A Little Dig For Boston

Storrow Drive runs along the Charles River in Boston. It's one of the major roads in Boston after the central artery (subject of the Big Dig) and the Mass Pike. It's described on the traffic report and about 100,000 cars drive it a day. Well one of the small tunnels on it is crumbling and needs to be repaired. The tunnel is just in the eastbound lane, the westbound lane has no tunnel. I used to commute it on it and this is where my gunfight story took place.

The repairs could take 2 years or more. What to do with the traffic during the repairs? On one side is Beacon Hill, not the most spacious of places to route 100,000 cars. On the other side is a park known as the Esplande that borders the river. Here's a map (I understand next week I'll be able to embed it on this page). The tunnel is in the middle where the Y is. The building in the park is the Hatch Shell where a lot of free summer concerts are and the Boston Pops play on July 4th.

So one plan is to route traffic through Beacon Hill, the other is to build a temporary 1,000 foot road 40 feet into the Esplande. The Boston Globe reports Revived plan for detour on Esplanade stirs outrage. "Richard Sullivan, commissioner of the State Department of Recreation and Conservation said the bypass road would cut construction time by six months and save the state $5 million."

"Sullivan argued that the benefits outweigh the temporary impact on the Esplanade, which he promised would be completely restored. Building a road, he said, would allow construction to take place from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., instead of just at night, and keep emergency evacuation lanes open at all times, with two lanes in each direction. The plan, he said, would allow the project to be completed in two years at a cost of $50 million. Even without the road, repairs on the tunnel will intrude into the Esplanade, at one point as far as 25 feet, according to engineers hired by the state."

The arguments against the bypass road are: "But it's a park!". Well there's a little more. The fear would be the road would become permanent which seems moronic to me. More plausible is that the state has a bad track record on road projects and this could last 3-5 years. I know nothing about civil engineering but don't understand at all why this has to take 2 years in the first place, but as someone who wasn't surprised at all by cost and time overruns on the big dig, I still don't trust their estimates. Also, estimates for the repair are from $25 million to $200 million to replace the tunnel. How can a $5 million savings estimate be accurate in such a range?

You may have guessed I favor the bypass road, apparently I'm in the minority.