maintain it well. As of now, seismically secure location for Boston.

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Ian Coss:
Climate change raises some questions about the viability of tunnels.

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Danny Crichton:
Exactly. And so it's always one of these tough challenges because the cost, you bear so much of the cost upfront. And particularly in a world where it's globalized, Boston has a lot of turnover. A lot of students obviously come, sometimes they pay taxes or whatever because they move their residency, sometimes they don't. So you're paying taxes for this project that you're not going to get any benefit for over the next 200 years. You're not alive, you're not going to count. So there's a bit of a challenge on some of this sort of stuff. But I always think of it as how do you account for that? Because clearly if you want to do these mega projects, you have to have a long-term... a deeply long-term vision for this. Maybe that's part of your work in trying to popularize, "Look at these benefits over 20 years and compare the old photos." But I'm just curious of do you think that there's a world in which we can bring a longer term lens to some of these projects, and then print that either at the local, state or federal in the United States?

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Ian Coss:
To me, that is a central paradox of infrastructure. You know that media works on a 24-hour cycle. And then politics obviously is working on a two or four year election cycle. And then we've got the Big Dig on a 40-year cycle. I mean, it's really hard to reconcile those things. And I don't know what the answer is to that. It's easy for me to sit here now and say, "Oh, you have to tell the story and you have to explain." But they knew this stuff. They had smart people doing PR for the Big Dig at the time, and they knew a lot of the things that we know now. And still they were not able to muster that support and convey what the benefits of this project were going to be. So I don't think there are easy fixes, but I do see a value. And one of the reasons I wanted to do this project was to revisit the story, to tell it again with that distance and perspective. Because now we can see the long arc, we can see it from conception to completion and the legacy and impacts.

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Danny Crichton:
So did this nine episode podcast series, really, really well produced. You interviewed a hundred folks. Obviously a very serious subject, but I'm curious across all of those different interviews, was there a funny anecdote, a funny observation?

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Ian Coss:
One of the storylines that if I could have done a 10th episode, I really wanted to do one that was just about the media, that was just about the reporters and the work they were doing and the narratives they were shaping. And there's this one story that a reporter told me that... It's funny, I ended up telling this story to other people so much that it makes me feel like, "Shoot, I really should have included that because clearly it's something that stuck with me in a very deep way."
When the tunnel opened in 2003, this is the downtown, what we call the Tip O'Neill Tunnel, this was the moment of triumph for this project, what should have been the moment of triumph. It ended up getting a little muddied. And so the story is that I interviewed this Globe reporter who was sort of the beat transportation reporter at the time, and he told me the story about how he went to his editor and it's like a month before opening. It's like, "Okay, it's finally here, the Big Dig. We're finally going to see it." And the word from the editor was, "Go out and find me something that's wrong with this thing and don't come back until you do." And I just thought that-

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Danny Crichton:
Sounds like The Boston Globe actually.

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Ian Coss:
I mean, there's that line in the podcast about, "This is the city of sports, politics and revenge." I mean, politics is blood sport here and the news media is cutthroat. And yes, there are some things about this story that are just very Boston. I think the media environment is very harsh. You see it in the sports, you see it in the politics. It is a harsh, harsh light to be under. And so this reporter told me the story about how like the dutiful beat reporter he was, he went out and he reported about how, well, they were supposed to have an orchestra in the tunnel when it opened and it was going to cost all this money. There was some sponsor that was paying for 90% of it but there was still the other 10%, so that's a big story.
And then there's story that... And you can find all these in The Globe, the month leading up to the opening. There was this concern about how the grade of the highway going down in to the tunnel had this one steep spot. There was this concern that the cars would come down it and because it was coming off this bridge and going into a tunnel that there'd be all this moisture if it was wet and then it would freeze and then there'd be this wildly dangerous skating rink, ski slope going down to the tunnel. And so he wrote this whole article about the grade of the tunnel and they had a diagram. If you look at the diagram it's like vertical scale has been magnified 10 times to help you see. It really looks like a rollercoaster ride because they amplified the y-axis to help you see it. And it was this whole story.
And then of course, we get to opening day, December 2003, and it's fine. They flip a switch, the last car goes up, the first car goes down and everything's fine. And this reporter, he was reflecting on it now and being like, "Yeah, there might've been some moments where the cynicism kind of got away from us."

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Danny Crichton:
You know, that might be a good tagline for this securities podcast series in general. There's just sometimes when your cynicism gets away from you. But, Ian, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the work. And definitely we'll have links to all of the different episodes for all nine on the Big Dig, and I'm looking forward to your next project.

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Ian Coss:
Appreciate it. I'm looking forward to figuring out what that next project is and how we can possibly bring it to life, but I'm working on it.

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Danny Crichton:
Absolutely. Ian, thank you so much.

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