Hacker News Reader

Comment by PoignardAzur | Hacker News Reader

It's a little puzzling to see commenters treat this project as if any part of it was serious.

Every serious accounting of the project says the same: it's batshit insane.

The scale is ridiculously big (170km long, 500m high), the location is ridiculous, the shape is the opposite of what you want in urban design (a straight line means the opposite ends are going to be disconnected, no matter how good your trains are), and every single design element is made to look good on a video presentation before being practical.

Management is reportedly made of oil barons who get violently angry if anyone questions their decisions, and foreign contractors who know the project is doomed but don't want to speak up while the free money is flowing.

It's a huge farce.

View on HN

> The shape is the opposite of what you want in urban design (a straight line means the opposite ends are going to be disconnected, no matter how good your trains are).

100% agree. I really don't understand why they didn't design it as Apple Campus-style, with a giant natural park inside (if this is possible in the desert), and railway lines along the diameter every 22.5° or so to connect opposite points of the circle, with an interchange station in the center.

Even a 4-spoke rail cross will require more rail than having all rail along the perimeter, and only speeds up the connection between opposites by pi/2.

It’s so the center is connected to the outside, not because they want to speed up the connection between opposite sides.

Typical cities are circles with most of the density being in the middle, and the 4 spoke optimizes for that.

If on the other hand density is in a line around the perimeter, that’s the best place for rail.

> I really don't understand why they didn't design it as Apple Campus-style,

Again, you're humoring them way too much.

A better question would be "I don't understand why didn't add two vaguely-circle-shaped cities at the base of the Line so that the phallic mentality behind the project could be even more clear."

> it's batshit insane.

Just like the great pyramid of Ghiza seemed to the Egyptians.

Only, several orders of magnitude more insane. In its 170km x 200m x 500m = 17B m^3 volume you can fit over 6000 great pyramids of 2.6M m^3 each.

If it does ever get built, its ruins will make a suitable 8th wonder of the world.

Meanwhile, construction on another mega project, the kilometer tall Kingdom/Jeddah Tower, has stopped since 2018 [1].

[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/civil/jeddah-t...

I feel like the "pyramid of Ghiza" analogy understates how stupid this all is.

I mean, if you really believe your immortal soul is going to be empowered by building a giant enough monument or whatever, then it makes rational sense to build something at the edge of your kingdom's logistical capacity.

And if nothing else, it's always good for bragging and showing your kingdom's superiority to its neighbors. And there were previous projects of smaller scale that proved it was feasible.

The Saudis aren't (deliberately) building a giant tomb. They expect people to live in that monstrosity. Even if (huge if) they can build something to the stated dimensions, it's only going to stand as an empty monument to their colossal resource-wasting hubris, a shell of concrete and steel and glass that will inevitably break down as nobody moves to live in there and nobody pays for maintaining the stupid thing.

> They expect people to live in that monstrosity.

I would definitely live in a city like that, it looks great to me. There are lots of people who have a preference for high density cities as it comes with lots of benefits. It's also more eco-friendly than low density living[0]. I just wish it was built in a more liberal country.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs-10eEGEe0

Insane but not batshit insane.

1) Shenzhen went from fishing village to a ~15 million population city in around 30 years. So there's a precedent for building a massive city in a relatively short period of time.

2) The Line is expected to house 9 million people. Assuming 2 people per house and given the $500 billion cost-estimate, it comes out at $110,000 per house. I've seen brand new apartments in Istanbul going for around that price and that's probably way above the actual construction cost (e.g. it includes land cost, developer's profit, etc.). Remember that the land here is free and there will probably be massive economies of scale due to the massiveness of the project.

It's supposed to be a giant building longer than Hadrian's wall and higher than the Eiffel tower, with half of it sitting in the middle of the desert. The idea that the costs are going to be remotely on the same scale as those of residential buildings in the economic hub of a G20 country is... it's not a serious idea.

Or you of train lines have opposite ends being disconnected. Why is that a problem?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com