I expected someone to make this comment! If you look closely at the image I posted, it seems asymmetrical in a way that makes it an octagon in the end.
I think it's not asymmetric, it's a *regular* octagon as seen in a close near-horizontal perspective which makes the near sides look more parallel and the far sides look shorter than they would from straight overhead.
If you look at the grid of buildings, you can see that the two edges on the sides of the picture aren't actually parallel; they just look that way because of perspective.
Yes and don't call me Shirley. But primarily it is a concept art for an idea which also happens to be a bad idea. The bees and hundreds of millions of years along with geometric truths on 3d planes of existence are correct and hexagons are the best.
I think this is what I meant by " You can do slightly better than this with a combination of express and local trains".
If I'm understanding correctly, n = 85 here, and log2(n) is about 6. That means six stops per ride, which not only means that you have to add six times your transfer time to the trip length, but that each train will only be going a few minutes between stops, most of that time will be spent in accelerations and decelerations, and you won't be getting to the 300 mph speed very much.
People have tried to draw up concepts for the "hyperloop" where you have cars that seat a small number of people, and you hit a summon button at a stop, an empty car leaves the loop at your stop, and then you get in and select your destination, and the car slots itself back into the flow of cars in the loop and whisks you to your destination.
That can't possibly solve the problem, come on, think about it. If you have trains which are going to be carrying millions of people-trips a day, maybe tens of millions, which is roughly what you're talking about for a NYC or Tokyo-scale city-wide 'this is the only way to get around' subway/train system, even assuming a lot of overlap among popular destinations, that still breaks down to 'we have to stop every kilometer on every trip'. The only way this won't happen is at like 4AM when no one is riding the trains, just one late partyer who can go express home. Which is also when it least matters, and it'll be worst when it most matters - like at rush hour and the maximal number of people hit every single stop along the way.
In theory if you have enough precision in your controls, and appropriate accel / decel branches on both sides of the main loop, it's possible to get the math to where you can squint at it and believe maybe it'd work. Like I said, people have proposed this with hyperloop as well. But I'm not convinced anyone actually has the tech to do this reliably, for millions of trips a day, for years, without having some kind of horrible 2000-car pileup at 300 km/h that kills a bunch of people. Like, the system needs to coordinate having thousands of cars whipping along in the main tube, and cars coming in from the stations need to accelerate to parity with the system and drop into an available slot, and if your entry into the main tunnel is off by a few hundredths of a second, things go pear-shaped.
Apart from all that, yes, admittedly most trips consist of moving a human body from here to there; but there are still an awful lot of trips that require moving me and my groceries/new couch where walking 1 km is not really an acceptable solution.
Not to mention how Manhattan (for example) is taken over by delivery trucks at night every night...
Once you ban the cars, how exactly do the groceries get in every day?
You could have an express train that runs non-stop end to end, and then have local trains dock to it in motion. There have been some attempts at this elsewhere, but I don’t know if there’s a working system.
I can imagine such system working quite well. The boarding would be similar to taking a train at some airports. Those trains are automatic and don't have drivers. You just wait at the door that opens only when the train has arrived.
The difference is that for a high speed train you would need to be seated during the travel. You would buy a ticket with a seat number on your phone app, then you would be requested to go to the specified boarding door (receiving advance notices on your phone) and wait there for boarding. If you miss the boarding, you miss the train. Hopefully they would run every 5-10 minutes which gives you enough time to rebook and try again.
OF COURSE you will use your phone to tell you which track/train/whatever to use!
That's not a serious concern.
The serious concerns are with things like the actual mechanical engineering; the times, speeds, accelerations, the transit between elements, the routing, etc.
(And not forget the more mundane issues like simply MOVING the amount of air required by all these concentrated people, if they're essentially living in a tunnel 24/7...)
You could also jettison people out through a tube. There would be a massive deceleration which would take some training to get good at (and to survive). I imagine it would work using a pull cord strung along above the windows.
A row of conveyor belts that is slow on one side and progressively faster towards the other. Pedestrians simply walk on to the outside belts, move inwards to gain speed, then walk back towards the outside to disembark. A phone app can help you with timing when to start moving off and how far in you should go so you don't blow past your destination. Google tells me a typical moving walkway goes 1.4mph, so you'd only need... 428 walkways for bidirectional travel at 300mph. Pro-tip: wear velcro shoes.
Always thought it would be cool to do an accelerating horizontal escalator (also spit-balling). You could achieve accelerating by making them work like slinkies with overlapping plates.
Yes, docking would be essential. We do this in space at 20 thousand miles an hour, so seems like it aught to be doable on land with trains. You'd probably want to have a car that travels between trains so the motion between trains is fully controlled. Or possibly you could get away with an escalator between docked trains.
In space velocity doesn't matter - you're at an arbitrary velocity towards any reference point you want, there is no medium that's giving you resistance.
On Earth, not only there's an obvious reference point of all the obstacles that are stationary and you can collide with, but at high velocity everything turns into an airplane whether it wants to or not.
Yes, they're not equivalent problems. A pointless example I suppose, but my point is it's clearly solvable in the limit, or at least there's certainly no real attempt to construct an argument that a docking system between trains in motion is infeasible.
However, my guess is it would be more economical just to have lots of smaller pods that merge on and off the main highway, which is certainly doable.
New York City. 1 train, local, 2 & 3 express. (Okay, they don't dock to each other "in motion", but that guy sleeping in the last car is doing some kinda' motion in his pants. Close enough.)
You could have a movable walkway system with the fastest walkways near the center, slowing until you can just walk next to and step onto the outermost ones. Robert Heinlein invented this in the 1940s for The Roads Must Roll. Fits really well here, though, since not only can you have very rapid transit, but you're still walking everywhere!
Well, they did say it would be a "five minute walking community..." I think I could walk across 60 lines in just about 5 minutes. Horrifically dangerous of course, and a massive waste of energy, but it would make for an exciting commute!
Why? You don't put the 500km/h one next to anything that's at a standstill, so if you took a tumble you would lose your momentum before you hit anything with a high relative velocity.
these walkways need to be thin, they can't control the airflow that well. Plus, moving that much air is expensive.
They should evacuate air from the entire tunnel, creating a near vacuum. I can stand just fine in 15 mph winds at one atmosphere, so logically I should be able to stand in 300mph at .05 atmospheres. Commuters will be required to put on a space suit. Its not like this is any more ridiculous than the rest of the city.
In "The Caves of Steel" (which is where I first was introduced to this concept) the central (fastest) "acceleration strip" has cars on it for this purposes. Although IIRC it also maxed out at closer to 60mph than 300...
Not exactly. Each train would only have a start and a destination. Every time you transfer you cut the distance to the destination in half using a divide-and-conquer style. I think you'd need n*log2(n) trains to make it work.
Also, since we're discussing and idiotic fantasy world with a practically unlimited budget here, we can reasonably (um...lol) assume that the trains accelerate/decelerate at 1G so it'll only take about 14 seconds to reach 300mph.
We can also assume that in this fantasy world all the citizens are perfect team players who follow all the instructions and transfers only take 30 seconds.
Even if destinations were random and not have a higher probability to be local, the expected travel time could actually be around 20 minutes.
Bonus:
If you mass produce these fantasy Noams by the millions, it'd probably be possible to work all the bugs out with lean, just-in-in-time, and continuous improvement manufacturing philosophies within a few centuries.
It can theoretically be done with a single train! It just requires deeply stupid train schedules. The train painstakingly moves between every ordered pair of possible train stops. From 1 to 2 and back, from 1 to 3 and back, etc until after 1 to 85 and it goes from 2 to 3, from 2 to 4... There are 7140 possible routes, after which it will repeat. Every trip will take less then twenty minutes, but you will have to wait 6 and half weeks for the trip you want to come up again.
If you make the line a circle instead, then you can make your one train the length of the line, allowing you to cut down your schedule length to just 85 “routes”. Now you can get anywhere and back in just under three days worst-case!
Sure, you could fit a city with the same surface area into a circle and walk 6.5km end to end, but is that the optimal design when the oil runs out and people want to riot?
An interesting question is whether a line with unscalable walls is a good design for a totalitarian regime trying to hold power. I’d think there are some benefits, but also disadvantages (rebels could split the city effectively at one point).
Unless you're making those walls armoured, "scaleable" doesn't matter much. Get an axe and a sledgehammer and you can make doors almost anywhere. Add some C-4 and a plasma torch and, well...
Another alternative is to have personal trains that uses the mainline highway but only decelerates at the station where you want to get off. Technically this is not mass transit but given that rail transport is now so much faster than road transport this personal train type of transportation should be much quicker than traditional car transportation. As an added bonus it should be a walk in the park to make the personal trains self-driving.
May be steelmanning excessively here, but do we *expect* large percentages of inhabitants to use the trains daily when one of their other bullet points is "five-minute walkability"?
If the full-length, full-speed train is reserved for maintenance workers and/or VIPs, I can imagine that being low-traffic enough to actually allow for the advertised speeds (though not the implied availability).
The rest comes from discounting the possibility that any Ordinary Plebian might want to live at Kilometer 25 but work at Kilometer 100.
So it might be aiming for a target of "not really one big city, so much as a string of one or two hundred closely connected mid-size ones".
The way this works out in real life is that wife wants to work at a company located at mile 17, husband at a company located at mile 87, and kids want to go to school at mile 124...
Meanwhile the only apartment they can find is at mile 39.
Now you can make various (classist? sexist?) statements about how for most people most schools and jobs and fungible, but that's the way it seems to work out in most cities right now. Unless we also have some sort of co-ordinated matching engine that handles all these dimensions simultaneously (in which case bring on the wholly *different* set of complaints and concerns...)
I mean, the issue with "job offers in two different cities" already comes up fairly regularly in real life. (Or, "tempting job offer in existing city x-hundred-miles from current residence, see: San Francisco and NYC housing prices")
The argument that the line-layout will severely exacerbate this problem is *mostly* convincing to me, but it's one of degree, not kind.
