In the immediate aftermath of Boston being chosen by the United States Olympic Committee as the U.S. bid for the 2024 Summer Games, the inevitable question among not merely local residents but everyone across the country was basically “why Boston?” And while it was far from the only factor, one aspect of explaining the USOC selection of Boston was it’s unique vision of the 2024 Games.

Boston 2024 planned their Olympics to be a “walkable Games.” The idea was to concentrate more events in one area than any Olympics in history. It was a bold notion, and an early selling point for a bid trying to showcase itself as unique and relatively inexpensive. The only problem with the walkable factor is that it clashes with other core tenets of the bid, as well as (to a large extent) reality.

Though the financial details of Boston’s venue plans are far from exact, there is one clear point: Building anything in or around Boston, whether temporary or not, will be more expensive than infrastructure outside of City limits. This stems from the general fact that the Boston area is more expensive than anywhere else in Massachusetts to specific issues such as the current businesses occupying Widett Circle (who would have to be paid to move) as well as Somerville’s stated opposition to building a velodrome.

It was also a major reason why the International Olympic Committee included the spreading of events into its 2020 Agenda, the point of which was to make hosting an Olympics more cost-effective.

Traveling farther away from Boston makes for a more feasible plan when possible. And if that’s a debatable notion, just ask the man who orchestrated the most financially successful Olympics ever: Peter Ueberroth, who organized the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games.

In a recent guest column for the Boston Globe, Ueberroth (who was the head of the L.A. Olympic organizing committee) offered this piece of historical wisdom:

We actually put the Games on in 29 different cities, in nine different counties, and in three states. It would be much more expensive to put on the Games in Los Angeles because the city had very tough requirements. We put only a couple of events in the city of Los Angeles. I think [spreading out the events] will be done more in the future.

And the capacity to effectively hold events in many places, given the continual improvements in technology, has only further enabled this concept since the L.A. Games. Add to that the fact that other Massachusetts cities such as Lowell have received Boston 2024 much more warmly than Boston itself, and it seems to be natural to utilize them for venues.

Again, it comes back to financial concerns. In order to pull off the Games, Boston 2024 has listed infrastructure projects that the state would have to pay for. Getting the rest of Massachusetts to pay for Boston-centric improvements is easier to do if other communities feel like they’ll play a role in the Games. As the famously crude (yet somewhat applicable) Lyndon Johnson quote went: “Better to have everyone inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”

Boston 2024 has many venues in the city that will be perfectly fine to use for low cost, like the Exhibition and Convention Center as well as many surrounding university facilities. And they should not give up trying to bend the IOC’s arm to allow certain competitions (rowing on the Charles, as an example) to be closer to the host city.

Still, it’s vital that the bid not attach itself too much to the “walkable Games” component. That’s a nice slogan, and it looks good in a bid brochure, but it hurts Boston 2024 in the most important category for public support: cost. Keeping the price down, as Peter Ueberroth learned in Los Angeles, means spreading events away from the expensive urban center when possible.

Progress on this front has been made (given the venue proposals from Lowell, Springfield and other non-Boston sites). That said, more needs to be done. In a battle for public support that requires every conceivable measure of cost effectiveness, needlessly shackling the Olympic bid to an impractical concept is a recipe for disaster.

Image via Boston 2024