Did Boston avoid a fiasco or miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when it abandoned its bid for the 2024 Olympics back in 2015?
The Games would have brought the world to Boston, showcased the city on the international stage, and provided a useful deadline to build much-needed housing and improve the city’s transit system.
They also would have been unimaginably disruptive and expensive, leaving behind white-elephant sports facilities and arguably draining money from more important things like fixing the T.
The Olympics instead went to Paris, where the Games opened on Friday.
I’m not going to rehash all the pro and con arguments here, which were debated ad nauseam back in 2015. For that, check out Jules Boykoff (anti) and Shirley Leung (pro) from last week in the Globe; this podcast featuring the two of them; this story by Globe reporter Matt Porter checking in with veterans of the fight from both sides; and this article by Katie McInerney and Christina Prignano about what became of the proposed venue sites.
But it’s interesting to note how prominent the T was in the rhetoric from both camps. Remember that 2015 was the same year snow paralyzed the Red Line, putting the system’s woes very much at the front of the public agenda.
Both sides were equally sincere in the belief that their approach best served the cause of modernizing the T.
What distinguished them was two theories of change — one based on disruption and the other on continuity.
Supporters thought that the deadline could sweep away the obstacles that make fixing the T so slow and difficult. With the threat of global embarrassment if we failed, lawmakers and the public would rally around fast action. Opponents basically said, yes, fixing the T is slow and difficult — which is why we need to keep our eyes on the ball and avoid the expensive distraction of an Olympics.
From the standpoint of nine years later, both sides can claim some vindication. Sure enough, without an Olympic deadline, progress at the T has been minimal.
But it’s almost becoming even more clear just how dire the state of the T is and how little it can afford to focus on bright shiny objects for an Olympics.
My own view is that nine years isn’t long enough for the kind of systemic improvements that some Olympic supporters imagined the Games might trigger. It’s taken longer than that just to get the new Orange and Red Line trains. There is definitely value in deadlines, but unrealistic ones can backfire.
Because the city dropped out of contention before plans were fully fleshed out, we’ll never know what the Games would have even tried to accomplish in Boston by 2024 — much less whether they would have succeeded. We’ll also never know how much the inevitable cost overruns would have amounted to.
Meanwhile, the T still needs fixing and that’s still going to cost a lot of money. Maybe the Olympics weren’t the best way to jump-start that effort, but that just leaves the question: what is?
This is an excerpt from Are we there yet?, a Globe Opinion newsletter about the future of transportation in the region. Sign up to get it in your inbox a day early.
Alan Wirzbicki is Globe deputy editor for editorials. He can be reached at alan.wirzbicki@globe.com.