[throwaway0a5e]

Giving the big dig credit for an economic revitalization that happened to damn near every city over the same time period is disingenuous at best.

Money spent ensuring that some jerk in his apartment downtown didn't have to look at a highway is money not spent improving the T or fixing other highway problem points for a sum total of the same or better economic effect.

Making transit options not suck increase property values regardless of how you make them. It's the results that matter. Green Monster V2 that yielded the same transit times between various points would have had the same economic effect.

And this ignores the fact that the state let all sorts of infrastructure go into disrepair over the course of the project and we're still digging out of that hole.

[ghaff]

I'm not an urban planner but it's hard to separate effects.

You also have the ongoing Seaport buildout and, as you say, Boston (and Cambridge) was well-positioned in any case to take advantage of technology/science industries and many educated young professionals moving back into cities. (The Cambridge biotech/pharma buildout had very little to do with the Big Dig for example.)

On the other hand, the Big Dig did improve downtown and airport access in various ways so I'm not sure the degree to which the Seaport expansion would have been possible without fairly large-scale road work. (And, yes, the public transit infrastructure done to service the area is sub-optimal.)