Over the Big Dig

Big Dig. We haven’t said it in a while and we’ve been missing that familiar ring of stories told about our $14 $15 billion hole in the ground. There’s not too much to report. The Globe went and named whistle-blower Edward Ginsburg the Bostonian of the Year for 2005, Bostonist snoozed. The park system promised is far from complete, tunnels are still a little leaky, and every now and then a closure makes it so you really can’t get there from here. To find out how to traverse the city we did what we often do and went to the ‘net for answers.

The start of a New Year is a great time to check out a new map of Boston to find out what streets have been mislabeled or omitted outright (a good friend lives on a street still not correctly in the NFT), or if in fact the Big Dig routes are correct. Turning to Google, we see the surface streets are in fact on top of the tunnels that replaced the Central Artery’s elevated highway. Mapquest, our old friend (we haven’t been keeping in touch with and we probably still owe a Christmas Card), makes a murky scene of the whole thing. By Bostonist’s reading of the Mapquest map I-93 is still running over the above ground streets. Seems a conundrum for Navteq who have a copyright on both. Besides that it's really no way to treat Tip and his tunnel. Let us know if there are other map-mishaps you’ve uncovered. Next time our relatives come to visit it’d be nice to give them a correct visual; perhaps TomTom can do better than BostonistBostonist for directions.