The fundamental idea of NEOM is fine. Basically they picked a bay near the Suez canal (a very busy waterway!) that's close to the population centers of Israel and Egypt (and to a lesser extent Iraq). And because of the Suez it's close to Europe too. The basic idea was to build a port and a startup city with various kinds of connectivity to these other places. And because the land was uninhabited (or at least it was after the expulsions) the religious scholars and legal apparatus of Saudi Arabia had no existing infrastructure and could be a sort of direct and absolute region MBS could set the rules for at whim. Besides, it's so far removed from Saudi Arabia's main population centers that people could just ignore it if they wanted to. So he could bring in foreigners or whatever. Even the ski resort idea isn't insane: Saudi Arabia's mountains get very cold. Lure people in with first class amenities, aristocratic luxuries like servants, regulatory/cultural freedom, and fat Saudi salaries/funding. Convince them to ignore that they're working for a murderous dictator. And there you go. It's basically a variation of the Chinese model which worked pretty well: designate a province as a special economic zone and dump money in and shoot anyone who dissents.
A lot of the initial decision making makes sense as a reaction to the previous model city project they had. It was set in a much more dense area and interlinked with Saudi transport to bus in workers. Not a bad idea but this meant it just kind of became another Saudi city, albeit a well planned one.
The thing is the Chinese didn't build giant Communist palaces. They built factories. Lots of factories. And boring Communist apartment blocks that are ugly and not great to live in. But they do at least house people. Meanwhile the first thing to be worked on in NEOM was the palace followed by workers quarters (of varying quality depending on if you're a western expert or a poor worker). The entire thing now appears to be a monument to MBS. And not even one that's been built yet.
If they actually wanted this to work they should be building a port and airport, industrial/office parks, wiring the entire thing for fiber, and building normal upscale apartments with retail and all that. Money could do the rest. And then if they want to they could build a solid gold statue in the center of MBS or something. Instead they're making plans to build a marina for yachts before a major industrial port.
You know, I'm beginning to think absolute monarchy might have some flaws as a form of government.
The thing is that command economies can do these giant special economic zones backed by money and get something that kind of works. This is just an especially incompetent version of it.
I don't know. Monaco does have a port even though southern France isn't nearly as desolate as Tabuk. How do you think they're going to get all the stone and marble for all those fancy rich people mansions?
> And boring Communist apartment blocks that are ugly and not great to live in. But they do at least house people.
Apartment blocks were one of few communist successes - they are more than passable and solve real problem.
Ultra heavy industry fetish has not worked so well (except producing enormous amount of tanks - which for additional irony most of post-communist countries are now sending to Ukraine)
I think we might have different definitions of "more than passable." As for solving a real problem: Yeah, they housed people and were often better than previous accommodations. They had less space (often much less, being in some cases only 50 square feet!). But they also had access to electricity, running water, etc. Just as those factory jobs were often better than backbreaking work in the fields.
If it wasn't apparent I'm somewhat ambivalent about the Chinese government's form of modernization and industrialization as a matter of human flourishing and economic efficiency. But I also think it's a working model. China's industrialization, including those apartments and factories, was a success.
I suspect you're talking about different things here. Your point is aimed at the Chinese and the ugly, boring and not-particularly-livable way they built apartment blocks. He's responding to a claim that "Communist apartment blocks" are boring, ugly, and not great to live in.
(On the bare communication level, the misunderstanding is purely on him. In the wider context, it may still be pointing to something important. I know next to nothing about China, and what I've seen of their housing developments does look ugly and boring and generally unappealing. But if I judged my own country's "communist" housing estates solely from the media message generated about them, they'd also look boring, ugly and unappealing. But here on the ground, many are outright great places to live in, especially once compared to the actually existing contemporary "capitalist" developments that followed them.)
I agree we're not really in disagreement. My point was (as I say in the last paragraph) to hold up the Chinese as doing it better. Whatever else you can say about Deng towns or Khrushchyovkas they were not mad follies that were outside the reach of their governments to realistically do. No one stood in front of Khrushchev and said, "Two bedroom apartment blocks? You're a madman comrade! A MADMAN!" And not just because of oppression. The goals were actually quite achievable which is why there are so many of the things.
In fact, while I stand by the fact they're ugly and generally have issues, my pointing that out wasn't meant as an insult. It was meant to contrast with the absurd luxury of a palace with gold and marble like the Saudis have. The Communists built ugly functional stuff. Especially after the 1950s. I'm saying, in effect, "If you're going to do the authoritarian model of special regional development then you need to build boring functional stuff like the Communists."
Though I acknowledge my tenor might be a little off because I am DEEPLY skeptical of such authoritarian regimes and their moving people and capital around on the state's whim.
I was surprised by the article about Latin American drone ventures. When they started by talking about the expensive “middle mile” I at first thought they were using a recombinant buzzword generator. But then I realized this could be exactly the comparative advantage of an aerial system in an urban area. Have a few big users put a little bit of investment into a few hubs for their sites, and suddenly it’s easy to get stuff from hub to hub, and the big user can have their own personalized last mile solution on-site. This is for a very different sort of application than mass transit, which is specifically about creating infrastructure in a dense city for getting through some linear network that is moderately close to many points in the city - but then still has trouble getting you the last mile if you are mobility impaired or carrying a package. This “middle mile” aerial shipment doesn’t solve the problem of urban transportation, and doesn’t expand anyones world the way that twenty minute access to the city does (or three hour access to all the major cities of the continent). But if you can’t retrofit your city with good uncontested travel, your institution might still be able to set up multiple sites where small packages are sent around efficiently (whether for light manufacturing or pharmaceutical delivery to hospitals or whatever the need is).
You know, I made that prediction on an earlier draft before the latest round of crazy revelations, and I assumed that even when all the crazy stuff failed there would at least be an airport, some basic infrastructure, and some houses, and sure, why not live in it? But you're right that I'm starting to doubt they will ever even be able to begin real construction and maybe I should lower that to 50-50 or something.
Lots of us cringe at the word 'crypto' - some are no-coiners, but others are bitcoin maximalists who are every reservation you have about the "cryptocurrency industry" but believe bitcoin is different for a number of reasons.
If we want you to do a deep dive on bitcoin maximalism, what format can we put on prediction markets? Any advice there?
So now I'm curious: what is the optimal configuration for public transit? Let's say you want a city of comparable volume (500 x 200 x 170000 = 17 billion cu m). You've got access to all of MBS's money, and as much Saudi desert as you want. The goal is to be able to get from any point A to any point B as quickly as possible.
Second, we want everything to be in a straight line, so you probably put the public transport underground where there aren't any buildings in the way
Third, we want to avoid the need for transfers as much as possible, they add lots of time, so tracks are a no-go
In conclusion, giant underground bumper kart ring; individual pods driven by an AI monitoring the whole system, depositing you directly at your desired exit to the city above.
It's probably doable with the tech we have already, as long as you're building from scratch in a small enough system. You don't need general intelligence, just a system that can handle organizing and directing all the little pieces moving around.
Would self-driving cars really be more efficient than trains? (Given that we're designing a city completely from scratch.)
Granted, there are a whole bunch of variables here. If our city is populated mostly with rich people who hate trains, or with people who are afraid of trains because of covid, then cars would certainly have an advantage. But from a purely theoretical point of view - how do we move people around as quickly as possible - it seems like trains would be better.
Though, hm, given infinite money, my intuition might be completely wrong.
I can't think of a way to do multiple tracks without line switching or multiple stops, which I'm pretty sure is slower than cars/buses taking a direct route on demand
That probably depends on how people you want to move around. A train can carry many more people per square foot than a car can, so a rail system can cope with numbers that would cause massive traffic jams on the road.
I do agree that having an underground layer (or two, or three) dedicated entirely to transport would be the way to go - almost regardless of geometry and type of transport, etc.
This made me think about the idea of using diamagnetic levitation as a "passive lift". Then I remembered that if the magnetic field was on all the time, you'd have a very hard time getting into the lift on the ground floor.
(Also, any loose change would rip itself out of your clothes and kill everyone ascending below you.)
The city's radius would be 4.5 km so trip time between two random points (assuming 50m/s top speed and 0.25 g max accel/decel) looks like ballpark 3 mins (check me on that).
The karts might get their motive power from ceiling or floor to reduce onboard mass.
4.5 km is too small to take advantage of the following, but an option to improve aerodynamic efficiency in significantly larger cities might be to enable karts to self-assemble into ad hoc trains (or are these your "pods"?).
A complete graph on N vertices. Basically every station would have a direct line to every other station (probably a sphere would be best for this). The problem is there are a lot of costly tradeoffs you’d need to make to let that many transit lines run through your city.
Space, primarily. Transit lines take up space that can't be used for anything else, which pushes everything else further apart, which makes the city less walkable.
Indeed - transit people call it "grade separation".
But there are still limits to what you can do; the right approach is to have a network that is designed so every line has an interchange with every other (so you have a two-seat ride from everywhere to everywhere else) and to have enormously high frequencies so the delays at interchanges are minimal.
If there's a train every five minutes, then the average delay at an interchange is 2.5 minutes + the walk time from one line to the other. The maximum is 5 minutes + walk time. People hate interchange delays, but when they are that low, they don't mind all that much.
And really good mass transit is much more frequent than that. London's Underground runs at least 20 tph (trains per hour) on all central routes (ie where the interchanges are), that's a train every three minutes; the best line is 36 tph (less than two minutes between trains).
At those kinds of frequencies, even multi-interchange routes will only add a few minutes to travel time, and - importantly - Londoners know that.
London is far from being the best transit network in the world (that's probably Tokyo), it's just the big city with a good network that I know best.
I'd probably go with a roughly circular city, with an underground/metro system.
