Boston in 2024: All of the highways through the city are in total gridlock. Fender-benders are common fare, and happen a few times a day. The MBTA has hired “pushers” to deal with the massive crowds on the subway. People are getting robbed by the pickpockets that thrive on the packed trains. A large area of the North End was demolished to fit a stadium and a village for the athletes. It is absolute, total chaos, the city packed to the limits.
And it’s all because of the Olympics.
If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, here’s a bit of background information. There are a lot of cities trying to bid for the 2024 Olympics, but Boston seems to be taking it pretty seriously. They had a big meeting to discuss it, and some major people are supporting it - people like Mitt Romney, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca. There’s even a Boston 2024 website with very enthusiastic reasons as to why Boston should hold the Olympics.
But I disagree.
If we were to hold the Olympics, first and foremost, the city wouldn’t be able to handle it. We’re a fairly small, compact city, and our road system downtown isn’t that great. The MBTA, likely to be the primary mode of transportation for most of the tourists, simply isn’t modern enough to deal with so many people. Many of its train cars date from 30+ years ago, and delays and service disruptions are very common. The MBTA says they can modernise the system in time, but it doesn’t seem like it’s possible - our system is very dated.
There’s also no space for all of the necessary components to hosting an Olympic Games. First of all, we need a large main stadium that can hold tens of thousands of people. Gillette Stadium (probably the largest stadium in the greater Boston area) fits most of the criteria, but it lacks a necessary track. Sure, there are various college stadiums around the city, but they couldn’t handle the massive crowds expected to attend.
We would also need an olympic village to house all the athletes. Again, there’s no space to be able to build one. If we were to host the Olympics, we’d need to cut down a lot of trees in unused space to build the stadium and village. And building these would probably take a long time, right? If we were to build these, we would need to start now.
And an olympic stadium and village would be pretty big, right? Well, what would happen when the Olympics end? There’d be a lot of wasted space. The stadium would unlikely be used again, and would ultimately be torn down. Consider what’s happening in Atlanta: Journalist Derrick Jackson says in a Boston Globe article that the stadium is being torn down to build a large residential development. Admittedly, Atlanta had been using the stadium for a while after its 1996 event, but it’s finally getting rid of it. And we would have that same situation, too. Olympic stadiums simply end up being massive wastes of money and space.
There are issues much more specific to the city, too: the Big Dig. That massive construction project, which was completed a decade late with costs skyrocketing from $2 billion to $22 billion, proves something: this city can't build anything on time or on budget. Another example is the Green Line extension to West Medford - the original deadline was 2017, now it's been pushed back to 2020 and construction hasn't even started yet. And we also have no money after the events of the Big Dig - certainly not enough to build an Olympic stadium or village.
Rob Baumann, a sports economist at Holy Cross, says that hosting the Olympics would not be very beneficial to the city. He says he hasn't seen any after-the-fact studies showing the economic benefit of hosting the Olympics. He also studied Super Bowls, and they show that although entertainment and manufacturing for tourism increase for a short time, other sectors lose money. He says it's just like shifting money around.
Boston police commissioner Ed Davis says that hosting the Olympics could drastically improve infrastructure, and it would be great to finally have a modern public transit system. But would that happen? No one wants another large-scale construction project after the Big Dig. And the MBTA is so deep in debt that they could never pull it off. And I hate to think of how long it would take.
And even if we were to build a stadium and a village, all would still not be well. The worst part of potentially hosting the Olympics would be the traffic and crowds. Navigating the narrow downtown streets would be awful. Getting to and from Logan Airport would be awful. And just thinking of the Green Line with these crowds, well...let’s not go there. But would you want to deal with all this? Would anyone?