Comment by KGIII

Oh, the things I could write... Let's do just that, shall we?

Warning, this could take a minute.

The Big Dig was pretty much my first project outside of the lab. I am not overly fond of admitting to my part in the project but it could be worse, much worse. Truth be told, we did our job just fine, but I digress.

By the time I got involved with the project, it had been in planning stage for quite a while and had undergone a number of revisions and had many funding proposals. My involvement was because I was busy taking traffic modeling into the computer revolution stage.

These various plans all needed to be modeled, of course. Even if there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell, it needed to be modeled. Even trivial changes will mean new modeling. It's lucrative work, if you can get it. Though, it's not much more than a fancy plugin today, it's based on some pretty complicated math and can be improved by adding more data points. Again, I digress...

Now, being new to the world of working as a contractor for municipalities, I had great expectations from the government representatives. I was quickly disabused of such notions but, again, I digress.

The Big Dig had many, many people working on it. It was in the public eye for a fairly short time, compared to the time it lumbered as a meandering project in the planning and pre-planning stage. Yup, they plan to make plans and call it pre-planning. This, of course, goes hand in hand with fact finding, feasibility studies, ecological impact studies, noise studies, and these may very well require constant revision as the plans change.

Well, traffic modeling is just one of those things.

At any point in time, any contractor, sub-contractor, or affiliate could have gone to the media to say just what you propose. In fact, if you examine the archives, I'm sure you'll find ample evidence of people doing just that very thing.

Sure, the amount I made on the project was just a rounding error, but there were a lot of rounding errors.

Then, you have people who will fight it, at every step of the way. They will tie it up in court for as long as they can, which means even more revisions. People sometimes wonder where I got my legal knowledge... Some was in academia but the majority of it was through experience.

There is tons of waste in government, I think we know that. But, politicians will add more - so long as it gets them votes. Interestingly, in this case, the guy campaigned on prosperity for the local economy. The project must not disrupt local business. Got to make money, after all. Yet, it slowed the project down and probably added a good 10% to the overall budget. The lengths we went to were absurd.

And so it goes...

Sure, someone may stand up and tell the politicians that they are insane and that they are stupid but, frankly, we've been saying that for years and nobody actually listens. We can't opt out, because we have contracts.

Oh, contracts? Yeah, every time you extended the project? I got a nice bonus to help grow my business. Every time I had to run the models again? Thanks... Every time I had to go get more data? Thanks...

The Big Dig was what enabled me to get my business up and functioning. We had more contracts before the first year was over and that project seemed to last forever.

I can see why people would just go along for the ride. If I'd had more insight and experience, I may have said something. I doubt it old have done any good, I'd have still had contractual obligations and the penalty clauses would have meant I was a poor man today.

Well, there is a wall of text. Make of it what you will, I guess. It is summed up with contracts, politicians, municipal workers, and citizen expectations.