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The project, called Project Hydra, will aim to establish 'Secure Super Grids' that can withstand extreme weather and terrorist attacks.

But will it survive human error and project mismanagement? I think not.

I had the opportunity to work with the crew that took out the internet service for Boston in late 2003 (I think it was).

They were electrical contractors for BigDig work, and were supposed to remove electrical control boxes that were marked "dead". There were 3 marked boxes, 2 were dead electrical boxes that were all set to be removed, the third was a AT&T broadband fiber control box that someone had marked to be removed. All of Boston was without internet for about 8 hours.

Needless to say, the guys responsible for it were pretty pissed off at whoever marked it. But then again, that's what insurance companies hired by these giant contractors are for. -AA

That happens in the U.S. too but we just start a war somewhere and blow up other peoples public works.

The us has its Pork barrel public works projects too.

BTW I seem to recall that there was a high bridge/viaduct built in the US recently to protect a senic valley from auto traffic. I think it was in Shenandoah National Park but I could be wrong.

Heh, you want to talk about road construction waste, come on over to my home state, Massachusetts. We got you beat by a long shot.

To say that Massachusetts labour unionists are influential in government would be to say that the Antarctic continent is freezing cold. Case and point: Boston's famous federally-funded Ten-Billion-Over-Budget scam known as The Big Dig.

On a sort of related note, I've noticed recently while observing the Big Dig that heavy machinery, which intuitively should be built as big as the task demands, in practice tends to generally scale up to a size that will fit either inside a standard 40 foot shipping container or, less frequently, the back of a flatbed 18 wheeler trailer.

There's a definite range where equipment will approach this size -- bulldozers & similar tracked digging equipment, high-capacity ventilation fans, and so on -- but for the most part it won't be bigger than will fit on a truck or railcar. If something does need to be bigger, it will either consist of major components that are up to the shipping container's size, &/or it will consist of collapsible sections. Either way, this allows the equipment to be shipped to the construction site, assembled for use, then taken apart & put back when no longer needed.

I suppose this is the modern version of the chariot / railroad constraint. America's Interstates have replaced its riverways & railways as the major means of moving material around the country, so it only makes sense that mass produced products would be built in such a way that they are easy to transport on the back of a truck or, under less common circumstances, on a train or freighter ship. Hence, things tend to be long & skinny, like big shoeboxes.

On a sort of related note, I've noticed recently while observing the Big Dig that heavy machinery, which intuitively should be built as big as the task demands, in practice tends to generally scale up to a size that will fit either inside a standard 40 foot shipping container or, less frequently, the back of a flatbed 18 wheeler trailer.

There's a definite range where equipment will approach this size -- bulldozers & similar tracked digging equipment, high-capacity ventilation fans, and so on -- but for the most part it won't be bigger than will fit on a truck or railcar. If something does need to be bigger, it will either consist of major components that are up to the shipping container's size, &/or it will consist of collapsible sections. Either way, this allows the equipment to be shipped to the construction site, assembled for use, then taken apart & put back when no longer needed.

I suppose this is the modern version of the chariot / railroad constraint. America's Interstates have replaced its riverways & railways as the major means of moving material around the country, so it only makes sense that mass produced products would be built in such a way that they are easy to transport on the back of a truck or, under less common circumstances, on a train or freighter ship. Hence, things tend to be long & skinny, like big shoeboxes.

On a sort of related note, I've noticed recently while observing the Big Dig that heavy machinery, which intuitively should be built as big as the task demands, in practice tends to generally scale up to a size that will fit either inside a standard 40 foot shipping container or, less frequently, the back of a flatbed 18 wheeler trailer.

There's a definite range where equipment will approach this size -- bulldozers & similar tracked digging equipment, high-capacity ventilation fans, and so on -- but for the most part it won't be bigger than will fit on a truck or railcar. If something does need to be bigger, it will either consist of major components that are up to the shipping container's size, &/or it will consist of collapsible sections. Either way, this allows the equipment to be shipped to the construction site, assembled for use, then taken apart & put back when no longer needed.

