Let's see, the US's largest boondoogle collapses killing a woman and you draw a conclusion about the dangers of driving cars?

Talk about a guy with a hammer seeing only nails.

It was only a tiny section of the broader boondoggle.

Could someone explain this to me? Why do you have 40-foot concrete ceiling panels suspended over a roadway? The concrete panel obviously was not providing structural support. If anything, it was a structural burden. So why not make the ceiling panels out of styrofoam?

Hey, the Big Dig was only about pilfering $15 billion from federal taxpayers, not about building roads.

Bob -- It has to be waterproof, since the tunnel goes below the water level and below Boston harbor. Too bad they didn't make it waterproof either, we've had leaks from the get-go, and they keep a sizable staff devoted to patching leaks.

Good thing underwater railway tunnels can't collapse like this.

If, God forbid, a section of the tunnel under Penn Station collapses, would you run a "Mass Transit Is Murder" headline?

Tile ceilings seem to have been the norm on all the vehicular tunnels built in the northeast from the 20s through the 50s. And as far as I know, there's never been a case of tile coming down and killing any passengers in New York, Baltimore or in the Ted Williams tunnel in Boston (the closest paralell I can remember is when part of the ceiling came down on top of the No. 7 train heading from Manhattan to Queens about 25 years ago killing one person. But the tunnel was at least 60 years old by the time that happened).

Trains are lovely. They belong above ground.

And of course, Britain has no need of a train to France.

Just a clear missile path....

Coincidentally I was reading "The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station" today. Prior to the opening of the station the Pennsy had to transport passengers across the Hudson in ferries. The station opened in 1910, so the tunnels connecting it to Jersey and Long Island now must be almost 100 years old.

I don't get the anti-human angle. Is the tunnel anti-human because it is used by infernal combustion vehicles, or is "tunnelness" itself antihuman? If the former is true, then oj is simply on his "cars are evil" hobbyhorse again. However, if it is the latter, mass transit systems the world over are bad.

Are we to sit on our estates, leaving only for the village green from time to time? That is so Jane Austen, not that there's anything wrong with that.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a nice property requires nothing else except UPS deliveries.

The PATH tunnels that the terrorists were eying for their "let's flood land above sea level" plot last week are even older than the Hudson River Pennsy tunnels -- they turn 100 in two years (and have had the smell of rusting cast iron for as long as I can remember).

Ed, that's certainly my preferred life style, but sadly delivery persons need tunnels and roads and bridges, etc. to get the goods to us, ergo they must be kept in good repair lest we miss out on our ration of plum pudding and marmalade.

Trains are anti-human, Orrin! :P

Trains are certainly murder.

That project has been plagued with logistical problems(hydraulics) very early on in construction. In structural engineering lingo all is well when the final calculations achieve a unity less that 1.

As many repairs, requiring re-design, and rework along the way the unity is probably all over the scale with little hope of ever balancing.

Kind of like having 10 band-aids stacked on top of the same cut. The top 9 don't do much.

No, trains are inevitable targets of anti-humanists. Al Qaeda loves highways.

So all those roadside bombs are love bombs, then.