A 105-mile-long city will snake through the Saudi desert. Is that a good idea?
npr.org
npr.org
It's supposed to run on renewables be less energy intensive and incorporate "green" technologies but somehow NPR feels it needs to bash this project because some people think it's impractical in the desert. The whole place is mostly desert. Where do they propose they build cities, maybe instead find rainforest to cut down instead?
Anyone can say that, but there is nothing apparently green about the design, whether you built it in the desert or on grass plains.
Giant mirrors in the middle of the desert, is good for what? At least there isn't anything to scorch, I guess.
The city is optimized to make travel distances as long as possible. No matter how you power those trains, shorter routes are more economical than longer routes.
"The city is optimized to make travel distances as long as possible."
Only if you don't see it as many agglomerated cities built on a line. At least the intention is to have many self-contained "city" sections within the larger envelope. Yes, you may want to occasionally go to the other end, but not most people every day. With jobs being remote, there is less need to travel wen your job changes.
Residents will be able to run errands with a five-minute walk;
Not true. What's more economical: a train straight up a very steep mountain or a train winding around the mountain? There are many situations where it's more economical to build an intentionally longer route to save money. Imagine a billion person where every single person can take a train directly to every other person. If you arranged every person evenly spaced in a grid you could connect them with less travel than if they were in a very very long line. But the train system would be much much simpler.
Most of the energy is lost by slowing down to pick up people, not by taking turns.
First, I think the green goal is supporting the population with a single mega city instead of dozens of dirty cities.
Regarding the travel, There is a lot of efficiency in having a single bus to support a city instead of spiderweb of connections. You can have trains with stops 100km, 50km, and 10, ect. If you compare a line and a grid, you have a lot less track and routes to support.
I think you can make a lot of arguments why a single city could in fact be cheaper than many smaller ones. Most boil down to efficiency of scale. 1 large transit system vs many. One large desalination plant vs many, one power grid instead of many, ect
On the other hand, it's also optimized to reduce the number of dimensions of travel from 2 to 1.
You never have to transfer from an east-west train to a north-south train (or vice versa). Literally everything is on your route.
Transfers add time to your trip because instead of waiting for a train, boarding, and deboarding once, you do all of that twice. Your trip time isn't just time riding on the train. It's all that other stuff, too. (You probably still do have some transfers with local and express trains. That's an issue in 2D rail systems, too, but it's probably worse in 1D because of increased travel distances.)
Combined trips also become easier. If two destinations lie in the same direction from your starting point, then one of them is directly on the way to the other.
I'm not saying it's necessarily a net win, but it's at least a trade-off.
You can accomplish that in 2D by making the train line a ring, like the Yamanote Line of Tokyo. That way you halve the max distance traveled, and can “cut across” on car, foot, bike, other-train, etc where the main train line would still be inefficient.
But they say it's going to have super high speed rail. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line%2C_Saudi_Arabia):
> The transportation layer will include a high-speed rail system, which is claimed to allow people to go from one side of the city to the other side in 20 minutes when finished, reaching a speed of 512 km/h, which is faster than existing high-speed rail at the time of announcement.
Maybe they think a perfectly straight line makes that easier to build. Or maybe they just think their rail is so fast that distance becomes a minor issue.
Future expansion is also interesting to think about. If you make it a line, you can expand by adding, say, 10% onto the end. Once you've built a circle, it's hard to make it 10% bigger.
But I guess you could double a circle by adding another circle and turning it into a figure 8. The figure 8 would have similar advantages to a circle since they are both closed loops.
Circle expansion: they could add interior and or exterior concentric circles or semi circles --but then that would complicate the simplicity, so maybe not.
Humanity produces 5 substances in the gigatons per year: coal (8 GT/y), oil, natural gas, concrete (about 4 GT/y each) and steel (2 GT/y). Everything else (in order, plastics, fertilizers, ammonia) are less than 0.5 GT/y.
This project is supposed to be 200 meters wide, and 500 meters tall. If on average from the width of 200 meters, only 2 meters are concrete, then each kilometer of this project will have a volume of 1 cubic kilometer. Concrete has a density of about 2.2 tons/m3, so each kilometer of this structure will use 2.2 GT of concrete. Each mile will consume roughly the entire global annual production of concrete. If you build one mile per year, it will take 105 years to build the project.
If you want to finish the project in just 25 years, you need to continuously use 4 times more concrete than the world currently produces.
There were concepts many years ago to have commuter capsules accelerating and dock to longer high speed trains, to avoid the slow-down of stops at stations.
I like the idea of using only 5% of the real estate and preserve 95% theoretically untouched - but the gigantic building will certainly change the surrounding environment by blocking air flow, reflecting sun to south, adding shadow to the north, etc. and you need to add lots of solar or wind farms, probably outside the actual building.
This gigantomanic plan is more an expression of prestige, non-democratic power, and an excellent way to totally police the people inside. Another useless waste of money, energy, building material, nature, probably human live of slave labor.
A useful project would need to include all stakeholders in the design phase, including a democratic process to define targets, outcomes, financing etc.
The first one (Jumeirah) is _very_ successful, and commands some of the highest house prices in Dubai.
It is on the back of this success construction of 2 additional Palms were started before 2006.
Palm Jebal Ali went bankrupt before any house construction began originally, but after construction of the island, and has been empty for quite some time (but not eroding).
Development recently began and the first villas have been sold.
Palm Deira went banktrupt before the palm part of the project was constructed and has been renamed to Deira Islands. There are some development there, but it isn't a destination anyone seems to talk about.
The scale of the 3 palms are miniscule compared to the wall in Saudi
If you think about it, how many small towns are there that only exist on small state route highways? Of course the residential areas may sprawl a few blocks away, but if you combine these towns, you get one long straight city.
I suppose building up alleviates a lot of the solar gain, and the gives you a weather protected courtyard between the structures, and also lets you manage water much easier.
105 miles is 168km, they say 20mn end to end, that's 140m/s, or ~500km/h. So only from one end to the other, no stop. Even by electrical means, that's very loud, try to stand near an high speed train in France or Japan. In a tunnel ? Good luck if there is the slightest problem with it, you are stuck. Goods, food, whatever ? Tough luck, you have nothing to eat for days, weeks, months.
That's obviously a place where the government does as it pleases, you won't be rioting there. 100 cops and you are stuck. You are probably living far from the top, no solar power, no water, no food. You bought yourself total dependencies to someone. A king of some sort.
No cars or roads, you only depend on the state for moving more than 6km/h in the best case scenario, but there are 9 millions people trying to move as well.
Who the hell would want that ?
You are misled. For example, the Burj Khalifa is not connected to municipal wastewater treatment meaning all human waste from the building needs to be hauled by poop trucks out of the city.
Maybe so, but they might just be willing to take MBS's money to nod and make cool designs that will probably never get built. Which, can't really blame them.
And what they know is “we have a fantastically rich client and an ego-driven vanity project to milk”.
If one part gets hot and the other part cold, you can get huge stress buildup and buckling.
Keeping a straight line straight can be a big challenge.
Imagine this building will be the same.