I suppose this is the modern version of the chariot / railroad constraint. America's Interstates have replaced its riverways & railways as the major means of moving material around the country, so it only makes sense that mass produced products would be built in such a way that they are easy to transport on the back of a truck or, under less common circumstances, on a train or freighter ship. Hence, things tend to be long & skinny, like big shoeboxes.

On a sort of related note, I've noticed recently while observing the Big Dig that heavy machinery, which intuitively should be built as big as the task demands, in practice tends to generally scale up to a size that will fit either inside a standard 40 foot shipping container or, less frequently, the back of a flatbed 18 wheeler trailer.

There's a definite range where equipment will approach this size -- bulldozers & similar tracked digging equipment, high-capacity ventilation fans, and so on -- but for the most part it won't be bigger than will fit on a truck or railcar. If something does need to be bigger, it will either consist of major components that are up to the shipping container's size, &/or it will consist of collapsible sections. Either way, this allows the equipment to be shipped to the construction site, assembled for use, then taken apart & put back when no longer needed.

I suppose this is the modern version of the chariot / railroad constraint. America's Interstates have replaced its riverways & railways as the major means of moving material around the country, so it only makes sense that mass produced products would be built in such a way that they are easy to transport on the back of a truck or, under less common circumstances, on a train or freighter ship. Hence, things tend to be long & skinny, like big shoeboxes.

$1.5 billion to potentially benefit the entire country is better than $16 billion wasted on one city. It's too bad it didn't work out (pre-set flight lanes essentially required by the fuzziness of VOR make the whole system less efficient than it could be), but at least it was federal money wasted on a national system, not federal money wasted on a local system.

And how would you propose that this be widened and rebuilt "at a much lower cost?" Oh, and you can't shut down the one of the primary routes through town while you're at it. Yeah. Shut the fuck up, dipshit.

Too bad it's about New Jersey...

BigDig.com isn't. I can't believe no one's mentioned it yet. It's got loads of info; the maps and videos (including virtual fly-overs and fly-throughs) being the most instantly gratifying.

Too bad it's about New Jersey...

BigDig.com isn't. I can't believe no one's mentioned it yet. It's got loads of info; the maps and videos (including virtual fly-overs and fly-throughs) being the most instantly gratifying.

Too bad it's about New Jersey...

BigDig.com isn't. I can't believe no one's mentioned it yet. It's got loads of info; the maps and videos (including virtual fly-overs and fly-throughs) being the most instantly gratifying.

The northbound side is already gone. Take a look.

Links:
Big Dig Photos
Big Dig Operations Center
The History Channel on the Big Dig
Official Big Dig Site

Links:
Big Dig Photos
Big Dig Operations Center
The History Channel on the Big Dig
Official Big Dig Site

Really, I wish whoever submitted this had done a little better job with the story, considering how big a project this was :-)

Well, yeah, but the views that will replace it will be nice, too. That expressway has literally overshadowed a huge swath of land through the city. Obviously developers will grab up a lot of it (and the increased tax base won't hurt), but a certain amount of it is -- supposedly, at least -- reserved for parks and open space.

My biggest complaint -- possibly even counting the cost-overruns and delays -- is that they designed and built a world-class bridge ... without a pedestrian/bicycle lane! Would it have costed that much more? Or did nobody realize it would have been a good idea?

Yeah, but a beautiful new series of parks
and new buildings, the Rose Kennedy Greenway will take its place. The central artery divided Boston neighborhoods for too
long. Yes, this was wildly expensive but ultimately a good thing for city. The replacement of the central artery will bring more business and tax dollars, hopefully offsetting some of the expense of the tunnel. Check out the video link aabove, its cool.

Go see the big dig everyone in the US payed $10 billion for. Ain't communism great?

In boston they built an undersea tunnel by just digging a trench, dropping in a tunnel, then filling up the trench again...pretty cool I thought.

Details of the Ted Williams bridge here.

It's fair to say that the Big Dig was too expensive, but I don't think that it could be considered "easy" relative to anything.

I think your point would've been better made comparing this project to the Chunnel. That 30 mile link cost about $13 billion (U.S.). So, yeah, 30 million seems a bit on the low side.