The tube lines would be laid out on a hexagonal grid, with sides about 15 minutes walk long. Some of them would be designated "hubs" and "superhubs".
Trains would run around this network in a wide variety of routes*. Some would be slow trains stopping at every station on their route; others would go directly from hub to hub or superhub to superhub.
* I suspect there's a reason this is actually a bad idea - in reality, most underground systems have a small number of lines, each with their own track, and trains only run along those routes. And there's probably a good reason for that, but I don't know what it is.
Money, I believe, is the inhibiting factor. Digging subway routes is really expensive. If you were building a city from scratch, it would probably honestly be cheaper to do your subway at the ground level and then just build up everything around it
That's what we do in Europe - many more cities in Germany have streetcars than metros. The drawback is that streetcars cannot go faster than my bike, because if accidents happen (they do often) these accidents are not always mortal that way. Metro has no obstacles, so it can accelerate to >70 km/h between stations and cross the city much faster.
There s s way of creating a subway that's not very deep , and relatively cheap: you dig a trench down a wide street, then roof it to restore the road surface. (Cut and cover). You need wide roads, but that shouldn't be a problem if you are starting from scatch.
If you're starting from scratch, why have an alternating lattice of ground-level trains and roads for cars+trucks [no sidewalks at all, so no pedestrians interrupting the flow of traffic], with inexpensive wooden boardwalks covering all of them so pedestrians can walk around at 2nd storey level?
You don't cover over roads if you can avoid it becuase the ventilation you need to deal with the exhaust fumes is expensive. Road tunnels are notoriously expensive for this reason. Also, internal combustion engines are a fire hazard, and a fire under a wooden boardwalk sounds like a terrible idea.
Now, a more interesting question: is it cheaper to lay out the rail at ground level and then build all the roads a level up, or to dig trenches and have the roads at ground level?
Build an entire lower deck of your city which is a vast open space filled with fast-moving robots on tracks, then dot the streets with little booths. You get in a booth, dial in your destination, and the next available robot will suck your booth down to track level and speed you off to your destination.
I think the optimal configuration for practicality and cost is effectively a boring old spider web. Lots of straight lines running through the center of the city and rings of loops between them. People ride to the relevant loop, switch to a loop train, and then ride on to their destination. Ideally the city is a circle. But if it's a semi-circle (such as for a port) you can either have the loops all run along the coast or a separate special coastal line.
I was thinking about the circular solution, but I wonder if the central hub station would be so large as to be inefficient.
Another option is a square with north-south lines spaced 0.5 km apart and east-west lines also 0.5 km apart. Your ride would never be more than two trains. Seems like it's roughly the same number of tracks as the circular approach, but the stations and crowds are more dispersed.
Yes, that's why I said "effectively." Something that's close to a single central station but might be split up (with maybe trams between them) could work better. And it could force walkable urbanism for a vibrant center if you want it. I'm not sure there's a right or wrong answer there. Whereas nodes with direct lines everywhere is wrong because it would be EXTREMELY expensive.
Would you strictly need to have a cental hub station at all? Say you had series of concentric circles crossed by four 'spoke' lines going north/south, northeast/southwest, east/west and southeast/northwest. In the middle, inside the smallest circle, the four pairs of tracks cross each other (either stacked vertically or with crossroads and very reliable signalling to prevent collisions), and thus no station is served by more than two lines.
As I said above, the optimal configuration is eliminating travel as much as possible period.
Maybe coffin apartments around central plazas that contain all services someone regularly uses. Everyone must work from home unless working in the service sector in central plaza. you don't need public transit because no one is allowed to or needs to go anywhere. Central plaza 86 is identical to central plaza 13.
The solution to public transit is not needing central transit might be true in a spherical cow sense but doesn't really fit mission parameters. That said I agree a more distributed city is better. But you can't actually achieve it completely. The center always has more density due to the nature of geography.
I'm curious as to whether you would actually want to live in this kind of city, or whether you are just suggesting this as a mathematically idealized abstract solution to an abstract problem. Because as much of a homebody as I am, that sounds absolutely miserable to me. No unique neighborhoods? No variety in the kinds of places you can go or be? No visiting your friend who lives just ten miles away on the other side of the metropolis?
This is hardly scientific, but when I play OpenTTD (https://www.openttd.org/) I get great results when I try to avoid building rail intersections whenever possible and instead use rail interchanges, with the trains passing under and over each other whenever possible instead of having to wait at intersections. Accordingly, maybe try applying that idea IRL? Take a standard city grid and replace all the intersections with interchanges, or just bury/elevate one set of roads below/above the other, or replace one set of roads with a set of subway tunnels or elevated rails. The goal is to be able to get to anywhere in the city while only stopping once at a single interchange to transition from North/South to East/West (or vice versa), and for the city to be able to grow because no circles are used, just tileable squares/city blocks.
Disk-shaped city and extremely boring grid layout. Dedicated lanes for mass public transport, public automated fleet for last-mile. Roads are very structured so there is no need for advanced automated driving. At the city center we expect more traffic, so we add more lanes and replace traffic lights with underpasses. Blocks are larger at the city center (1x1 at the edges, then 1x2 when getting closer, and 2x2 at the core). If anything larger than 2x2 is needed (stadiums? palaces?), just make a huge NxN superblock and increase the capacity of the roads encircling it accordingly.
It will be some kind of square/circle shape, with a grid network. https://humantransit.org/2010/02/the-power-and-pleasure-of-grids.html Transfers are not a problem if both lines are high frequency (<5 mins) and each grid intersection is only serving two lines so it's a small station/interchange/two bus stops at a crossroads, with minimal distance to walk between the two lines.
Jarrett doesn't discuss the third dimension but if you want to go tall I guess you follow the same approach: high speed elevator at every stop, which itself stops at a spacing that people are happy to walk, maybe every few floors. (Though, while disabled people could live on elevator floors, it would be depressing if they could never reach the other floors, so additional lower speed elevators or ramps should be included).
(I'm not endorsing the spacings given in the link. Say the Saudi city stays 500m high. To get the same volume it would have to be 5.8km x 5.8km. 10 lines each way gives a line spacing of 530m (as there is an edge area outside the lines) and a maximum walking distance ~375m to an intersection. So you could do away with stops between intersections if using this close spacing, or leave them in depending how hard you're happy to accelerate people. Without them you can easily get end to end on each line in <10 mins, so the worst case trip end to end on two lines is still under the same time of 20 mins. And it would look like trackless trams or trams, on their own rights of way, all at the same level but coordinated so they don't have to slow down for each other's crossings).
A few things that I think "The Line" might actually have going for it (reservations about MBS and the Saudis aside, obviously) are that
(1) The Mirror-sides are probably actually load-bearing rather than an aesthetic flourish in the Saudi desert as an attempt to keep the interior temperate, and that's something you kind of can't do with a sprawl-model, and
(2) Building and expanding public transit can just take place with cheap cut-and-cover or analogous trench construction outside the city itself (or even aboveground, although environmental control would probably be easier underground) with lateral or funicular connections to the city itself, with no infrastructure to dig through.....ever, and the simplest possible track and acceleration models. Expansion and building for transit, infrastructure (pipes, cables, etc.) compared to basically any other urban design is an absolute breeze.
The one thing about the design that strikes me as not stupid is that whole thing is one giant tall building. Being tall means you have more places nearby. Regular cities with skyscrapers sort of do this, but you have to go all the way down to street level to get to the next building over. Also a street in a regular city takes up a huge vertical space even though it only uses the bottom of that space.
I'm envisioning a giant high rise building with a floor devoted to north-south rail lines, and another floor devoted to east-west. Some of the train lines are high-speed with few stops, others are low speed with many stops. In terms of travel times, it would make sense to put these floors in the middle, but for weight reasons they might need to be at the bottom.
Optimal? How about everything is a pod the size of a smallish shipping container, and autonomous crawlers shift them around like eggs in an ant colony depending on demand?
Why commute to work across the whole place when the crawlers can shift everyone else slightly and put my pod next to work? They can put me on the side of work where the new coworkers I like have their pods. We can walk from there to the restaurant pod that our living nearby attracted.
I have a heightmap of the relevant terrain lying around somewhere if anybody wants to import it into Cities Skylines and have a go. (trying to replicate The Line did not go well)
> The goal is to be able to get from any point A to any point B as quickly as possible.
Well, that depends how exactly you measure that. If you take for example "average commute from home to work", then the solution is something like work from home, everyone has an office at home. Commute = 0. I think it's kind of fair, but work and home are only some of the places you go in a city. For buying stuff, delivery and a corner store in your building. I imagine big multi functional buildings, probably skyscrapers because elevators are the most common mechanized way of moving inside a building.
But then there's the hard part, which is stuff that people don't do all the time, but still do. Go to the cinema, shopping (as in, the experience of being in a store), going out with friends. Maybe you can use some kind of matchmaking program to put people together and build stuff near them if they have shared interests. I don't know how much interests overlap in real life. For example, take the opera. Do the people that go semi-regularly to the opera work in the same kind of companies, go to the same kind of restaurants? If that's mostly true, this could work. If it's not, it gets harder but you could imagine some kind of program that see where you go and try to optimize where you will live so that the time spent moving will be the smallest possible. This also gives you a good excuse/reason to track people, which might be a big plus for Saudi Arabia. And if the interests of people really overlaps and are correlated with something like income/class, you get class division for free, justified.
Your description of Neom, as scathing as it is, still does not capture the sheer stupidity of this project. My former company landed a contract with the Saudis to contribute tech to Neom, and while I can’t reveal much due to NDAs, that project remains the most memorable clusterf*ck of nonsense I have ever experienced. The average 9-year-old addicted to Minecraft could probably craft a better city than the fools running the show at Neom.
So much arrogance. So much stupidity. SO MUCH MONEY.
