Will the transit be a hyperloop?
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Perhaps if they put the city on tracks, with the proles at the back and the wealthy at the front…
You know Prince Bonesaw isn’t going to make this project about equity and equal opportunity. If the myopic and greedy House of Saud is investing its dirty money in something it’s bound to have a dark side. I hope this never gets built.
Now baked into this boondoggle is a vision of autonomous rideshare cars, which I doubt is a co-incidence given that the Saudis are also invested heavily in the Uber grift.
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Yes and no.Hub and spoke minimizes pedestrian travel distance and water lines, but introduces some known inefficiencies for things that are reasonably close trips in public transit systems. Picture a true hub and spoke as something like a pie. For trips between the outer crust, but on the same piece you get issues with having to head into the core and back out. On the whole a hub and spoke is way closer to ideal, but it comes with some trade offs. The ideal would probably be something between and grid and a wheel. Maybe a set of tessellated hexagons would things well.
But on to my own rant. This city is going to be an ecological disaster, even if it were to have a perfect zero car transport system. People upthread mentioned the obvious problem of crosstown travel, but it hits at every level. The added distance means you have to do more to deal with water pressure step down and any number of other minor engineering hassles. It also fundamentally misunderstands the social realities that make cities work. The biggest problem is the same as every other harebrained rebuilding scheme that is proposed, embedded costs. Any newly built city has to offset the emissions of every ounce of the new concrete, wiring, and pipes used to build it. It is almost impossible for efficiency gains of new construction to clear that hurdle when compared to thoughtful retrofitting.
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I thought we were getting rid of cities? Because of Covid and whatnot. As much as it astounds my co-workers, I cannot wait until I can go back into an office again and send the kiddos to school. Kids are driving me crazy! I’m not a home-schooler.
On the other hand, they’re probably going crazier than myself since they are still grasping what is going on, whereas I just have to deal with it.
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I guess the idea is to build the entire city around a really long metrorail line?
The big question is: why will people want to live there. What jobs will be available beyond menial service jobs? What will it produce? Normally cities are centralized around their primary industry, this one just seems to be sprawled out in the middle of a desert for sprawl’s sake.
In any practical sense it will have to operate like a large number of small towns connected by a single transit system.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to shape it like a huge doughnut? You could have two sets of tracks, one running clockwise and the other counterclockwise, massively reducing the worst case scenario for going somewhere in the city and also significantly shortening the average trip distance. It could operate like an actual city, except without the city center, at least at first.
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This is a giant crock of shit. zero-carbon and carbon-positive? WTF?
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And traffic snarls, slow crowded mass transit!
Back then they didn’t know much about the hazards of industrial air pollution/lead emissions on juvenile minds.
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This is a fantastic take on it. Wealthy narcissists keep trying to “redesign cities” and always land on “we just need pointier buildings”. This article perfectly summarizes why.
Also, I’ll give two fucks about anything Saudi Arabia does when they stop treating their women like cattle.
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Those are the renewable energy in this plan, I suspect.
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I don’t see how they can possibly fit in a palace for every prince and princeling of the House of Saud, let alone the six-lane freeway for them to drive their Ferraris on.
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This is yet more desperate flailing around in a vague attempt to pretend that Saudi has any prospect of an economic future, beyond the export of climate destruction and regressive Wahhabism
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It’s a weird bit of greenwashing. The ecological impact is made worse by being so spread out, in many ways. I mean, my immediate response to this was, “And I guess ‘screw you’ to migratory animals?” It would be a big urban wall stopping the flow of plants and animals across a huge area. Not to mention how grossly inefficient that layout is in so many ways… I mean, if you have the ability to say, “We’re going to build a brand-new city, from nothing,” that gives you a lot of options for placement in a non-ecologically sensitive area, and making it efficiently dense. Which this is the opposite of.
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Let’s not forget that some Saudi Arabians, probably this guy (MSG?) are major investors in Uber, the car “sharing” company that helped pour nearly a quarter billion dollars into keeping its workers misclassified as “independent contractors” in just one American state.
My other comment is about how inherently smart people are when they are born with money.
/s
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Where I come from these seemingly endless straight stretches of houses and roads are sometimes called Langer Jammer ‘Long Lament’ (cf https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_Jammer), which certainly is indicative of how much people cherish the experience of having to drive or god forbid walk down miles upon miles of straight roads that do not bend or twist or turn, and often have a lot in the offing—for the feet to walk at least, not so much for the eyes to take in. Those are often placeless localities that have no place or locality. I raise you https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4457036,13.5250747,15z, https://www.google.com/maps/@53.082291,7.4718499,1114m/data=!3m1!1e3, https://www.google.com/maps/@53.1282326,4.838487,14.97z for examples of what linear human settlements look like; drop to streetview to see if that resonates with you. And it’s not like linear settlements are new to the Arabic world, either; as an example, walk down along the seashore over at the famed Palm Tree, https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dubai+-+United+Arab+Emirates/@25.1206109,55.109669,18.25z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x3e5f43496ad9c645:0xbde66e5084295162!8m2!3d25.2048493!4d55.2707828. It is the embodiment of being lost in nowhere really. There’s even a quasi-medical unhealthy state-of-mind connected to this kind of situation, Prairie Madness (or Fever), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_madness.
As for some details of the plan, let me just highlight ‘invisible technology generates carefree and open urban space’ and ‘replace outdated urban services with new services driven by artificial intelligence’. This and the plan to build the entire thing (‘the pedestrian layer’) on top of two ‘invisible’ levels, the ‘service layer’ (which is presumably where all your imported workforce spend most of their time), and the ‘spine layer’ which features ‘AI-enabled transport’ (read autonomous cars), ‘next-generation freight operations’ (?), and ‘ultra high-speed transit’ (the hyperloop). This is everything but about giving ‘people’ livable spaces and getting rid of cars. It’s more of a giant service structure. Like valet parking but cubed and put underground so you don’t have to actually share a street with all that which and all those who make your life in the middle of the desert possible. It leaves one angry and helpless.
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