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Great Projects by James Tobin, The Free Press, $40, ISBN
0743210646

THIS is the story of America’s engineers, the people who built the Hoover
Dam, the George Washington Bridge and tried to tame the mighty Mississippi. It’s
the tale of Thomas Edison, who had the vision of lighting homes with
electricity—and of Samuel Insull, who delivered that dream of cheap
electricity to the masses.

Great Projects celebrates the achievements of engineers past and
present. In Boston, for example, they are now building the world’s most complex
underground expressway—12 kilometres of tunnels that will carry nearly
250,000 vehicles a day—which they claim will solve the city’s traffic
problems.

This scheme was an unintended consequence of a road protest movement. The
engineers wanted to build an inner belt of freeways. The anti-roads group fought
off this destructive plan. And in its place emerged a plan to pull down the
central artery—a 1959 elevated freeway dividing the city—and rebuild
it underground.

Tobin’s theme is that engineers solve problems. But don’t they also create
problems? After all, if this book had been written in the 1950s, wouldn’t it be
lauding the achievements of the engineers building the central artery, who had
solved Boston’s traffic problems at a stroke?