Belltown Messenger - Grant's Broiler

This month I want to pass the mic to Thomas Oles, an old friend, a brilliant and revolutionary urban designer, and current Boston resident who knows the effects of the Big Dig firsthand and has a strong warning for Seattleites. Here's Thomas:

I remember the charmless drive to Logan Airport in mid-eighties along the Central Artery, the great rusty lizard ripping through what was left of downtown, the cheap reflective towers going up on all sides, built on junk bonds and stuffed with bow-tied brokers; bumper-to-bumper, bashed-up Boston cars, all rusting too; my parents' grimaces and my back-seat eagerness to leave for college in Seattle, where the highways were so wide and so empty they were called "free."

Then the dreaded passage through the mile-long sphincter of the Callahan Tunnel, the only link between the airport and the suburbs I was fleeing, spent places with names like Billerica and Saugus and Natick. Built in 1964 for 20,000 vehicles, by the late 1980s the Callahan was carrying, at excruciating and ever-increasing slowness, over 50,000 cars daily. The Artery itself, designed to carry 75,000 cars, bore nearly 200,000.

Packing my bags, I listened to radio reports of the money recently secured for the huge public works project that would save the city from "the Artery," the product of 1950s urban renewal that also tore down the West End and Scollay Square. The promised redemption? Yet more tunnels, designed to carry a then-unthinkable 250,000 cars per day. Construction chaos was promised for the better part of the coming decade.

I am finished with this place, I thought.

Over the years my family fell apart, parents and siblings fleeing too, mostly west in the great migration that continues out of the cold rocky places. In time I had no family or friends left in Boston. Then in 2004 I drifted back to this city to study at one of the button-down institutions I had scorned at age eighteen. I had not followed progress on the "Big Dig" since my departure and assumed that in place of the Central Artery I would see the green space and improved public transportation system promised to reward, by 1996, ten years of urban evisceration.

Instead, I found the old lizard carrying more rusty cars and angry Boston drivers than ever. Only later that year was it finally gone, leaving a mile-long blank spot in its place, toxic even in its absence. The green space is still years away: First the project was to be finished in 1996, then in 2001, then 2006. Progress has been so laborious that the first pieces will be obsolete long before the last ones are in place.

Meanwhile, the "T" rots. Save for the construction of a Seattle-like bus tunnel because the political will to build a new line was lacking, nothing has been done to the subway since I left town twenty years ago. The existing four lines are still running the same cars, many of them visibly rusting through, and all the sagging, hastily-hung Old Glories in the world cannot mask the decay of stations last renovated in the 1970s under a more visionary governor, one Michael Dukakis. Some stops are so forlorn and the headway between trolleys so erratic that one wonders on entering whether they are still functioning at all. The metal subway token, long abandoned everywhere else, is still in use.

And the tunnel? Since I have been in Boston it has sprung over 100 leaks. The governor, a Mormon whose election in Catholic Massachusetts testifies to the rise of the car-bound exurban voter, had to take a well-publicized ride through it to assure the public of its safety. The project has brought low its principal contractor, Modern Continental. And now Fred Salvucci, former transportation secretary of Massachusetts and "Father of the Big Dig," tells us the tunnels-surprise-will do nothing to reduce congestion, that traffic has already reached the levels predicted for the end of the decade. And the promised carrot atop the whole gridlocked mess, the "Rose Kennedy Greenway," is still far short of the estimated $300 million necessary for its construction and maintenance.

Now I learn that what I fled in Boston is about to happen in Seattle, even involving some of the same actors. And cost overruns, graft, and faulty construction in Boston? Not to worry, right?-these are the products of corrupt East Coast political machines, of politicians with Italian names and friends who can get your legs broken. This is so much feel-good, back-patting Northwest pabulum: Large tunnel projects invite corruption and almost always run over budget and past completion date, and our local politicians are just as corrupt even if their personal style is more yoga-and-hiking-boots. To an ignorant observer it might seem the viaduct proposal is designed to assure that the project fails as spectacularly as possible while giving the most meager public benefit, continuing the proud lineage of transportation debacles-the bus tunnel, Sound Transit, and the Monorail-in Seattle over the last two decades.

In many ways the tunnel, with road capacity not at issue, is even more egregious than the Central Artery Tunnel: For the sake of 100,000 cars that could be carried on a series of large city streets or a shoreline boulevard like the universally admired Passeig de Colom in Barcelona, the Viaduct "solution" will create a 180-foot-wide new rip in the city at its south end in Pioneer Square, as well as leaving a piece of elevated expressway-historic preservation Seattle-style?-for tourists at the Pike Place Market.

In the face of all their obvious shortcomings, there must be some other reason why officials and planners love tunnels-and, for that matter, subterranean parking. Really. it is not a matter of faster trips to the airport, or more cars, or greenbelts, or any of the rest of it. What tunnels do for us is this: They mask the physical and moral ugliness of what Margaret Thatcher called the "Great Car Society" by pandering to our nostalgia, by sustaining our illusions of urban cleanliness and order. They are like the modern toilet designed to let us forget that we shit.

But the worst thing about replacing highways with tunnels is that it saps both our outrage and our creativity: Because 200,000 cars daily were already barreling through downtown Boston, it was assumed that any replacement for the Artery needed to accommodate equal or more traffic. But in no small measure it is the increase in capacity that itself increases traffic-that is why Salvucci himself has always argued that the project will fail absent massive increases in funding for public transportation. More even than its grotesque cost, then, the legacy of the Central Artery project is a climate of civic exhaustion and cynicism in which we dare not envision the city differently. As the removal of the Embarcadero freeway in San Francisco demonstrated, cities do not stop functioning when highways are removed (in many instances they function better). Yet the Big Dig has drained the air out of the public discourse and left oxygen for only more tunnels, more roads, more traffic, more denial of the dead-end that Car City-and Car World-represents.

So Seattle: before you pick up your shovels and start digging yourselves deeper into the hole we're already in, take a long look at the other end of I-90 and think. Think very hard.