Engineering!=CAD

I am an engineer. I've worked on many engineering studies over the past few years. I run a engineering company now. The number of times I've had to use a propriety CAD package I can count on my right hand.

Thanks to all of the open source packages out there, there are plenty of engineerng apps available for Mac OS X.

It's not that hard you just need a big box and a big hole.

And, if you do manage to get here by September, you might be able to get on a Big Dig Tour, and see the tunnel and bridge close up before they let the cars on the southbound portion. It's a lot of fun - I just did one. Bring a camera and some high-speed film.

And, while you're in Boston, you can see America's First Subway, the T.

Boston, Massachusetts and its environs are filled with incredibly geeky things. Boston is the home of the Free Software Foundation, Ximian, and OSDN. Just across the river, Cambridge is the home of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undeniably a geek Mecca. Next door to MIT is Harvard University (as the MIT t-shirts say, "Harvard: Because not everybody can get in to MIT"). Plus we've got the Big Dig, which despite its infamy for budget overruns, corruption, and defacement of the city landscape, is also home to some incredibly geeky marvels of engineering! And of course, many other geeks of note live and work in and around Boston.

It seems like, aside from the continual updates thing, a nicer idea would be to have a PalmOS or WinCE version that would be updated either at sync time or, hardware allowing, continually via wi-fi, modem, or Bluetooth circuitry. Better still, if your PDA had GPS abilities, then getting current traffic info (and, why not, weather as well) for your current location would be even better. By going to a traditional PDA, you lose the real-time updates that the dedicated device seems to provide, but you also lose one more gadget to have to carry around (or, I suppose, just leave in your glovebox), and you also gain a good deal of flexibility.

I think the most interesting thing about this application is the excellent data representation of in the WA-DOT map. I'd like to see this traffic map style replace some of the other, clumsier traffic sites that I'm used to, with their breakdown of a region in arbitrary ways ("well, my route takes me from this section, across part of that one, and ends up at this third one..."), under-descriptive icons, pages of text ("wait, where the hell is Frontage Road? OH, the so-and-so landmark on interstate $foo..."), useless webcams that are greyed by smog and blocked by obstacles, and maps that don't attempt to tell you anything at all. Compare this to the WA-DOT's system, which tell you conditions between each exit, attempts to explain data holes ("no data" / "no equipment"), and even provides archives of maps at earlier times ("what the hell was going on last Thursday?"). Nice!

But I don't think I want a device dedicated to receiving that information.

Especially one targeted only at Seattle... :-)

I think that many outside of China don't realise something that China's less than democratic system permits which wold be nigh on impossible in the USA: Long term commitment to a project.

You haven't heard of Boston's big dig, have you?

Started in 1992.

Original cost estimate: $2.6 billion. Current price tag: $14.6 billion.

60% of the money paid for by federal tax dollars.

If that isn't long term commitment, I don't know is.

Thus disproving your point entirely.

While I'm sure the prior responses to your question have been well-meaning, they have also been under- or misinformed. Here's what the Big Dig really is, from a Boston-area resident:

Interstate 93 runs directly through downtown Boston, from north to south. This part of I-93, called the Central Artery around here, was built in the 1950s as an elevated highway. Even as construction was completed, the city realized it had made a big mistake in erecting an ugly green eyesore which separated Boston's waterfront neighborhoods, including our analog to Little Italy, the North End, from the rest of the city. Thirty or so years later, this eyesore was still ugly, and was jammed with traffic for the better part of each day.

The Big Dig is, as has been mentioned, the largest public works project in U.S. history, which aims to put the Central Artery in a tunnel under Boston and demolish the elevated Artery, thereby reunifying the downtown area and increasing its ability to carry high volumes of traffic. The other major aim, now almost completed, is to extend Interstate 90, an east-west highway that used to terminate at the Boston waterfront, underwater to Logan Airport in East Boston. Along with these two primary objectives, a lot of supporting work has gone on around the city.

The Big Dig undoubtedly has a huge price tag, one that has only gotten bigger and bigger as the years have gone on, but given the enormity of the task at hand, I can't see how this wasn't to be expected. The end result is going to transform the city for the better, and the project has implemented a ton of cool technologies (check it out at BigDig.com, actually a fairly cool site).

