More Digs Down Under: Boston's Latest Uprooting

By Jane Holtz Kay

The ground will be dug to distraction. The bulldozers and backhoes will sift through the centuries and the budget, now a paltry billion dollars, will soar through the decade. The downtown and theater district businesses will be in an uproar, the new "Y" uprooted, the subsoil shaken, the Common's greenery unsettled. And traffic? Don't even talk about the congestion in sight for the eight-year (so far) project.

Does the scenario sound familiar? A dim memory from decades ago? Well, if visions of the Big Dig dance in your head, you will understand why folks hereabout are describing the newly-launched MBTA boondoggle "The Little Dig."

Yes, even as Boston begins to dismantle the Erector Set landscape of the Central Artery project that has beset the city for what feels like a lifetime, the MBTA is launching a pricey, havoc-making project. Just as Big Diggers boasted of an end in sight, the "T" put its first $20 million down on a feeble, to dig a tunnel turnaround to connect the Silverline bus and South Station underground. Slated to dig under, around, over and in between, the streets and sites of Downtown-- from the tourist booth on the Common to the New England Medical Center.

The "T's" announcement of the first $20 million dollars down for this "Little Dig" in the midst of budget cuts and fare raises - along with the Romney administration's cutback more solid transportation projects and poverty programs - is a sign not only of a lack of charity, but of transportation and city planning run amok.

In theory, the "Little Dig" is the third stage of the Silver Line bus project that would connect the Washington Street Corridor busline to South Station. By creating an underground turnaround for its lumbering 40 foot buses, it would supply space to spin them around under the built up infrastructure of the city. To do so, of course, the T says it will require "civil, structural, mechanical, fire and life safety, signals, traction power and electrical engineering as well as environmental review and permitting" (are your calculators running?) not to mention traffic and parking planning, permitting, analysis, "temporary and permanent land takings... as well as tenant location." Sound familiar?

But why clunky buses when the greenline could do it better on slim, rail lines taking one-fraction of the space? Better, economically, financially, AND geographically, too. Why are we propping up more silverline buses (locally known as the "silver lie") when they have already failed in their mandate to ease disinvestment and discrimination in Roxbury with light rail. With cars parked in the buses' so-called speed lanes, the trip has slowed to carriage pace; with interior aisles too narrow for a baby carriage, passenger comfort is shorted; and with a 40 foot length exterior too long for flexibility, compact mobility underground is denied.

The tunnel designed for this cumbersome bus turnaround would connect no one to no place and do it ...expensively. It would make a muck of city surfaces. Among its disturbances: a digout at Boston Common, excavations disrupting the theater district, and a land grab that destroys the new $16 million Chinatown YMCA for a "T" portal. All this in the period of scrimping on services, shorting other valid transportation choices, and heightening construction fatigue.

This senseless project not only demonstrates a myopic T management but one blind to the nature of the region it serves. Boston is a first-class rail city, a streetcar city shaped and (as this winter white deluge shows) sustained by rail. Urban rail is the cheapest, most efficient way to go. And yet, the boys on the T-bus parade plump for this and other bus boondoggles.

Instead of promoting new city rail systems that cost less and attract more riders (between, say, Medford or the indigo line), T bosses send us to the back of the bus. Instead of joining Senator Kennedy and Congressman Lynch in supporting a north-south rail link underground --allowing Bostonians to travel north to south, and train riders from Maine to Florida -- they ignore this better, cheaper underground rail which would lure business backers and has the potential to make a profit.

This isn't only about the true toll of the "Little Dig" which beggars other means of mobility and gets more intrusive on the way. This is about a bureaucracy hitting bottom through stubbornness and a governor and his team whose planning innocence (to be polite) lets bad ideas bubble out of the brain machine. We have lived through a decade and a half in the slag heaps of an auto-age project, let's not let this one bury us.

This article appeared in the Boston Globe, March 29, 2003.

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