Part of the Boston 2024 discussion has consistently hovered over the simple proposition that hosting the Olympics sets a deadline on many construction projects. The virtue of bringing the immovable deadline of the Games is that it forces the host city to grapple with issues that might not ordinarily get done so expediently, simply because there is no choice.

Take this passage from the London 2012 Official Report book:

This was to be the biggest and most diverse construction project seen in the United Kingdom for decades. And unlike virtually any other job, it came with an immovable deadline, which was used to concentrate minds. Dates were non-negotiable, as Sir John Armitt, the chairman of the ODA, observed ‘You know you have to do it. The Games were going to start on 27 July 2012 and … you work backwards from that date. The great thing about it is that it forces you to make decisions more quickly and to a degree it makes things easier because everyone knows that time is of the essence … the world was turning up in 2012.’

In a sense, the analysis is correct. The Olympics (or any “mega-sporting event”) is the rarest of projects, setting a fixed date upon which construction must be finished. In theory, that sounds like an ideal project for a city like Boston, trying to continue its evolution.

Of course, it’s not that simple.

Olympic deadlines don’t necessarily apply to the kind of public projects that the citizens of Boston truly crave. More importantly, the fixed deadlines don’t account for the inevitable obstacles and issues encountered in the pursuit of the all-encompassing deadline. This often translates into cost overruns.

Olympic Wins

Naturally, there are examples of success. Barcelona in 1992 harnessed the Olympics for the city’s existing plans. The deadline simply provided a convenient end-point for the remodeling of the city’s waterfront.

Los Angeles in 1984 was also a famous success story. Of course, the Games in that year required minimal additional construction.

Tokyo in 1964 might actually be one of the best examples, though it came with a catch. As a city that was only beginning to emerge from the destruction of World War II when it won the bid in 1959, the Olympic Games provided the perfect opportunity for the Japanese capital to modernize. Superhighways were built. Sections of monorail and bullet trains were added, along with thousands of new buildings.

The cost was enormous, but since the plan meshed with an existing government initiative, it genuinely appears to have had a positive legacy for the city as a whole. For individual citizens, of course, their feelings on the issue might have been different. Displacement, an unfortunate byproduct of far too many Games, was prevalent in Tokyo.

Olympic Losses

In terms of Olympic deadlines, there are in fact many more examples of  the concept backfiring on the host city.

The most recent (and relevant) example of this reared its ugly head recently in, of all places, Tokyo.

As the crown jewel of Tokyo 2020, the Olympic Stadium continued to balloon in cost until the most recent projections hit $2.1 billion (where it originally was supposed to only cost half as much). The problem, Japanese officials plainly admitted, was that they worried about shifting to another design due to the immovable deadline of completing construction.

And there it is, in clear terms: The concept of setting a deadline is a double-edged sword. It can clearly accomplish the desired task that might have otherwise been pushed down the road, but it can also serve to place an inescapable burden on a public project. Tokyo, to its credit, has altered the stadium plan even with the risk of a deadline though.

The other historical issue with deadlines is that in order to meet them, construction costs generally go up. In the scramble (with varying degrees of desperation) that cities have gone through in past Olympics to finish projects in time for the Games, initial budget estimates have been trampled on.

Montreal in 1976 stands as one of the most ignominious examples of this. The “Big Owe,” as it infamously became known, took thirty years and $1.5 billion of public money to finally pay down. The cause mostly stemmed from an inability to stay on course. As the deadlines piled up, so did the overtime construction costs.

Conclusion

Like any theory of city design, the concept of “setting a deadline” lacks a simple answer in determining its ultimate value. Examples exist on both sides of the issue, showcasing that, in tight circumstances, communities can (and have) rallied to accomplish projects that might never have been achieved otherwise.

Yet even in accomplishing goals in various cases, some of the same projects spent way more money than they originally intended.

Clearly, this has large ramifications for Boston 2024. Setting a deadline for upgrading parts of the city could, in theoretical terms, have a positive impact (as it did in Barcelona, for example).

Yet the potential for cost overruns that directly stem from the necessity of hitting a deadline is exactly the kind of thing that Boston 2024 can’t afford. Already on a budget with little margin for error (since the exact details of the insurance plan remain to be hammered out), any overtime overruns would be infinitely worse for the privately-funded Boston Games.

Image via Stephen Craven, CC By SA 2.0