Sound Transit light rail’s impossible time horizons

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.”…