The Big Dig was a Big Joke

I know this isn't news to anyone who commutes by car through the city, but I haven't had to do it for a long while, even when I lived out in the western 'burbs. But yesterday I had to drive from the South Shore through the city to North Andover during rush hour.

Don't ask why I was driving to North Andover. Why anyone lives up there is beyond me.

But...could someone please tell me what our billions of dollars bought from the Big Dig? It took me an hour to get from one side of the city to the other. I thought--naively, it seems--that tearing down that ugly raised roadway and putting it underground was also going to alleviate traffic jams.



It seems all that the powers that be did was take the awful traffic situation and put it out of sight. I knew that the Big Dig didn't do anything for those of us who lived to the west of Boston. The Mass Pike was still a parking lot out that way at both a.m. and p.m. rush hours. But I thought for some reason that the Big Dig was supposed to reduce the commuting time north and south of the city.

It was a big pile of cars, idling and polluting the sky, not getting anywhere...burning oil...using money we borrow from other countries like China to buy oil and pay off our other debts...

In the end, the Big Dig was just a big way to put a lot of money into people's pockets.

There wasn't a lot of vision that went into this Big Dig thing, was there? And by vision, I mean, some people out there who could think way beyond what the problem was. Public transportation. Something.

And don't tell me people won't ride public transportation. That they want their cars. In 1984, if someone had asked people what they wanted in a computer, no one would have said I want to have this thing that I can move around on my desktop click a button and point at pictures. The people at Apple came up with a mouse and graphical interface on the screen, called it Macintosh, and changed the world. Visionaries tell people things they don't know.

So, instead of just taking the same damn thing we had in Boston and burying it underground, they could have taken all those billions and torn down that ugly roadway, and built parking garages outside the city so anyone coming into the city could "pawrk their cawr" and take a way-cool transportation system that really worked throughout the city, and I mean throughout, one that connected all the parts of the city by train. Trains that worked. Trains that were comfortable and that ran on time and all throughout the day and night so they were dependable and you knew if you had to get somewhere you could get there on time.

And coming home, I sat in another traffic jam as road work was being done on the Southeast Expressway as it is always being done. You can't tell me that road needs to be torn up and fixed as much as it is. Or that the Mass Pike or any of the other roads around here need the same kind of work. We're just taking tax money that really doesn't need to be spent and handing it over to people who couldn't make it any other way without state or federal jobs to keep them going. It's pork-barrel politics, people. It's socialism, but no one wants to call it that.

The world could use a few good visionaries right now.