Hearts and Minds

November 15, 2023·38 min·2 clips

Randy To's family was displaced from Boston's Chinatown to make way for the highway in the 1960s — and now, every time he drives to his old neighborhood, his on-ramp passes directly over the spot where his house stood.

The story turns onto the road. After billions of dollars, the host brings the Big Dig back to its simplest promise: could it help people get across Boston? Laura Bears gives the episode its test case, one commuter with a family tie to the host and a rush-hour route that cuts through the city. She lives on Boston's north side, works about twenty miles away on the south side, and has to pass through the Central Artery. Before she had a car, transit ran her day. The trip meant a bus, a train, another train, and another bus, often adding up to an hour and a half each way. Pregnancy made that route feel even harsher. Late in the day, she had to stop at Downtown Crossing to use a department-store restroom before continuing home. It is a small detail, but it says more than another traffic chart. Infrastructure gets personal fast when a body cannot wait. So Laura bought a used Ford Contour, soft and bubbly in its nineties shape, and entered Boston traffic for real. After her son was born, the two of them joined nearly two hundred thousand cars in the elevated lanes five days a week. The host keeps the story close without turning it syrupy. He says plainly that Laura is family, then uses that connection to test a public promise against one daily commute. If the Big Dig gave Boston a road through the city, the question is whether it carried people like Laura any better. Laura still has some faith in the project. She says she believes they will take care of the mess, which sounds patient and tired at the same time. That is the bargain: people endure the lanes, ramps, and delays because the finished thing is supposed to make the disruption worth it.

As heard by us

A road-level look at how the Big Dig changed daily travel in Boston.

The Big Dig episode "Hearts and Minds" treats Boston's highway project as a daily driving problem as much as a civic one. It follows Fred Salvucci and Laura Bears, using Laura's pre-Big Dig transit slog and later Central Artery commute to ground the project's impact in ordinary…

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Want Boston traffic history told through one family's commute?

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