Field crews and public relations teams use this informal benchmark to describe massive equipment, sinkholes, or structural spans. It typically represents a length of about 12 metres or a mass of roughly 12 to 15 metric tonnes. It gives laypeople and workers an immediate, visceral sense of scale that abstract numbers fail to convey.
Heard on the job
The new tunnel boring machine is about the size of a city bus and weighs ten times as much.