In 1959 Boston opened its Central Artery highway, the highway was six-lanes and elevated through the middle of the city. The highway was intended to carry a traffic volume of 75,000 vehicles on a daily basis. Well in the early 1980s the Central Artery highway faced a daily volume of over 200,000 vehicles. The city of Boston faced the worst congestion in the country with an increased accident rate. In regards to such a problem business and city officials had to come up with a solution, so they came together and developed the Central Artery/Tunnel project known in Boston as the “Big Dig.” This project included two very distinctive elements, which included replacing the elevated roadway with an eight-to-ten lane underground expressway under the existing roadway. The roadway had to be 14-lanes with two bridge crossings over the Charles River and they had to extend I-90 through a tunnel beneath South Boston while stretching to Logan Airport. The project was a headache for nearly 20 years. They employed up to 5,000 workers creating the construction of an 8 mile highway, 161 lane miles, stretching almost halfway below the ground. They had to excavate soil of up to 16 million cubic yards with a grand total of 3.8 million cubic yards of concrete. They had to complete this project without disrupting the traffic pattern on a day-to-day basis. The project increased its budget every year as it went on from 1980 to 2003 escalating all the way to 14.5 billion dollars. When the “Big Dig” was complete before it was considered bankrupt by a federal audit team the company who planned the project had lawsuits streaming from certain authorities for poor project management. The business fact remains that planning a projects cost is an important step that can get out of hand and create some unethical decisions just to get the job done. In this case the project needed to be approved and the state wanted to know was this project underestimated on purpose. This method of planning cost billions and will go down in history as one of the most under planned cost estimates projects ever. When you develop methods for planning the cost of a project learn from this business fact and plan accordingly.Reference: Reference: Jeffrey K. Pinto. 2007. Project Management- Achieving Competitive Advantage. Pearson. Chap 8. Pg. 248-249.
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