abraham, ya better hope the blithering nitwit bagman mayor don't see or hear about this article.btw, whattya want for all those BILLIONS OF GEORGE WASHINGTONS.oversite and accountabilty. fuggeddaboutit.ma

I wish more people had gone to jail for this piece of work. Including regular guys that looked the other way, when they knew as tradesman that what they were doing was shoddy work.

The good news is, the tunnel reduces what was once a half-hour crawl from South Station to Charlestown to just a few minutes, meaning the grimness must be endured briefly. Thank goodness for the Zakim Bridge, the on aesthetic triumph of the project. Still, aside from maintaining the tunnels,I feel we now need to just accept it with a resigned shrug, and expend all other improvement dollars above ground, on in the places people actually walk and gather. /// As for LED lighting, yes, yes, yes. Will save a fourtune in electricity over time, and the money budget currently budgeted could/should be ear-marked for maintenance.

this project was the most corrupt ever, plenty with fat pockets. I know someone who worked for the dig project, brags about punching in and going to the bars for a few hours. wonder why we have shoddy work, unions.

Yvonne, you're pointing out the obvious without offering a shred of a suggestion of how to make it better. You keep dancing around the elephant in the living room. OK, sit down, I have a fact of life moment for you. THERE IS NO MONEY FOR THIS! I know liberals don't understand this strange collection of words, but those of us who do just learn to live with the ugliness and be grateful for not having to sit in 2 hours of traffic every day driving by all that beauty that you seem to recall. Power wash it every couple of years and go on with life. World class city like Madrid? I lived in Madrid for 2 years. You think Boston has ugly parts? And by the way in case you haven't been reading the world class Boston Globe World section, Madrid and Spain are flat broke with 25% unemployment. But they do have pretty tunnels, so the rest is irrelevant.

The greenway is just beautiful and a wonderful place to be. It has enriched the experience of many of the people who live, work and visit the area. No matter what your complaint about the tunnels they are a vast improvement to the overhead expressway. In this economy I would rather my roadway tax dollars go to maintanance of roads and bridges. When families are hit hard by current economic times, extra expenses like landscaping and other non essentials are cut from the budget. I hope that the state follows the same logic. Maintaince is very important but worrying about dirty walls, pretty tiles, dark colored ceilings and ugly rebar is nothing but aesthetics and frankly the state should spend their money fixing the leaks, crumbling concrete, lights and bridges. Leave the pretty things to a time when there is more money available.

I agree that it's hard to beat the tunnels for ugliness. Even worse, however, is the lack of safety. The branches of the tunnels require lane switching, and in my experience, most drivers exceed 45 mph as they pull ahead of others as they switch to the left or right. I'm amazed that there aren't more accidents. Personally, I take the long way around as often as possible to avoid using the Big Dig. The drive from Cambridge to Logan via Route 16 may take a lot longer but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

I think it's best to watch where you are going rather than looking at bad murals disguised as "art"

"OK, sit down, I have a fact of life moment for you. THERE IS NO MONEY FOR THIS! I know liberals don't understand this strange collection of words..." / / / Perhaps, yet somehow we found a trillion dollards for two questionable wars while simultaneously cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans to a fraction of their historic levels. / / / What part of this collection of words do you fail to understand? Yet have the audacity to make the sweeping generalization that Liberals are missing something? /// We need to limit spending AND raise taxes, without an acknowledgement of those inescapable facts, the rest of your argument, like you see "pretty tunnels", is irrelevant.

The public was fleeced ,

One source of the poor QA on this project is the common philosophy in our country that government (and therefore projects like this) are wastes of money, and that if only the world were run by private business, money would NOT be wasted. Take the nearby Boston Garden, now there is an ELEPHANT. The garden demonstrates the huge waste private business is capable of. Look at the number of times they have had to take down perfectly good signs to rename the darn building. They actually had to rip out EVERY seat in the building before they were used, because the seats had SHAWMUT stamped on them, and Shawmut was bought by Fleet before the opening. (The two companies were in a bidding war with one another while at the same time negotiating their merger, check Wikipedia on this.) Do you think the money for those seats came from thin air? No. Anyone who has ever paid for tickets to the Garden, or was a customer of the string of banks who've paid for naming rights paid for those seats, and silly very costly name changes. This is just one example. Every business along the big dig wastes money in their own special way, which we conveniently overlook because its private, or not our money, since we are not forced to use their business. And yet, even on a busy day, the Garden or any of these other businesses will not cater to even a small fraction of the traffic that the big dig carries on a slow day. Which is more necessary to welfare of our city, and our country? The Central Artery. When you argue there is no money for this, I guess you are overlooking the money we spend monthly on our cell phone bills, or what the folks in the fancy houses in Winchester spend on their lawn care and yearly renovations. Most folks would complain miserly if they were charged $120/month for their family to use the Big Dig roads, but don't seem to complain overly about dropping that kind of money on cell phone service... because its private business and they have "choice". Until the average person starts taking pride in their work again, instead of throwing up their arms and complaining that there is no money to do things right, we will end up with projects looking like the big dig. Dirty on the day it opened. Fire stand-pipes on the bridges rusting during the first year. We only have ourselves to blame. This project was not worked on by Martians, the work was done by our neighbors. And shame on them.