The Saudis had absolutely asinine requests that they refused to compromise on, despite us telling them it would never work. Our project team kept helplessly cracking up every time we did our internal review of design docs. Usually this review was quite a serious matter, but we’d just all be helplessly laughing at how stupid and impossible our proposed builds had become.
You may be wondering why my former company was willing to create design docs for impossible builds… It was because we all knew Neom would NEVER reach the point where they could actually try to implement the build. The project would crumble far before then, and the CEO was quite confident his company could then say, “Aw, shucks, too bad we never got the chance to actually build this for you! Thanks for the millions you gave us for the design plans.”
The most bizarre aspect of the whole thing was that all the Saudis seemed deadly serious about the whole thing, and excitedly ate up every single preposterous deliverable we gave them.
I never managed to tell how many of them were just too terrified to point out the absurdity, and how many truly believed in the project in all its ridiculous glory. I got the feeling that a few key leaders were true believers, while everyone else was just keeping their mouths shut.
One thing that’s worth pointing out is that the Saudis have a major issue with unemployment, so many Saudis may be fine with the stupidity and waste, as long as it’s making massive amounts of jobs. And it currently is, soooo, goal accomplished? But this is obviously a very poor bandaid on their employment problem that will definitely come back to bite them in the butt.
Years later, I still don’t know how to wrap my head around that project. It all just feels like a fever dream. But I will greatly enjoy watching it go down in flames, especially after their horrific treatment of locals at the build site.
Haha. You know, I watched that sketch again just now, and I actually think they could have done it. They just needed some weird möbius surface and maybe putting green and blue inside the red lines. Failure of creativity. Not nearly as doomed as this project.
You could draw the lines as great circles on a glass sphere, that would be cool. I'm not sure about the kittens though. I guess the line could be the outline of cat. Er, kitten I mean.
You can draw brown lines using transparent ink - or, at least, ink which is transparent at the time of writing. Use an invisible ink such as lemon juice, and heat it up to make it visible. I wonder if there's any green ink which can be developed (through heat, ultraviolet exposure, etc.) to turn it red.
I know the US spends lots of money, sure, but who's going to keep them in check, now if the Saudis are going to throw $1T down the drain like that, at what point does it become ethical to intervene? I'm pretty sure if they started believing that oil came from the devil and started digging all their oil and burning it a lot of people would be in favor of intervention. This is not that much farther.
The only circumstance where I could see it remotely justified would be if the mismanagement created a humanitarian disaster with waves of refugees destabilizing neighboring countries. But even then, the costs for the attacking powers would be huge (see Somalia), not to mention the toll on "beneficiaries" of the alleged humanitarian intervention.
The other circumstance would be if you're causing a humanitarian disaster outside your country through side effects, like pollution or depletion of valuable resources.
Thanks for the hint. I thought this was genuinely from George Best. Now I heard for the first time about Channing Pollock. Probably it's even older. I suspect Tutenchamun.
Intervening because they are building a city? Ffs. There’s all kinds of reasons the US shouldn’t be allies with Saudi - see Yemen, or its death penalty for homosexuality. How they handle their economy isn’t one.
It’s not an issue for the US. Do you think a future China should invade the US for its inevitable future deficit. In any case the money spent here isn’t “burnt” it’s flowing out of Saudi but not disappearing. Quite a few western architectural and construction companies are benefiting. From the point of view of the Saudi people some money is disappearing.
If you build a 34km^2 ghost city, from the point of view of humanity, you're definitely burning a bunch of energy and raw materials. Some of the money is paying for services and will get recirculated, but a lot of it is paying for materials that will be wasted there.
In the end they claim it will be carbon free. Which will be the first for a city that large. I don’t think it will ever be built but if it is then it will have some carbon reduction compensation for its build.
I’m any case you don’t seem to understand the political reality of the US Saudi relationship, which is one of allies. This is despite the fact that the kingdom is a vicious dictatorship and despite its treatment of lgb people (which isn’t just the worst in the world but historically amongst the worst ever). Also despite the grubby war in Yemen, where blockades leading to starvation have seen the US remain allies with, and in fact join in with the Saudis.
So the US isn’t going invade over a city. And if it did, the Islamic world would be in greater upheaval given the area is considered holy.
Are you always this obnoxious? "Ffs", "you don't seem to understand". You failed to understand that it was an ethical question on hypotheticals, not a practical question on this exact matter.
In the case of service you're paying for someone's time. Time is arguably finite but extremely abundant today. So you put the money in circulation in exchange for a renewable resource. When you're buying energy or raw materials, there's a high likelihood that you'll make them unusable again (energy is always one way, it's hard to recycle other materials and even when you do you lose some of the material in the process). So the money part is also recirculated but in exchange for resources that are not renewable.
I would give better example. Bitcoin. The recent fall of BTC price wiped out about 2 trillion of wealth. Was it all virtual anyway? Not really, the amount of energy burned to produce these bitcoins is really mind blowing (probably close to 500 billion). And yet, it is not high enough to damage the western economy yet.
Neom might be a big waste of money and resource but I consider it much better waste than bitcoin. They will most likely fail but it could identify what are real problems and maybe even ways how to solve them.
"The recent fall of BTC price wiped out about 2 trillion of wealth. Was it all virtual anyway?"
Yeah it was. It's like buying 100 share of a stock at one dollar per share, then having it go up to fifty dollars a share, then going down to two dollars a share. Has 4800 dollars disappeared from the world? No, because you didn't trade it at that price.
The point is that also energy was wasted to obtain those coins. That energy was worth billions of dollars that could have been used for different purposes, like building cities :)
Every riyal spent on NEOM is one that will not fund ISIS or Al-Qaeda, nor bombing poor Yemeni civilians, or teaching hatred to kids in Pakistani madrassas. Plus a lot of it is exfiltrated to the West and is as close as it gets to Keynes’ thought experiment about burying money in a pit then letting people dig it out. What’s not to like?
The US wastes orders of magnitude more money than that on the military (almost a $1T/year), a waste of resources with negative public good value, if there ever was one. By that logic it should invade itself ASAP.
For obvious reasons I do not have big problem with USA military, and I hope that 90%+ of Russian tank fleet will end destroyed. Hopefully with as small Ukrainian losses as possible.
Presumably, if I would be from Central/South America my opinion would be likely flipped.
Still, Red Army murdered/raped/looted far more than USA army in time since Red Army was created. And I would prefer to be invaded by USA than Russia.
I don't disagree with your assessment of the European (and especially Eastern European) realities. "Being invaded by the US" worked out well for Europe (and Japan) for the most part. Not so much for other places. The Soviet Union/Russia, on the other hand, has a consistently terrible track record treating the locals.
Still, most of that $1T a year US military budget is pure waste.
If spending your own resources on things which you like but which aren't particularly useful is a crime worthy of being shot, 90% of us are going to the wall.
Even Mohammed bin Salman doesn't have enough money to kill everyone in the world who ever said anything bad about him. Khashoggi did a lot more to oppose the Saudi monarchy than "one critical blog post".
As god is my witness, I have tried, and failed, to find the answer to that question. The only thing I can even begin to think of is trains and subways going faster if they don't have to turn. But they have to stop along the way, unless you construct an ungodly number of them for every station. They must know this.
I'm confused. A line is the worst possible contiguous shape for a city. It would literally be better if Mohammed bin Salman tried to use the city to spell his name. More to the point, its *obviously* the worst possible shape for a city. I have to conclude that its shape is not about being a good city. Is it meant to be a controllable city? A sector misbehaves, and gets locked down with only two points of entry or exit. Is it meant to be an advertising stunt? People talk about the Line more than other, less stupid projects.
I have no idea what is going on. Is the entire thing for funneling money somewhere secret? Why bother, if you can fund this atrocity of a project to the tune of a trillion dollars, you can buy whatever you want.
I can't believe I'm considering "The crown prince is actually just that stupid" as a hypothesis. Its a trillion dollars. For an idea that was clearly unfeasible when they were going to build it at ground level. I feel like I'm reading a fantasy novel, toward the beginning, where a foolish and wasteful king is about to be deposed, sparking an age of strife.
With a hereditary monarchy, "the crown prince is actually just that stupid" would always be my default assumption.
Ibn Saud (1875 - 1953) presumably had the combination of intelligence and specific personality traits to do something as impressive as 'founding a country'. But MBS is his grandson -- and not even like a favourite, especially talented grandson. He's much more likely to be just 'some guy', rather than anyone particularly smart or talented.
I reckon early on, someone googled “largest thing ever built,” accidentally hit on either the Great Wall of China or the Game of Thrones wall, and the initial dimensions were ripped from there.
Or MBS put a typo in an early email, and no-one dared question it.
Or the brief was “tower that reaches the moon,” and and at some point they were told the only way to do it was put it on its side.
Humourously nominatively determinative architecture? It opens up so many great puns. The Line in the sand. Hold The Line. The Line dancing (forthcoming euphemism for its public transit). Snort The Line (drug tourism). Hook, The Line, and sinker (investor gullibility and/or regional specialty cocktail).
Otherwise I am genuinely not sure, it just seems suboptimal for most practical equilibria. I live in a roughly-square city and can't imagine what worthwhile tradeoffs one would get by cutting it in half and stretching it way out along one dimension. It'd make the major road/subway line more convenient, but as already noted, adding stops cuts into that efficiency. Narrow rectangle seems like the sort of funny shape imposed by hard physical constraints, like building in a valley or alongside bodies of water...not out in the open.
(I wonder if the roof will just be solar panels, or maybe it'll be a great tarmac for jet takeoff or whatever. Like a beached aircraft carrier?)
Ethics Gradient has the best answer Ive.seen: it's because of the walls, which you need to.shade the interior. If you move the.walls apart into more of a square shape, the interior will fry when the sun is overhead.
I'm still not clear where the solar goes. If it's a separate solar farm, they're lying about the environmental footprint. If it's built-in, you could put it on a roof , and that solves the overhead sun problem, allowing to you to adopt a more square shape, with a more sensible transport layout.