Offtopic, yes, but hopefully this has been helpful for you.

they're basically expanding/renovating the existing highway system in the city of boston without shutting the city down. it's the most expensive public works project in history and has pushed the limits of civil engineering. info here. it was supposed to be done first in the late 90's around 2000 but it's looking more like 2010 if we're lucky. several phases have been completed and the new tunnel and bridge are open i believe.

I have no idea what Big Dig is.

The Big Dig is the common nickname for Boston's "Central Artery/Tunnel Project". Its a massive and extremely impressive feat in civil engineering intended to solve all of Boston's traffic woes.

There's plenty of pictures and videos and whatnot on the project's website

(Okay, so that's not totally fair, but I couldn't resist)

The Big Dig _is_ really cool, although right now it's just a major construction project that is not quite complete. One of its drawbacks is that most aspects of it will become available for use right at the same time. By now the project has been underway for over ten years, and although it is mostly finished, a relatively small amount of it is being used. It just worked out that way because each part of the project relies on the completion of other parts.

Since this was such a huge undertaking, the state went all-out on the PR front. The practical upshot of this is an amazing web site that changes constantly and is always interesting to look at when you have some time to kill.

http://www.bigdig.com

Well, almost. I think that once Boston is finally finish EVERYONE will want their own federally funded underground freeway. Remember, for one a bit more than half the cost of a space station, you too can have one!

I've heard the Boston Central Artery (aka Big Dig) compared to a heart surgery performed on a marathon runner while he is running marathon. I wonder if the robot could be used in the Dig, too. 8-)

I mean, billions of dollars to dig a highway under a city that will likely to be at capacity the day it's opened.

Local newscasters will be reporting:

"Today, in Boston, the Big Dig officially opened to unbearable traffic. In unrelated news, the Even Bigger Dig will commence next week to meet todays traffic needs ten years from now."

This is correct. As someone who lives in North End of Boston, I have witnessed the development of the Big Dig since they broke ground, and, while it IS vastly over-budget, the work schedule is still on track. The new bridge has been complete for the past year (and is one of the most beautiful ever constructed), and the tunnels underground are complete. They recently had a "Walk the Big Dig" where the public was finally allowed to walk the entire route. If you check out this picture, I think you can see that it's just about complete.

2004 is a year after the big dig will be done. bigdig.com

Not quite. Not at all, in fact. Boston's bypass is I95 (also known as Route 128) which has no mention in the Big Dig Project Probably due to the fact that construction on the bypass was mostly finished in the early 60's. Now, the Mass Pike gets money from the CA/T Project, but it's not a bypass - it's a spur straight into the city.

Furthermore, while I see the gripe with spending money to put it underground - fact is, the road needed more lanes. If you've ever driven on it, you realize that when it goes past the North End and Fanueil Hall, there *is* no more room for expansion without massive demolition (which would trash some taller buldings and historical landmarks, and that just wouldn't be happening)

Boston has transportation nightmares. Unlike New York, that does construction at night, all road construction is done during the day in Boston, including during Rush Hour. The unionized workers don't have to put in overtime, so sometimes jobs will involve ripping up a street on Thursday/Friday, then MAYBE getting to fix it Monday or Tuesday of the next week. However, if it wasn't planned that way, it may be a week or more before they return with equipment.

Quoting from their website:

The Central Artery project's unique challenge is the fact that it is being built in the middle of a city. Work of the CA/T project's magnitude and duration has never been attempted in the heart of an urban area, but unlike any other major highway project, the CA/T is designed to maintain traffic capacity and access to residents and businesses - to keep the city open for business - throughout construction. Highway projects of the 1950s and 1960s, when the interstates were first built, gave very little consideration to the communities in the path of the new roads, with disruption and dislocation the rule of the day.

In the meantime, I also think a 15 year plan for a project this huge is reasonable and something still totally within their reach....software delays or otherwise. It's also interesting to note that a majority of the land recovered by removing the Central Artery's above-ground eyesore is going to be returned to the city in the form of parks/trees/grass as opposed to being auctioned out as lots for more building.

