Only thing of note here is that he wasn't killed by a failure of the tunnel itself.

Callous

He's a victim of poor design -- lack of adequate shoulder -- but that's not unique to the Big Dig.

WanPhat: Did Tip O'neil have a connection to Ford or is there a meme I'm missing?

Speaker of the House for the last two weeks of Ford's presidency.

Be careful subby, or you'll develop stretch marks.

I thought the headline might be a reference to "Found On Road, Dead."

I remember driving through Boston back in 1998. I needed to get on I95. I got on I93 instead. I then took a weird series of turns out of gut instinct and ended up back on I95. It is the strangest city i have ever driven in.

It is the strangest city i have ever driven in.

Your older cities were largely built before motor traffic came along. As a result, they later have to decide how to accommodate a bazillion cars and trucks and busses. Some cities destroy their historic architecture to widen existing roads or build new ones. Some try to shoehorn new roads in, or build roads around the city anywhere they can. This is the real reason why older big cities tend to have lots of one-way streets -- those used to be two-way streets for horse traffic.

Neither plan tends to work out well. European cities, often older than US cities for some reason, have dealt with this in a variety of ways, too, with varying success -- but most Western European cities have vastly less car traffic for their size than, say, Boston has. And whereas Manhattan is a fairly planned city, Boston is much more organic, which is to say unplanned.

In Boston, they decided they could build the roads around the perimeter, or in tunnels beneath the city, or on overpasses above the city. I had a friend who lived in a condo beneath the old expressway; they almost never had direct sunlight coming in through their windows. I have to wonder if that property's value has skyrocketed since the expressway came down.

Boston's roads, yes, are insane. They're an attempt to retrofit, and to cope with the massive traffic. Plus, of course, MA drivers are insane, especially near Boston. They're insane in consistent ways, though, and it's easy to drive in Boston if you understand the unwritten rules and obey them. A lot of cities are like that, but the unwritten rules aren't always the same.