But then the core, the centre wouldn't get much light or fresh air. So what you actually need is a plus or X shape. That allows you to use a 2d transport layout, halving the worst case journey length.
Almost everyone would be looking out of a mirrored wall at another mirrored wall? A Line ensures everyone gets an uniterrupted view form front and rear..but crosses are pretty good too.
The next parallel line can be one mile away, which is close enough to reduce travel distances by an order of magnitude, but distant enough not to make you feel claustrophobic.
We're changing one 170km long line to ten 17 km long lines. If they are built within a 17 km wide square of terrain, then they are 1.7 km apart, or about 1 mile.
"Including a six-minute walk on each end, plus a twelve-minute wait for a pod, and two two-minute midway stops plus a two-minute fudge factor plus the 30 minute end-to-end travel time (6+6+12+2+2+2+30), the longest conceivable trip in The Line would be one hour; 20 minute trips would be common."
But whether it's 20 or 30 or 60 minutes, why does it have to be that much when it can be less? What's to gain from making this city a line?
Right. This seems like the obvious answer. Assuming there's good bedrock there, you can dig deep and get cheap cooling, and long and thin and designed to deflect the sun may actually be a legit good shape to pair with geocooling. Great big thick stone walls with shutters would be better than all the glass, of course, but not cool enough to get magazine articles.
Unless I've missed something (I suspect I have), wouldn't pods need to accelerate/decelerate for less than half of the distance between stations for the two-lane system to work? For Example:
Two pods travelling in the direction of station 100. Pod A is travelling to Station 9, Pod B is departing from Station 8. Pod A needs to enter the A/D lane .6˙km before Station, so .3˙km after Station 8. At this point, Pod A is travelling at top speed. .3˙km after Station 8, Pod B is travelling at half of top speed. If Pod B is between .3˙km and .5km, Pod A can't enter the A/D lane without colliding with Pod B, and can't stay in its own lane without blocking the whole line.
This is fixable by changing the specs slightly (having the pods accelerate at around 1.4g, or put the stations slightly further apart).
First let me see if I can make a schematic. I'm just drawing the Up Tube (increasing station numbers). The Up Tube is 3 lanes wide near a station.
[AL] = airlock
..... short airlock lane, 100 meters
****** A/D lane, 0 to 300 kph or 300 to 0
>>>>> cruise lane, 300 kph
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
*******************************************
..... [AL] .... ..... [AL] .....
[L1 wait room] [L2 wait room]
The system must certainly avoid deadly conflicts in the A/D lane.
There have been changes in the specs. Top speed is now 300 kph which is reached in 18 seconds and .75 km at .5G. Deceleration is at .3G, perhaps 30 secs.
Two pods leaving adjacent stations (L1 and L2, 1 km apart) at the same time would not conflict.
However a pod stopping at L2 could definitely conflict (violently) with a pod leaving L1.
Nothing happens without CentCom's approval, so it's up to CentCom to not allow this scenario.
The simplest way to avoid a crash is to have the pod leaving L1 wait for 30 seconds outside of the L1 airlock but still in the airlock lane. When the pod approaching L2 is safely in the L2 airlock lane, then the pod exiting L1 begins accelerating.
30 seconds is not a long wait. The passengers leaving L1 might not even notice.
The onboard computers would also have knowledge of other pods in the A/D lane and could order emergency maneuvers if necessary.
I'm pretty sure you've solved it. If you make each airlock lane a little over three pods long, pods can also queue up to join/leave them (maybe a pod each side), so I don't think it's more computationally difficult then just wait 30 seconds if there'll be a pod you'd otherwise intercept in the A/D lane. Frankly, given the costs you're already incurring (and my bold assumption that the cost of maintaining a vacuum this size increases linearly by volume and not exponentially), you could make the airlock lane the whole length of the loop for use in emergencies/for maintenance vehicle access (obviously ducking into the A/D lane as needed, on something more like manual manoeuvring).
That is what I have done. The airlock lane is now continuous (except for the airlocks).
It is also used for travel from one station to the next at 60 kph average speed: one minute of travel.
The airlock lane is also used to accelerate to 100 kph before entering the A/D lane which reduces the disparity of speeds in the A/D lane. (Every pod is moving between 100 kph and 300 kph) Same for decelerating from A/D into the airlock lane.
Speaking of SimCity, when is someone going to build an optimal SimCity city in real life? Now that is a utopian project that I would love to see and that may have more than a snowball's chance in hell of working out.
If I remember correctly, an "optimal" city was optimized for density and revenues.
It was a dystopian nightmare where people died around 40, no education, unchecked crime rate and a single tree every 10 km. I wouldn't love to see it at all.
Or perhaps you're refering to a city that would be optimized for inhabitant happiness?
OK, let's do the math. 1WTC has a 56x56 meter footprint. If NEOM is 200 x 170,000 meters, that's a about 10,800 1WTC towers. 1WTC cost $3.9 billion, so NEOM should come in at $42 trillion. OK, let's credit them with a learning curve at an exponent of 85%. It would still cost $4.8 trillion, approximately seven years of Saudi GDP.
And some things don't have learning curves. 10,800 1WTC towers means 486 million tons of structural steel, and 2.16 billion tons of concrete. At current prices of $1220/ton for steel and $80/ton for concrete, that's $765 billion for the most basic raw materials alone. And really, purchases at that scale will distort the market so that they're spending a terabuck by the time the project is just a mountain of I-beams and bagged cement on the shores of Aqaba.
To be fair, it's supposed to have a population of nine million people. So you recover the $42 trillion cost by selling off nine million apartments at a price of $530K each, which is fairly normal big-city prices. All you have to do is find nine million people who have $530K and want to live in this crazy thing.
Now, that's still not going to happen, but it sounds less insane when you put it this way. And if you scale down your ambition from a 130 km city housing nine million people to a 3km city housing 200K people attracted to this Monaco-of-the-Middle-East by a favourable tax situation then maybe it starts to seem reasonable.
Now I'm wondering whether the real agenda here is the desire to build a city where rich people can live without even needing to see the houses of poor people. If you go to Dubai then you've got (I assume, having never been to Dubai) a bunch of apartments housing rich people, whose amenity is spoiled by being surrounded by the ugly houses of all the poor people needed to keep the rich parts of the city going. In a linear city, on the other hand, all the rich people can have their apartments up one end and the poor people live up the other end; the rich never need to see the poors' houses nor interact with them when they're not actively working; the poors will be delivered by high-speed train every day to do their menial jobs and then whisked away to their vertical slums which, thanks to geometry, cannot even be seen from any window in the rich part of town.
I don't think this is what people are thinking. There are plenty of neighborhoods all around the world where rich people can't see poor people. All suburbs and a bunch of nice districts in cities.
I don't know. I mean, if you live in Beverly Hills you don't have to see poor people as long as you never actually leave Beverly Hills, but if you actually want to go to the beach or the mountains you've got to pass through poorer neighbourhoods, even if it's on a freeway.
The Line lets you pass straight from a super-rich dense walkable city to unspoiled wilderness within minutes . Now, maybe there's a few places in the US where you can get some approximation to that, but The Line probably isn't trying to attract people from there, it's trying to attract people from Mumbai and Moscow.
Hey you're right. I actually meant to use the OP's second estimate (which was $4.8 trillion) not the first one (which was $42 trillion).
(I do think you can mass-produce skyscrapers in the Saudi desert using Pakistani labourers cheaper than you can build a one-off skyscraper in downtown New York City using New York City union labour, so the $42 trillion is definitely an overestimate.)
You're ignoring the part where building the WTC doesn't meaningfully impact the market for raw materials, whereas building 10,000 WTCs all at once does. If its even possible to produce the supplies necessary for this to be done by 2030, it would only be possible by prices for materials skyrocketing and inducing supply, blowing out any cost estimate.
Right, I definitely wouldn't say that building the whole thing by 2030 is within the realms of possibility.
The main point I wanted to make is that as long as you consider this a _city_ rather than a single structure, the materials and cost requirements no longer seem insane. (The layout is still insane.)
But the cost of building any city of nine million from scratch would seem prohibitive if you tried to do it all in one go, securing all the funding before the first house is sold.
The Burj Khalifa is about 1/3rd of the cost of the 1WTC per cubic meter of area, if wiki's claim that it cost $1.5B and Quora's claim that it has 1.6M cubic meters of volume are true.
The question is, how much lower than the Burj Khalifa can you go? If you are trying to finish this project by 2030 you're going to need enough concrete and steel to impact the world's production of those two goods I think?
" 10,800 1WTC towers means 486 million tons of structural steel, and 2.16 billion tons of concrete"
World production of steel: 1,950.5 million tonnes in 2021
World production of concrete: 4.4 billion tonnes in 2019
Hmm, so actually if your consumption is smoothed out over 8 years, you'd need 3% of the world's steel per year, and 6% of the world's concrete per year. That's not likely to affect the prices directly, but I would wonder how transportation to the site will work.
Are we assuming that they're telling the truth about the dimensions? What if we start by assuming there's a ton of "advertising puffery," aka bullshit, going on. Then it's not literally 500m tall and 170km long, it's just "tall, narrow, and long". You could do 20m tall buildings along a 10km line, new-urbanist style, and that would still give you room for a lot of people (200 wide by 20m tall by 10,000m long is 40 million cubic meters, enough for 400,000 people to have 100 square meters each) with a reasonable commute even with stops along the way. You might have to travel farther than you would in a normal city, but it's made up for by never having to wait for a transfer or walk too far from your stop. And presumably they'd go all-out on transit since that's the only option.
When you put it that way, it starts to make sense. Build it along a nice beach somewhere and you can actually justify the linearity, too.
Imagine a version of Miami where everything has been demolished except that thin island that runs north-south from South Beach to Palm Beach, with cars banished to the mainland and an ultra-efficient north-south transit corridor installed. It sounds like a pretty nice place to live.
