How exciting! The Bay Area is getting a Big Dig-sized civil engineering project of its very own, the new East Span of the Bay Bridge. Although the linked-to site seems even more boosterish than that of the Big Dig, so consider yourself warned.
One more thing to buy: Traffic Engineering Handbook, 5th ed. As an aside, why are all the cool books so expensive? Sigh.
It's been a great couple of weeks for bookstores, I must say. My parents, my brother, and I just returned from a trip to Portland, where our primary objective was, of course, Powell's. Not only did I manage to come away with less than $500 of books (shocker, that), but I also managed some very decent finds. Besides the requisite number of staggeringly thick histories, biographies, and technical books, I also found a replacement copy of my beloved (and out of print, alas) The Hubble Wars by Eric J. Chaisson, Brian J. Cudahy's Under the Sidewalks of New York, and the catchily-named tome IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems. But my favorite purchase would have to be a copy of the 1988 edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, known to traffic engineering enthusiasts everywhere as MUTCD -- drool!
I discovered the excellent Hennessey + Ingalls while in Santa Monica this weekend and while leaving the store (having already made a purchase, of course), I noticed the first issue of the magazine "The Next American City" on the periodicals rack. Seeing as how it had been strategically placed to pique my interest in urban design, I had to return to the register with it. I of course visited the magazine's home page upon my return home, where I noticed a link to this Boston Globe article about the fruits of the Big Dig. The subject of the article is that, even after the completion of the primary stage of the 'Dig, traffic still sucks. Well, duh.
The purpose of the Big Dig was never to eliminate congestion: that would be impossible. When everyone tries to use a road at the same time, it becomes congested. Leaving aside the "building roads causes traffic" phenomenon which the good folks at TNAC were undoubtedly latching on to, the problem that the Central Artery/Tunnel (CA/T) was built to solve is the one given in one of these FAQs: "Today [the Central Artery] carries about 190,000 vehicles a day, quite uncomfortably, with bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go congestion six to eight hours every day. If nothing were being done, the elevated highway would have bumper-to-bumper conditions for 15 to 16 hours every day -- every waking hour -- by 2010." By those estimates, the CA/T portion of the Big Dig has had a noticeable impact already, reducing the amount of total gridlock to a mere "two to three hours a day," according to traffic manager Glen A. Berkowitz. And of course that's even with a sizable number of additional commuters lured to the (not very) open road of the shiny new CA/T. I heart civil engineers.