Back in 2023, GBH, one of the public radio stations in Boston, put out a podcast called The Big Dig. Hosted by Ian Coss, the podcast was a deep dive into the infamous, massively expensive project in Boston that tore down an elevated highway and moved it underground.The podcast was wonky, filled with archival tape and intricate finance and policy details. It was also a smash hit, spending weeks on Apple’s top 100 podcasts list and making its way onto multiple best-podcast-of-the year lists.
That success inspired GBH to keep the podcast going, allowing Coss and his producer Isabel Hibbard to do “big digs” into the Massachusetts Lottery and “the Codfather” in the podcast’s second and third seasons. But now the Big Dig is returning to its roots with what Coss calls the “Highway Teardown Tour” of eleven cities around the country: Seattle, Portland, Austin, Louisville, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Rochester, Syracuse, Providence, Boston, and New York City. It’s less a new season than an extension of the first one — the new episodes appear under the first season in Apple Podcasts — but using a completely different format. Instead of documentary-style deep-dives, each episode is a recording of a live event hosted by a public radio station in each city, where Coss and a local reporter who has been covering the topic talk through that city’s highway problems and bring on guests to help illustrate some of the paths forward.
There’s also an unusual incentive structure: While the stations hosting events get to keep the revenue from ticket sales and GBH will keep the revenue from the podcast episodes, host stations got the opportunity to put out the event recordings on their own feeds and social channels before the podcast episodes dropped in the Big Dig feed. That way they could make sponsorship revenue of their own off the same tape.
It was, Coss told me, a reminder that public radio stations are “part of a network” (i.e., NPR), and it provided a sense of connection — and a potential revenue source — at a time when public radio is particularly vulnerable. I called up Coss to learn more about the tour, the future of the show, and the importance of archives in his work; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
After the original season came out [about Boston’s Big Dig], I kept hearing from people in other places about other highway projects, and I got enough of these emails that I started thinking it might be worth actually visiting some of these places. And then I got invited out to Portland, Oregon last fall to moderate a session at a conference about highway removal and highway capping and what to do with old highways, basically. They paid to fly me out there, and I figured, “well, while I’m out there, why don’t I do something about highways in Portland?” So I reached out to the local public radio station, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and they immediately were like, “great, we’d love to do it.” I thought, “well, I’m out here, maybe I should go up to Seattle and do something.” I reached out to KUOW, and they also said “great, let’s make it happen.” And it kind of just snowballed because the response was so strong.
Some of [the cities] I specifically wanted to go to because I knew they had big active projects going on. Some of them were as practical as, “hey, I know somebody at that station,” or “I know somebody who knows somebody at that station,” and it was just easy to set up events.
There is that commonality of these roads being built around the same time and having similar problems, but I really found in every single place there were these different nuances and challenges to the debate. You go to Austin, Texas, and the dynamic between the city and the state is very intense: a really liberal, progressive city that is also the state capital of an overall conservative state. So the degree of antagonism and jockeying between city leaders and state leaders over the fate of these highways in the city was intense.
You go to Portland, Oregon, where you might think everybody’s progressive and going to want the same thing, but actually, the issue is really heated there. You have a state [Department of Transportation] that is focused on relieving congestion on the highways and wants to expand some highways in Portland, [and on the other hand] you have neighborhood activists who are focused on trying to mitigate the impact of the road and climate activists and war-on-cars people who are focused on removing the highway. And in the Portland area we focused on the divide between the different kinds of activists, because the neighborhood activists and the anti-car activists are not on the same page at all.
Meanwhile in Rochester, New York, you have a city whose population peaked around 1960, right when they’re building the highways. The highways were grossly overbuilt. There are stretches of road in the middle of the city that get ten to fifteen thousand cars a day, whereas the BQE in Brooklyn is getting 150,000 cars a day. It’s a similar kind of highway, but way bigger than it needs to be. In a city like Rochester, they have the luxury of saying, “We can just tear this thing down and not replace it and build housing there.” If you go to Seattle, a booming city right by the coast with very dense geography, the idea of removing a highway there is really fraught. So it’s the same basic problem everywhere, and yet a very different kind of set of challenges and solutions in every place.