At this scale it would be worth it to vertically integrate everything. Mine the raw minerals from mines that you own, and build the factories to do all the processing yourself. No way this is done on a timescale less that several decades, and there's a huge list of reasons why it wouldn't work at all.
My favourite thing about NEOM is how much more sensible it would be if it you simply made it 200m high and 500m wide instead of 500m tall and 200m wide. It would be vastly less expensive to build, and vastly easier for people to get around.
Don't get me wrong, it's still an insanely stupid idea even when it's on its side. But that's what I like about it; it's an insanely stupid idea made even more insanely stupid by the simple stupid decision to make it taller than it is wide.
"Wayside School was accidentally built sideways. It was supposed to be only one story high, with thirty classrooms all in a row. Instead it is thirty stories high, with one classroom on each story. The builder said he was very sorry."
While we're talking about Neom, Egypt is relocating its capital to a new city (named the New Administrative Capitol) being built in the desert, designed <to make sure the government listens to the demands of the military instead of the demands of the street> to relieve congestion in the capital. It's going to include widely separated single-use neighborhoods, a new 22 mile long river, sporting facilities for an Olympics that may or may not come there, the largest military headquarters in the world, and a 1 km tall obelisk. While it's not as absurd as Noem, I find it more objectionable because Egypt isn't rolling in cash like Saudi Arabia.
There is some precedent for doing futuristic things by using Native Americans' special legal status to avoid regulations. An ocean fertilization project off the Pacific northwest was done in collaboration with the Haida nation, before international political backlash stopped the project.
On the one hand, isn't this Neom thing just a really inefficient arcology ? Arcologies have been proposed in the past, and sadly, the way things are going, they're probably the future.
On the other hand, insane projects such as these are usually just vehicles designed explicitly for embezzlement. Actually building anything out in the real world would be extremely counterproductive for that purpose. You want to embezzle the money, not sink it into parts and labor !
Also, Mohammed bin Salman seems to be directly involved in this, and he has no need of embezzlement vehicles - he's absolute monarch accountable to no-one.
Maybe I'm too embroiled in the Russian perspective on this; but, in Russia, if a monarch wanted to give out little gifts to his barons in exchange for their loyalty, this is how he'd do it.
That would depend on how involved he is in coming up with the idea. If I were an advisor of his who owned a construction company, I would tell MBS to build something like this and rake in the cash.
Also, it's a great way to distribute money to a wide variety of people in multiple industries without the transparency problems of just handing it out to your closest friends and asking them to share it around. $1 trillion pumped into the economy using specific channels will result in your people getting real world experience doing all the things needed to build massive projects.
It's not nearly as nice as getting a good project done, but if you think this might work at all it's a great OTJ opportunity that might just pan out into a decent final product.
Something I wonder from time to time is why no one tries to make a charter city in America.
80 percent of the regulatory burdens that block places like eg, San Francisco from becoming denser or building more trains are city and state level political issues that you could avoid by not being in California or SF.
If you put a brand new city in the middle of Nebraska or something on cheap land, you wouldn't be able to get out of federal taxes or federal drug laws, but you could still compete in a lot of ways with US cities, and you get a huge natural bonus of cheap and legal immigration from the entire United States, free trade with US, etc. etc.
There are already plenty of small towns in flyover America. Some have died to the point of selling the rights to Hollywood studios to blow up their remaining buildings.
Coordination problem. Everybody wants to live in a brand new city with forward thinking civil codes and walkable design etc., but nobody wants to be the first person to move to a field in Nebraska
The reason tens of thousands of people live in Falun and Kiruna are the iron mines. Surely a charter city could be created around the extraction of some natural resource.
> Everybody wants to live in a brand new city with forward thinking civil codes and walkable design etc
Actually I think not all that many people even want to do that, it's just that the people who _do_ want to live in a place like that are massively overrepresented among people who write a lot of comments on the internet, and most of those people are too young and poor to be buying houses.
By the time people get to house-buying age most of them seem to be willing to trade off walkability for space and quiet.
Eh plenty of people with money are willing to pay a big premium for walkability, otherwise prices in Manhattan wouldn't be so high. I think it's more that people aren't willing to trade being in the middle of goddamn nowhere with no jobs or amenities for walkability.
I strongly agree. Even within NYC, you pay significantly more per sq. ft. for space in Manhattan than space in near-Brooklyn, and way more than space in far-Brooklyn.
Walkability is something that is undersupplied in the US housing market, so it commands a premium price. However that's only if walkability is walking to: {an excellent suite of restaurants+bars+cultural amenities} + {high-status jobs}
Both of which you don't get in Manhattan or similar.
Melvin is correct. The whining about livability (defined in a particular way) is very much an over-educated 20-something american issue, not a universal issue.
Would Columbia, MD count? Planned community (by the grandfather of Edward Norton, no less!) in 1967, intended to be more than just a bedroom community for some place else. Somewhere north of 100k people live there now (including me, for several years). They were thinking of holding the new Woodstock there.
In this case, it's probably interesting in terms of what people thought a city Ought to Look Like in 1967, versus how it looks today. (A whole bunch of townhomes / apartments sprung up around the Mall in just the last five years or so.)
I am starting to get a bit annoyed at all the moralizing coming from the West re: the Neom project. Yeah, it’s a crazy and impractical idea. So what? Perhaps that’s what the world needs right now.
It’s especially grating to read these complaints about the cost of its creation, especially when the West has spent an order of magnitude more money destroying things in the region.
I'm claiming that it's impossible. I'm claiming that if the King of Saudi Arabia said he was going to invest all the country's money in a perpetual motion machine, the people of Saudi Arabia might justly be unhappy about this.
I don’t intend to sound snarky here, just informative. I have interacted with a lot of Saudis and they don’t think they way you think they do. Pretty much every need is covered, including healthcare, education, housing, etc. It is very much a welfare state where the concept of scarcity basically doesn’t exist. This is of course why there are so many foreign workers there: because the citizens don’t want or need to work.
If anything, this project will be popular amongst Saudi citizens, as it aims to propel The Kingdom over regional competitors like Dubai. It’s futuristic, too expensive, and borderline delusional on purpose. That is what matters in post-scarcity politics. If they wanted a modest, realistic desert city, they could have done that. But it’s not sexy or cool and it certainly won’t propel Saudi over the UAE in “global attention points.”
The psychology can be hard to understand for middle class Westerners (myself included), but if you interact with the superrich class, especially the Gulf superrich class, you’ll start to understand it a bit better. The concepts of pragmatism or rationality are not particularly important to these people.
Then I should clarify what I mean by "might justly". I don't mean that, with a sufficiently good PR campaign, the prince couldn't get people to like him and make his perpetual motion investment popular. I'm saying that it would be unfair to the Saudi people, and that if they understood the situation, they would have the right to complain.
Again I don’t think you quite grasp that the citizens of a different country have different values and mentalities. I’m sure they understand the situation just fine. As I tried to explain above, literally no one there cares about wasting money. It does not exist in the minds of the citizens. Full stop.
Sorry, but the idea that “if only they saw the world the way we enlightened Westerners do, and weren’t being brainwashed with PR campaigns, they’d agree with us” is just pure Western hubris.
But you'd think Westerners would have started to care about wasting money when real wages started to fall; yet politicians promising to spend billions on their own vanity projects get elected and re-elected every election cycle for positions from city councillor all the way up to head of government.
After all, you can't let that other city have a nicer sports stadium/modern art project than you, can you?
The amount of money being wasted is a relevant amount of money, even for Saudi Arabia, especially since $1 trillion is hilariously insufficient to complete this project as currently specified but MBS seems to be committing his prestige/credibility to making it work as specified
I've also interacted with a lot of Saudis. And that includes people who aren't wealthy or well connected enough to attend western colleges. Saudi Arabia has a higher poverty rate than the US and its biggest budget item is the military. The Saudi ARISTOCRACY has every need covered and significant money. But most Saudis are not aristocrats. Saudi Arabia is not a post-scarcity society by any stretch of the imagination. It has a GDP per capita of about $20k per person and most of that is oil.
This is a common mistake by westerners. They only meet the people who are elite enough to go to the west and speak English and assume those people are typical. But most Saudis are much poorer than the median American.
In terms of the stability of MBS's regime, the interesting question then becomes which groups in Saudi Arabia can threaten the monarchy. If the common people cannot topple the monarchy in the face of aristocratic cohesion, then their opinion doesn't matter.
Who staffs the army? Their opinion probably matters more than the aristocracy.
All senior officers come from the King's extended family, partly to keep them busy. They have >500 princes after all they need to keep busy. More reliable princes get more powerful units.
"Peasants" isn't a complete answer. Roman Legions were always mosted staffed by non-aristocrats, but it mattered a lot when the non-aristocrats changed from being Roman peasants to German peasants.
Yes, though one thing MBS has proven adept at is internal games. He's managed to outmaneuver and sideline some pretty major factions. In fact, that seems to be his primary talent.
From what I've heard, Roman is semi-correct. The army is staffed mostly by lower ranks members of favored tribes. The officer corps, including senior posts, are staffed by aristocrats with units being effectively personal fiefs. Some of them are princelings but most are just the equivalent dukes or other nobles because these are less of a threat. A princeling, no matter how small, can aspire to the throne. The son of a high ranking noble can aspire to great wealth and power but never the throne itself. Or at least not as easily.
More interestingly, MBS has sidelined the Wahhabis who are traditionally a pillar of Saudi stability.
Yeah, I've been astonished that the Wahhabis got boxed out so quickly and *quietly*. I would have expected that to cause major problems, but either people were wrong about how important the Wahhabis were to the regime, or there's trouble bubbling under the surface.
The composition of those favored tribes will probably be key. As long as the Saudi royal family can keep control of the keys to the saved up oil wealth AND the loyalty of most of the army, they are probably untoppleable, since that oil wealth could feed the army with imports from the outside world for decades if it came down to a Royals vs People showdown.
