Which is how you’ll have to get around, apparently. I mean, the “20 minute” train ride is no good - even if it’s the world’s fastest train, it could only cover the distance in 20 minutes if it didn’t make any stops. So unless you want to only go from one end to the other, you’re walking.
The problem is that for once, they’re not thinking big enough. A public transit system with reasonably spaced stops - i.e. about a quarter mile - would be about 420 stops, and normally takes at least 20 seconds at each stop, which would add up to at least 2 hours and 20 minutes of just being stopped each ride, not counting actual travel time. However - hear me out - if we replace the train with a series of canons that launch transportation tubes a quarter mile at roughly Mach 1.3, and spend 2 seconds to reload them into the next canon (during which time passengers can disembark, if they’re conscious, have retained all their limbs and are fast enough), it would work for 20 minute trips. The canons would be extremely green because they’d be powered by pixie dust, Cavorite, unobtainium or the like. And sure, it seems unlikely anyone would survive, but that’s a pretty minor detail given the whole context.
Or you could just make the city as a circle rather than a line, and it would be a literal 15 minute city.
LOL, I love that. Yes, that’s definitely the take-away - “visionary” urban planning is at risk due to climate change, not a clearly stupid idea invented by a demented man-child that obviously doesn’t work, which is breaking down as it’s finally running into reality.
I can understand all the architects and builders not wanting to point out the emperor has no clothes when they’re getting paid big bucks to keep pretending (though I can’t understand their willingness to work for a murderer who is murdering people for this insane fantasy), but when the press tip-toe around the issue…
The interesting thing about the proposal is how often it relies on everything being greater than anything that currently exists - everything has to be bigger, faster, more advanced, more popular than anything else. I think it does it because even at the most cursory, superficial examination, it needs to be, because otherwise it won’t work. (The problem is, it all falls apart with even the slightest scrutiny - a train a bit faster than anything currently existing in the world could indeed plausibly travel from one end to the other in 20 minutes, but only if it never actually stops for passengers.) So part of the plan was for it to welcome more tourists than any city on Earth. (Why?) Another part was to have the most advanced scientific research and development going on of any city on Earth. (How?) And so on. The plan doesn’t just require research, tourism, etc. - each has to be the best and biggest for the plan to appear to work even on the most superficial level.
“We have no water and what will soon be an uninhabitably hot desert even now. What shall we do with it? Build a city!” The whole thing is premised on some notion of how the structure will be self-cooling (which is why it’s thin and tall, I guess?), but the whole thing is also composed entirely of fantasies, so I assume it wouldn’t work.
From my understanding of the project, it sounds basically like a luxury housing project for 9 million people. All the service jobs for the inhabitants are supposed to be filled by robots, self-driving flying cars, and even holographic teachers (no, I don’t know what that actually means either). In other words, by design poor (and even middle class) people won’t be allowed there, as there won’t be jobs for them. Upper-middle class people can presumably come as tourists, and that’s about it. Sure, we don’t have the technology to allow this, but the plan requires a number of technologies that don’t exist.
The structures planned are on par with some of the world’s tallest buildings - only instead of individual towers, it would be two walls stretching for 100 miles. It would require a high level of engineering and build quality to even stay up long enough to complete construction, so they can’t even fall back on tofu-dreg to make it economically feasible to build.
There’s no way this thing gets built in the first place because it’s literally impossible in a thousand different ways. Whatever they do build - if anything - will be so small and so far from the vision, I’m not sure who would be interested in living there. If you look at the proposal documents, they read like a 10-year-old boy wrote them - less a bold vision for the future than a series of childish fantasies about what’s possible. And that’s what people are being killed for being in the way of.