I was planning these in 2025, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was being defunded and stations around the country were [looking at] potentially laying people off, canceling shows, and grappling with their own futures. In some ways, the most moving part of the tour was the experience of cold-emailing people in places I had never been to, at stations where I knew no one, and getting this immediate response that reinforced for me the fact that we are part of a network: that I, as a producer at member station WGBH in Boston, have some kind of distant family tree connection to KUOW in Seattle. I was heartened by how positive the response was and how game people were to work together and to make it as easy as possible.
The basic deal was that the partner stations were in charge of the venue, the recording, all the tech for the recording, and all the promotion, because [they had the local audience]. I was responsible for getting myself there, putting in the time to do the research, and booking the guests. Editorially, it was always a collaboration to some extent, and it varied from station to station. In some places, the newsroom was really involved, and we talked about guest ideas and stories together, and in some of them, the newsroom was a bit more hands off. That was just up to the station, but really, there was not a lot of money changing hands. It was all kind of like “You contribute these things that you have access to, and I contribute the things that I have access to, and together hopefully we can put this on.”
It was very DIY. I was not traveling in a tour bus with a whole technical team or something. I would just show up and we’d put it on.
If you have a story that speaks to an engaged audience, then they’ll show up, and they’ll tell their friends about it. Sometimes I’d go out into the audience after an event and people would tell me they found out about it because they listened to the podcast, But I would also meet people who were just following this issue and had never listened to our show before. They’d heard it about it on the local station, or somebody posted about it on social media, and they’d come out. It was a nice mix of going out to meet our existing audience, and introducing some new people to the show.
There were a few places where I was a little anxious about who would show up, but everywhere we went, we had good houses. These issues are affecting the public, and it feels very appropriate to have the conversation in public, to get the stakeholders together in public and record it in public.
So for example, our next season, which will come out in September, is all about healthcare, which is one of those topics where it’s hard to think of something that’s more intimate, more personal, affects more people’s lives, and yet as soon as you get even close to the policy details of it, people’s eyes glaze over.
My goal with that topic is to find the gripping political drama inside of it, and I enjoyed that, because I find bureaucracy fascinating. Bureaucracy gets a bad rap. It’s kind of a dirty word. No one wants to identify as a bureaucrat, but ultimately bureaucracy is just people trying to accomplish something, and there’s good stories in there.
In a funny way, the Big Dig podcast feed has almost been defined by the GBH archives, because what happened is we made this one story about a highway project, and in making it I realized just how much incredible material resides within WGBH. The station turned 75 this year, and it has been recording and archiving audio and video for all of those 75 years. It’s local news, but it’s also Frontline, and Julia Child, and American Experience, and Arthur, and Antiques Roadshow.
There’s so much material in that building; I recently learned the station archive is five and a half petabytes. A petabyte is 1000 terabytes, and a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes.
We did this story about the highway project, which I had at the time thought of as just a one-off, and it did better than any of us who made it had dreamed that it would. And we realized that there was an opportunity to keep going and keep making more of these stories. So my first instinct when the folks at GBH came back to me and said, “Hey, do you have any ideas for other stories?” was to go back to the archives and see what other kinds of stories there might be.
Whatever big topic you’re interested in, there’s some kind of thread you can trace through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. And at first, when we started doing season two and then season three, I was a little worried that if we keep doing more and more of these in the same geography, it’ll just feel more and more provincial, but I’ve actually come to feel that it just becomes more rich and weird because you get these characters that crop up in one season and then return in another, and you have these storylines that talk to each other. The comparison that I will sometimes make is The Wire. I’ve never lived in Baltimore, I have no reason to care about the city of Baltimore, but by the end of those five seasons I care.