A project still in the works might be popular or unpopular; a project that has succeeded might be popular or unpopular; but surely a project that has failed can only be unpopular.
Are you saying the project will be popular among SA populace even after it has failed, or that you don't believe it will fail?
In which the author confuses the mean Saudi viewpoint with the views of the Saudis wealthy enough to know English and for him to have ever come into contact with in the first place.
But please, continue simping for a country so morally vacuous because they happen to be brown.
Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund is only $620 billion, and the market estimate of the value of Saudi Aramco is $2.3 trillion
Commit $1 trillion & your regime's prestige to a project, find out that the project costs more like $50 trillion, and post-scarcity politics turns back into scarcity politics pretty fast
And when Saudi Arabia is evicting people to make space for palace-city for its royalty, I see little value in whether it was legal according to the local law.
Also, I would not treat US police as worth emulating (though maybe my view is heavily distorted - and Uvalde police hopefully is an outlier)
At least some of the complaints are not moralistic, they are based on eminently practical engineering issues - energy budgets, transport issues, air flow, and similar such concerns.
Those don't go away regardless of different moral codes or different views about the relationship between the individual and the state or different aesthetic preferences.
Saudi Arabia doesn't have a great reputation for human rights. But those shiny pictures look great. How plausible is it that they can actually build the line?:
The construction cost of WTC1 was $3.9 billion. It is 64 meters on each side and 360m tall not counting the antenna. That comes to $2644/m^3 including all the regulatory costs and high labor costs that the US has and Saudi Arabia doesn't have.
Saudi is proposing to construct 200m * 500m * 170km for $1 trillion. That comes to $58/m^3. I thought the combination of economies of scale, lower labor costs, and lower regulation could plausibly save them 1 OOM, but 2 OOMs is hard to believe.
I don't totally hate the line geometry. So long as it's wide enough and dense enough you can probably get most of what you need without even using transit. In the rural US linear strings of towns naturally develop along highways. The air temperature 500m above ground where it's exposed will be much lower than the surface temperature, and there will be indoor corridors too, so the walkability is totally plausible. Line geometry puts everyone within walking distance of wide open nature.
I think they got that 20 minute transit time number by just dividing 170km by the speed of the shanghai maglev and rounding down. In reality it's probably at least twice that. Perhaps a high speed train which only stops once every 40km, and lower speed trains to fill in the gaps.
The construction cost of WTC1 is actually an unfair comparison because it cost at least twice other skyscrapers its size. The US worried it would be a good symbolic target for terrorists and so gave it expensive extra-double-terrorism-proofing features. It's still an order of magnitude off though.
The "1" refers to it being the primary/first building of the seven-building World Trade Center complex. The South Tower was 2 World Trade Center, and there were a number of smaller buildings on the site as well. All seven buildings were destroyed or irrecoverably damaged on September 11, 2001; the Twin Towers themselves were the only ones directly rammed, but their collapse hit all the other buildings with debris and there was also fire spread.
The tower now called One World Trade Center is called that because it replaces the original 1 World Trade Center, although it is on the site of the original 6 World Trade Center. They are planning to eventually build another tower called Two World Trade Center on the site of the original 5 World Trade Center to restore the "Twin Towers".
It is kind of confusing, but only when talking about past events without a date reference - there has only been one 1WTC at any given time.
The better reference would be the Burj Khalifa, which cost $1.5 billion to build and has a volume of 1.6M cubic meters, for a cost of $937 / m^3
So yes I would expect that $58 / m^3 is still too low, but the gap between US construction costs and Middle Eastern "definitely not coerced" labor costs is already a factor of 3.
Favorite read on Substack this week. Thank you ($250K is actually pretty cheap for a pad in Maldives. If the whole getting there and what happens in rough weather gets worked out might be worth going in for island 2, if island one survives that is).
Why? In the US, securities registration is the main legal barrier, and being built on tribal land doesn't exempt people from federal law. This leaves the possibility that their new legal code involving digital assets is the draw. If that's the case, how does Catawba enforce that legal code against entities not in Catawba?
'You can do slightly better than this with a combination of express and local trains, but you’re never going to compensate for the fact that laying your city out in a line is shooting yourself in the foot'
I would be interested to see the math behind this statement.
Back of the envelope guesstimate: If the total journey time between one end of the city and the other is 40mins for 170 KM with no stops and making the assumption that each stop adds 2 minutes and every train leaves every 5 mins then:
If there is a main stop every 42.5 Km and trains that run between main stops stop every 10 and a bit KM, and local trains that run between these sub-mains stops stop every 2 km then even the longest journey would take a max of:
46 mins + 5 mins wait (one end of the line to the other plus 3 stops)
14 mins + 5 mins wait (2 sub-stations back)
10 mins + 5 mins wait (4 local stops)
15 mins for 1 KM walk time
I'm sure this could be optimized but even the longest trip using these simplistic assumptions would have a maximum journey time of less than 90mins which as a Los Angeles resident is not to be sneezed at.
Plus the build costs of straight railway lines parallel to the city would make a huge costs savings.
Don't like the Saudis but to my simple mind the idea isn't so crazy.
Does this include the time lost accelerating and decelerating?
Google tells me that a train trip from a random part of Tokyo to another random part of Tokyo such that the total area covered includes about 9 million people takes 80 minutes (or 40 minutes by car). I don't know how fair a comparison this is; I guess you would have to compare the total cost of the Tokyo subway to the total cost of Neom. But Neom is unbuildable, and I don't know if there's an option for a modern version of Tokyo to use 300 mph maglevs to bring the time down.
I had guessed that 2 mins would be the time lost in deceleration/acceleration and stopping at the station. No idea if that is realistic or not.
I can see other optimization that would reduce journey times (more frequent trains, more point-to-point trains - for example all the main station having non-stop links between them - reducing required stops , moving side walks that would increase walking speeds) but having seen Wasserschweinchen's comment (and assuming its accurate) its hard to see how Neom could reduce journey time to anything like that of those for a conventionally shaped city.
That still seems significantly worse than an equivalent in a circular city with a good transport network. Central London is about 28 km^2 versus Neom's proposed 34 km^2 and you can get from pretty much anywhere to anywhere else in central London in ten minutes to half an hour.
Heck, a circular 34 km^2 city is only 6.5 km across. That's a ninety minute walk or thereabouts. So the Neom's super maglev train system is only fractionally better than walking in a sensibly laid out city.
The size of the city is 34 square km. A disc of that area would have a diameter of 6.6 km. With a simple hub-and-spoke rail system with stations spaced 1km apart, no part of the city would be more than six stops away, so you could get anywhere within 1 km of walking and 12 minutes of riding. Or, if you're in a hurry, you could just ride a bike anywhere in 20 minutes.
There is really no chance at all of Neom, and especially The Line, ever being built. I do not now the exact mechanichs behind oil sheikhs and their megalomania but it seems in their world saying something (especially accompanied by nice pictures made by Western consulting firms) is almost as good as actually doing something.
A relevant parallel here is Masdar City (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City) in UAE. Declared in 2006 (with nice pictures made by Western consulting firms) it was supposed to be the next generation self-sustainable eco-friendly future city in the middle of the desert. In fact it was eerily similar to Neom. It was supposed to be finished in 2016. Needless to say, today there is nothing but some dusty concrete low-rises where the maps say that Masdar City is located.
You read my mind. MBS could do a lot better hiring the people who worked on Masdar City and telling them, "OK, this is try #2. Build a Masdar City in Saudi Arabia this time... and don't worry, I definitely won't run out of funding."
I think Masdar occupies a better spot on the cool-vs-practical chart: cool enough for foreign investors to praise your futuristic forward-thinkingness, but practical in the sense that it's based on existing best practices instead of "what if Blade Runner, but in the desert?"
I find the overt sneering towards Neom specifically and Saudi Arabia in general, both here specifically, and from contemporary UMC American culture in general, somewhere between culturally insensitive (if I’m being generous) and extremely racist (if I’m not).
Once upon a time, what is now St Petersburg was a marshy swamp, Russia was a strange Asiatic country to the East of Europe. Peter the Great dragged Russia out of that state by devoting resources that might have gone somewhere else (conceivably to the Russian people, more likely to the hedonistic pleasure of himself, or possibly to pay off powerful individuals to further entrench his rule) into turning that marshy swamp into real estate that is as valuable today as any in Russia.
It was an inspired bit of statecraft.
Was Peter the Great a flawless guy, umm no, he wasn’t, so what, we have St Petersburg now.
As mentioned, the clock is ticking on oil wealth, Saudi Arabia probably has something on the order of 30-60 years to figure out how to sustain itself post oil.
How should it plan for that future?
Let’s be real, conceivably Saudi Arabia oil wealth could be spent on its people, but for most of the past 100 years or whatever it’s been directly towards hedonism and entrenching the royal family’s rule.
That’s the actual trade off.
If MBS has directed the Neom budget towards a fleet of super yachts for all his buddies, no one here would be mocking him for it, Bloomberg wouldn’t be writing snide articles about it. And the country MBS is responsible for would be that much closer towards their post oil abyss.
Is MBS a flawless guy, ha ha ha ha, it’s obviously dumb to even put it in those terms, when Peter the Great was less than a flawless guy that was just par for the course.
But for all his flaws, between yachts for all, and creating a new St Petersburg, Neom is an inspired attempt at statecraft, it’s putting real resources behind a vision for the future in a way we’ve proven beyond incapable of.
It’s become obvious that the Western response to this is to sneer down their nose, plenty of people would have sneered at the development of Dubai, or the development of any number of Chinese cities, let’s check back in 100 years.
There’s definitely something in that. Now that west has stopped grand projects we are just sneering at those cultures that continue to do so. I heard about the new Egyptian capital on this thread. It was sneered at here, but a city that can house another 6.5 million people is something that would clearly benefit some European or western countries with housing issues. Maybe not so large, but a new city of some size.