If you're not familiar with what the Boston Big Dig is, you can visit:

http://www.boston.com/beyond_bigdig/ (Warning: Flash) for extensive information

or the 'official' web site at:

http://www.bigdig.com/ for more information

U.S. Senator who ensured the passage of the Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation Assistance Act of 1987. This act included the federal funding for the Big Dig. President Ronald Reagan had vetoed this bill earlier that year. The senate voted to sustain this veto. Senator Kennedy allied with West Virginian Senator Robert Byrd to force a revote in the senate to override Reagan's veto. The revote was approved. At that point Kennedy and others put pressure on the deciding vote, namely, Senator Terry Sanford of N. Carolina. They threatened to pull tobacco subsidies to North Carolinian farmers. Under this pressure, Sen. Terry Sanford changed his vote and the Big Dig bill became law in April of 1987.

And they still need more help... The "Security Contract" is still open for bidding. It includes video surveillance equipment and a 400 Gig DVR. Anyone interested?

The Big Dig has indeed been going on for over a decade now. As a Boston resident, I'm definitely tired of it. But to be fair, it's not behind schedule simply due to incompetant beaurocrats (although there are plenty of those). The project itself is the single most complex undertaking of civil engineering in the history of the U.S. Any project of this scale is going to have delays.

They actually have a pretty good website It has a really neat gallery of huge aerial photos, as well as some great maps of the whole thing. A good time-waster, if you enjoy looking at maps.

Most of us up here in Boston just want the damn thing to end. It's getting there -- they've finished the bridge and lots of ventilation buildings, and they are starting to close up some of the massive holes they've dug.

Mass transit in Boston is pretty good. you can go anywhere on the subway for $1, and the buses do a decent job of coverage too. The thing that sucks is that the subway turns into a pumpkin around 12:30am.

$10 billion - just a few billion less than this monstrosity.

You're mistaking the population of Boston city proper (which is close to your quoted figure) with the size of the Boston metropolitan area. The metro area, which is the effective size of the city since Boston proper is landwise fairly small, is around 3 million as of 1990. Boston has been trying to correct at least some of their traffic problems with the big dig.

For comparison London has around 7 million people in the city proper and around 12 million in the metro area. Definitely more crowded, but then so is England overall so this should not be especially surprising.

I took a tour of Boston's Big Dig project a couple of weeks ago, including the Leonard Zakim cable-stayed bridge across the Charles River. The head engineer for the project went over the design considerations, including the properties they needed in the cables. He showed us a few different kinds of cable, including ones meant to flex, ones meant to be stiff, etc.

Ultimately, it seems like a fascinating materials science problem. You spec out what properties you want your bridge to have (amount of traffic, hence average & maximum weight load, resistance to winds & seismic activity, etc) and then find cables that can support that specification. For the Zakim bridge, the inner cables will be under a light load, and won't be twisting much, so the cable needed doesn't need to be as strong. The top/long cables have to be able to flex, resist 200+ mph winds, and will be bearing the greatest load, so the steel chosen for the purpose is picked to match these needs. It's all quantitative science, not guesswork, and I'm sure the prople designing the Sicilian bridge are just as clueful.

I took a tour of Boston's Big Dig project a couple of weeks ago, including the Leonard Zakim cable-stayed bridge across the Charles River. The head engineer for the project went over the design considerations, including the properties they needed in the cables. He showed us a few different kinds of cable, including ones meant to flex, ones meant to be stiff, etc.

Ultimately, it seems like a fascinating materials science problem. You spec out what properties you want your bridge to have (amount of traffic, hence average & maximum weight load, resistance to winds & seismic activity, etc) and then find cables that can support that specification. For the Zakim bridge, the inner cables will be under a light load, and won't be twisting much, so the cable needed doesn't need to be as strong. The top/long cables have to be able to flex, resist 200+ mph winds, and will be bearing the greatest load, so the steel chosen for the purpose is picked to match these needs. It's all quantitative science, not guesswork, and I'm sure the prople designing the Sicilian bridge are just as clueful.