BOSTON - For more than two decades, the words Big Dig were a virtual epithet, a sort of national shorthand for pork-barrel extravagance, skillful political earmarking, cost overruns, and government bumbling.
But now that Boston's decrepit, elevated Central Artery has been carted away and replaced with a 10-lane underground tunnel that allows traffic to glide silently below downtown's streets, the $14.8 billion price tag and associated scandals are receding in the city's memory.
Today, the Big Dig looks more like Boston's Big Coup.
On a bright morning in the fall, Boston dedicated a 1.5-mile linear park that is the public face of the Big Dig. A series of connected lawns and gardens, the greenway hugs the contours of downtown, skirting the historic Quincy Market and opening up spectacular views of the South Boston waterfront. Once an outback of crumbling warehouses, wharves, and parking lots, the area is morphing into a glittering arts district. The city is visibly whole again.
Covetous glances are being cast from Philadelphia, another city long separated from its waterfront by an interstate highway.
Not long ago, the idea of bringing down the great barrier of I-95 seemed beyond Philadelphia's reach. But in recent months, a group of influential Philadelphians has been talking seriously about embarking on a "Philly Dig." They are emboldened not just by Boston's success, but also by President Obama's emphasis on stronger infrastructures and Mayor Nutter's interest in developing the historic waterfront.
"This is the time to be ambitious," argued Gary Hack, an internationally recognized urban planner and former dean of University of Pennsylvania's School of Design. "If Philadelphia had a plan ready for I-95, we could probably be starting something right now."
Striking the highway from the city map was once dismissed as the idle fancy of urban planners and waterfront activists. But in the next decade or so, the most intrusive part of I-95, the 30-year-old Penn's Landing segment, will reach the end of its functional life and require a reconstruction.
"The question we should be asking right now is: Do we rebuild I-95 as is, or do we rethink the whole thing?" said Harris Steinberg, who runs the nonprofit consulting firm PennPraxis, which developed a waterfront policy for the city in 2007. The Obama administration's interest in urban areas, he said, "has given the city a license to do something bold."
Actually, what Hack and Steinberg envision is less a Big Dig than a No Dig.
Instead of burying the highway in an expensive tunnel, they would entirely rip out a stretch of I-95 that runs south of the Ben Franklin Bridge and I-676. Traffic volume drops off there, proponents argue, because the bulk of the highway's users are commuting into Center City from the north. Airport travelers, they point out, can take I-676 to I-76.
With I-95 out of the picture, cars would flow along the Delaware River on Columbus Boulevard. That road would still give drivers access to Penn's Landing, the South Philadelphia retail chains, and the sports complex. But drivers would be traveling on a city street bounded by sidewalks and bike lanes and regulated by traffic signals. The highway could pick up again around South Street, or perhaps Washington Avenue.
The transition would be similar to what happens near Cape May where the Garden State Parkway downsizes to a local boulevard.
Opponents, who include planners and traffic experts, point out that tie-ups can overwhelm the southern end of Columbus Boulevard, near the big box stores. But Philly Dig supporters maintain that problem is manageable.
Unlike Boston's Central Artery, the central part of I-95 between Market and South Streets runs in a trench. Since the trench is roughly the width of a Philadelphia block, eliminating the interstate would enable the city to stretch its street grid farther east. The land could slope gradually down to level of the river.
For motorists, driving on a boulevard would certainly be slower and more cumbersome than zipping along on an interstate. But the trade-off, proponents argue, is that the Delaware River would become more accessible, especially for pedestrians.
Once the wide highway is gone, large-scale waterfront development would finally make sense. The city would gain about six blocks of tax-producing real estate, which could be sold to private developers for additional revenue.
The concept is getting lots of encouragement from outsiders. During a speech to the Ed Bacon Foundation in December, John O. Norquist, the head of the Congress for the New Urbanism and a former Milwaukee mayor, told Philadelphians that I-95 was expendable. "Get rid of it," he urged.
Alex Krieger, a Harvard University urban planner who prepared the initial design for Boston's new greenway, contends that removing I-95 would be a modest undertaking compared with the Big Dig. While Boston needed almost four miles of underground tunnels and costly ventilation systems, Philadelphia would need only to take a jackhammer to roughly a mile of I-95.
"Philadelphia's problem is a lot easier to solve than Boston," Krieger said. "It's not such an incredible engineering challenge."
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