The western country that I live in can barely build a subway system, or a hospital.
By continue to do so I mean grand projects on general. Doomed or not.
I doubt if the new Egyptian capital is just built for that reason. Why would one city be less likely to protest than another? And of course the west doesn’t have to have that criteria if we were to build a new city. Something that was common enough.
Not sure why we moved on to Dubai but a google of their transport and it seems ok to me. But what matters is recency, London has had a 150 years start.
Well, one could probably make a city of loyalists quite easily if one restricts who can live there to say; government employees and direct family members. (You step out of line, you lose your job and your house. You'll probably quit and move out of town before stepping out of line.)
In that case you'll be happy to hear about my new project to build a space elevator to the moon right here in the good ol' US of A! My budget is 20 bucks and a shoestring, but I think if we stretch the shoestring long enough it'll probably turn into carbon nanotubes.
Not sure if you've been to Dubai, but I've used its public transport during the three weeks I spent there and found it easy to use and way better than median public transport in 'advanced' countries. While I will reserve my doubts about the viability of Neom, I do second the pushback against habitual sneering just because it's 'them' pursuing grand visions
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
I'm not sure if St Petersburg required new transportation technology to be created and scaled up to city size within only 8 years. The technology in this case is the HyperLoop.
Someone should point out to Gall that the ‘inverse’ of his proposition is the same as his proposition.
It’s impossible for it to be the case that a complex system that works invariably evolves from a simple system that works, without it also being the case that complex systems that didn’t evolve from simpler systems never work.
> But for all his flaws, between yachts for all, and creating a new St Petersburg, Neom is an inspired attempt at statecraft, it’s putting real resources behind a vision for the future in a way we’ve proven beyond incapable of.
If it will actually sort of succeed at being city (rather ruin or palace) then you can make fun of me.
As it stands - it is strictly worse than making several ton pile of dollar banknotes and burning it.
>somewhere between culturally insensitive (if I’m being generous)
We should be sensitive to such a vile culture?
>and extremely racist (if I’m not).
Oh, so you're just going to use meaningless slurs to slander people you disagree with?
Oh, and tell me, how many white countries in 2022 could get away with executing homosexuals and treating women like property without people like you losing your minds?
The issue here isn't cultural insensitivity, its cultural relativism in which leftists perform mental gymnastics to justify being more upset over the mockery of an incredibly stupid saudi pipe dream than they ever are over the oppression of millions of sexual, ethnic and religious minorities by said Saudis.
>As mentioned, the clock is ticking on oil wealth, Saudi Arabia probably has something on the order of 30-60 years to figure out how to sustain itself post oil.
How should it plan for that future?
Not with projects that literally CANNOT possibly work and will piss away vast swathes of the oil nest egg they've managed to be saved. Though these people bankrupting themselves would be entirely welcome to me.
>If MBS has directed the Neom budget towards a fleet of super yachts for all his buddies, no one here would be mocking him for it,
If they had somehow managed to spend a TRILLION dollars on yachts while their country was staring down a future in which most of their existing economy is wiped out, then no, they wouldn't be mocking him. They would be calling him the most disgustingly wasteful man in history. But hell, a fleet of floating yacht-based communities is literally a more practical option than the line.
But would you listen to yourself? We're meant to NOT point out that an insane, grossly wasteful project is insane and wasteful because....at least they didn't blow a trillion dollars on wasteful hedonism? THAT'S your standard? Something something tyranny of low expectations.
>But for all his flaws, between yachts for all, and creating a new St Petersburg, Neom is an inspired attempt at statecraft, it’s putting real resources behind a vision for the future in a way we’ve proven beyond incapable of.
The median American has a standard of living far in excess of what most Saudis could imagine. And we do this without stupid, wasteful megaprojects spearheaded by arrogant know-nothings who cannot be told why they're abjectly wrong.
>It’s become obvious that the Western response to this is to sneer down their nose, plenty of people would have sneered at the development of Dubai
Why are you acting like Dubai is anything but soulless and truly revolting place? Because they have big shiny buildings (where the shit and piss literally needs to be collected by trucks each day and taken away)?
The city built on slavery of foreigners?
The city that spent $12 billion dollars on pointless islands that are sinking into the ocean?
A city that cannot survive rising sea levels and which is doing nothing to mitigate this existential risk?
THAT'S what you think Americans should be aiming for? Keep it, please, keep this hellish place for yourself. Here in the west we'll continue to enjoy high standards of middle class living instead of creating glistening turds in the desert for evil oligarchs to play in.
>or the development of any number of Chinese cities,
You mean the *dozens* of ghost cities that were created to inflate GDP growth numbers? The cities that wasted untold billions of dollars that could have been instead used for almost anything else which would have helped china face a number of looming catastrophes? The almost unheard of levels of malinvestment that has perversely been used by countless resentful anti-western leftists to tell us all about how much better China is and how they'll be overtaking America any minute now.
Again, please, please PLEASE keep this. We don't want it. It has no value to anyone with half a brain.
>let’s check back in 100 years.
Yes, let's!
Let's check back in when China's economy is in shambles because the population has absolutely collapsed and there's nobody to look after the hundreds of millions of old people.
Let's check back when the oil money
There is nothing admirable about any of this. MSB doesn't get points for boldness. The Saudis are facing ruin and they should have put in place sensible long-term programs to mitigate this. Instead, they've waited until it is almost too late, and in their foolishness and vanity they've chosen a project that cannot possibly succeed, which will waste ungodly amounts of money and will prevent projects that may well succeed from doing so. I could come up with a dozen better uses for this money in literally five minutes. He deserves scorn and ridicule for choosing something so absurd.
But like I said, I think Saudi Arabia is a terrible country and I am happy that MSB is playing his part to bury the country.
My god. Rant of the year. I’ll take you up on one point there - the Chinese ghost cities were pre-planned cities that were eventually occupied.
You are right about the utter depravity of the Saudi regime - and you might want to talk to your representative about that since the US is a major ally.
As you say, we do in fact have St. Petersburg now. We're not going to have NEOM, or anything half as grand as NEOM, sprouting from the Saudi desert any time in this century. *That's* why we're laughing. Those of us who have done the math, at least.
This recent SMBC cartoon reminded me of the Model City Mondays series generally, and the Catawba Digital Economic Zone is even more relevant to it than most: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/enginomics
As for Neom, if it's actually going to be a *building* 500m x 200 m x 170 km, then they can solve the "too hot to walk everywhere" problem with air conditioning.
So the whole Line thing sounds completely absurd... but.
Coastal cities are sometimes spread along a shoreline. If you run a subway, or an above-ground train line coursing every few minutes - some of them do - you create perhaps the only form of public transport that doesn't suck and can reliably service a large portion of the population. I live in a city with this kind of solution, and proximity to the train line is a huge deal when it comes to logistics of getting places, the viability of commuting, etc.
On the other hand linemaxxing into a 170km monstrosity is pointless - crossing the whole thing in 20 minutes means you have two terminals of high-speed rail and the train doesn't stop between them at all. So if you want to go from 10% to 90% that'll require combining low speed rail + high speed rail + low speed rail, effectively over an hour of travel time at best.
> crossing the whole thing in 20 minutes means you have two terminals of high-speed rail and the train doesn't stop between them at all. So if you want to go from 10% to 90% that'll require combining low speed rail + high speed rail + low speed rail, effectively over an hour of travel time at best.
I'm getting a weird vibe from the post and the comments that says "if there's a high-speed express, it should have stations at 0% and 100%". But that doesn't appear to make any sense; if you're going to have a two-stop express, surely the correct locations are 25% and 75%?
That doesn't change the conclusion that going from 10% to 90% requires a low-speed -- high-speed -- low-speed sandwich, but it has a lot of implications for how long it takes to go from 0% to 100%, or for how fast the high-speed train needs to be in order to cut the travel time for 0-100% down to 20 minutes.
Since they are specifically claiming end-to-end times of 20 minutes, I think people are assuming they only have 2 stations at 0% and 100% to achieve that, since 170*3 = 510 km/h is possible with current train tech
Yeah, that. If the constraint is end-to-end in 20 minutes you have absolutely no time to change trains in the meantime, and you'll barely make it in a cutting edge maglev that AFAIK doesn't exist anywhere in the world.
That optimizes the end-to-end time, but it does so at the cost of making travel time between any two other points worse. It's not a sane design choice. Virtually all trips are not attempts to cross the entire thing.
I agree that it's not a sane design choice, but most of design choices for the Line are not sane design choices, which means it might still be a reasonable assumption.
From the video, it sounds like pretty much everything that a Neom inhabitant would need will be within 1 km of his home.
Perhaps we are thinking too much of the American model of suburban homes and long commutes. It may be that only a small percentage of the inhabitants would actually need to regularly travel along the city.
What if you want to meet with friends? What if you change your jobs - do you move 40 km away along the line? What if THEN you want to meet with friends who stayed behind?
1) I don't like life in cities, I prefer countryside but most people prefer cities because they provide more connections to other people, therefore big cities is the way to go.
2) Neom doesn't make sense as a project to protect the nature when there is very little nature around. I know that the deserts can have their own ecosystem but it really is insignificant compared to luscious Amazon rainforests.
3) It makes sense to make a city like a big building for economic reasons. Less air conditioning costs, less road infrastructure, economics of scale works quite well etc.
4) I don't understand how they plan to build a train in the city if the width is only 200 meters. But probably they mean to build it adjacent to the city. The transportation can easily work. You make, let's say 5 stops (each 2 minutes) on the way, that would make the total trip (the worst case scenario) 30 minutes long (20 min + 10 min). On the other side build a local train line with stops every 2 km (14 additional stops, each stop 1 minute stopping time, travel time between stops 2 minutes, on average 20 minutes travel). On average you would spend 35 min to travel where you need. