IT GIVES me great distress to read in the Globe (“On the slow train to financial reality,’’ Editorial, Aug. 16) the utterly bogus $8 billion cost estimate, assigned as fact yet again to the proposed tunnel linking North and South stations, and then used to dismiss it.
This number was concocted by the Romney administration and its antitax, anti-infrastructure, antigovernment ideologues.
The cost inflation strategy was created to dishonestly inflate the link’s apparent costs, in order to elicit editorials that might hasten its death. While that has not happened, the rail link, by far the most important transportation project in New England’s history, has been delayed, even though support remains so strong for the rail link in the offices of most New England senators and representatives that funding for the next engineering phase moves forward.
A score of European rail tunneling projects have been and are being built at a fraction of the cost per mile that the rail link would allegedly entail. Please stop using the Romney administration’s $8 billion lie when referring to this project. It is unbecoming and ill-serves your readers.
Its costs can also be borne in large part by private sector investment, if investors are invited in to help, because the link would create in its underground passageways adjacent to and feeding the link’s stations - North, South, and Central (State Street) - a vast retail shopping space that, like Montreal’s underground rail/mall system, would give Boston a winter-free promenade, and help make the city a year-round convention destination, as Montreal has become.
James P. RePass
Boston
The writer is president and chief executive of the National Corridors Initiative. 
