The Boston Red Sox are baseball's world champions, but the city's highway-project reputation puts Bean Town in another category of its own - and not for the right reasons.

The Big Dig highway tunnels under downtown Boston have been a monument to failed construction deadlines, as well as a construction-budget catastrophe, that must not be allowed to occur again in this nation's transportation endeavors.

Adding to the debacle in late 2004 were concerns about the structural safety of the project. In September, water broke through a faulty wall panel; subsequent investigation revealed hundreds of other, albeit smaller, leaks.

Although the tunnels have been ruled safe, the situation regarding the leaks, unfortunately, still has not been fully resolved. Incredibly, despite passage of a half-year since the September water break-through, full inspection of tunnel walls still has not been completed and a program capable of quickly detecting future leaks still has not been implemented.

Those are actions that the Federal Highway Administration currently is advocating.

The Interstate 93 project has been so long in progress - and it's not scheduled to be completed until later this year, seven years behind the original timetable - that it has even had time to be accorded a name change.

But the name change for what had been known as the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project is, in effect, cosmetic. Far from being cosmetic is the $12 billion extra that the nation's taxpayers will dole out for the project, which carried an initial price tag of $2.6 billion when Congress first approved its funding in the mid-1980s.

From the standpoint of meeting its construction and financial objectives, the Big Dig has shown that taxpayers not only can't be assured of getting their "product" on time, but can't feel confident about getting good quality for their money.

The garment industry would use the word "irregular" to describe the Big Dig as it currently exists. The project should be a yardstick in measuring the success or failure of future large-scale highway-construction ventures.

When a final evaluation of the project is completed, assuming that the project actually does achieve completion, there's no doubt that the blame for all that has occurred will be widely distributed. A mess of such magnitude couldn't have been the work of one or two people in one or two agencies.

Congress and the U.S. Department of Transportation must accord the Big Dig the full end-of-project investigation that it deserves and assure America's taxpayers that the probe will not be deemed complete until the taxpayers get all of the answers they deserve.