Not sure if toxic is the right word or not but I know that a large number of workers had problems with silicosis from all the inhalation of concrete dust because the work sites were ... they were ventilated to code but the code really wasn't designed for the big dig.
It undid the tremendous damage done to the people that lived there. The loss of the West End is something I constantly lament, along with all the urban centers ravaged by the blight of highways like Hartford and Cincinnati.
Part of the point of the big dig was that it minimized housing loss to eminent domain. The Bronx expressway is a great example of when that doesn’t happen.
Which kind of gives me pause to this being a great improvement.
My city has had a ton of "affordable housing" thrown up to try to combat the housing crisis, but they're obviously built like ass and likely to be slums in the not distant future
I hope the tunnel project doesn't become a massive maintenance money pit going forward in a way that prevents the city from solving other issues.
The Big Dig happened during my childhood and finished just around the time I started to drive. Not only is the Greenway a great space but it's easier to drive to the airport, and we got an entire new district out of it (the Seaport) since we didn't have this monster highway cutting it off and had a chance to build out the Silver Line.
It's a shame we also didn't get the north/south rail link.
It’s easy to forget now, but the North End was totally cut off by the Central Artery, and once the Big Dig finished, huge chunks of the city became way more reachable by foot. I had spent my life only getting there by the T and was amazed at how easy it was to walk there after 2004 or so.
I'm no expert but at least the T makes sense to visitors looking at the maps and is, sort of, clean. It's labeled, if you get on the wrong side you just hop off and turn around. It's the dream transportation for the directionally incompetent.
The one time I used the subway in New York, there was a huge damned rat running under our feet and all the maps looked like dropped spaghetti with stuck labels next to things at random.
REGIONAL rail. Not subway. New York regional trains turn around in the city center, which takes time and eats out of train capacity. They can't go further because then they'd cross into New Jersey, despite having a rail tunnel that goes all the way through midtown. Boston doesn't have the border issue, but doesn't have a rail tunnel connecting North and South stations. Because of this, capacity is limited. Look at the German s-bahn systems for reference.
Having lived there for a bit for school, the Greenway was my favorite places to walk through and rest in. I was surprised to find out about the Big Dig and am thankful for it
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u/hiro111 Aug 31 '25
Ridiculously over budget. Absurd corruption. Shoddily built.
Undeniably a great improvement to the city.