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I am sure many agree.  I hate driving through Big Dig.  It is still completely jammed for most of the day!  Where did our 14 billion dollars go?  I think the mistake was made in making the estimate of the vehicles traveled.

I went to the Old State House on Congress and State today to take my out-of-town guests, and saw some interesting stats on the Central Artery and Big Dig.

- The original raised Central Artery was built in 1959 and was designed to carry 75,000 cars a day. 
- In 1990 before it was demolished, it carried almost 200,000 cars a day. 
- New (Big Dig) Central Artery is designed to carry 250,000 cars a day.

I got a few gripes here. 
1) How was the “capacity” considered as 75K, but the road was carrying 200K cars?  If there were 200K vehicles traveling, isn’t the capacity of the road 200K? (I know, I know.  Maybe the capacity is # of cars it can support to travel without traffic or something.)

2) Going from 200K to 250K doesn’t seem like much. 25% increase seems like we will catch up fairly quickly.  Of course, unless we mean “250K capacity”, but it can actually hold like 700K cars (see #1 for definition of “capacity.”)

3) …wait, is it an increase from 75K to 250K?

4) 200K figure may be correct in a factual sense, but it ignores the fact that it is NOT a good estimate of how many cars “could” be traveling on it.  Bostonians avoided Central Artery at all costs because the traffic was so bad.  Many of those people wanted to take 93 but couldn’t.  (and now they do)

So, I sure hope we didn’t use this figure to come up with the 250K figure, because from my experience, we already got 250K riding on it.  What the heck are we gonna do now?  Go figure.  …sigh…

Readers have left 8 comments.

1. Chimeral

Good Point, Canucks. I wonder what the REAL number of vehicles that would go through it if the highway had infinite capacity. like 700K?

2. Guest User

I feel like the traffic has somewhat improved in 93. I still remember how bad the traffic was before. It was bumper to bumper at night or day, weekend or weekday.

3. Boscorelli

Looking at this topic in this manner frustrates me, because this means that the government was deflating the # of vehicles coming in and out of Boston - but the truth is that everyone was avoiding the highway. It means that the gov't never really faced the real issue of how much capacity was needed by the people of Boston.

4. Sully

Boscorelli, In their defense, maybe it was physically impossible to fit more than 250K and have the capacity increase any higher. There is only limited space, and controlling capacity is not as simple as just widening the road. There are bottlenecks and other factors (e.g. # of lanes outside of the city).

5. Chris

Traffic modeling is probably pretty complicated. It's not like the capacity of a jug of water, where you can figure out the volume and come up with a concrete number.

My guess is that the capacity numbers indicate something like a "working capacity", ie, how many cars it can handle before things start to back up. Theoretically it could probably handle millions of cars a day, if everyone drove bumper to bumper at 90mph. But that's a little unrealistic.

6. Guest User

Quit going to museums. You can't handle it.

7. Chris

Quit going to museums. You can't handle it.

— Guest User

8. Tom

This thread reminds me a scene from Mission Impossible 3, where the hero lies to his friends (and fiance) that he is a traffic engineer, and starts babbling about how it's a living being.

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