It has been said that infrastructure megaprojects, like Seattle’s light rail build-out, are so vast and beyond the normal scope of construction experience that they “speak their own language.”
It’s a language of ambition or excess, argues the Oxford University researcher Bent Flyvbjerg. It’s right there in the Greek word “megas,” meaning, he writes, “great, large, vast, big, high, tall, mighty, and important.”
Mega also means “million,” which suggests the language has been eclipsed by the scale of the projects. As with Sound Transit, the largest projects now have price tags in the tens or even hundreds of billions, and so are properly “gigaprojects.”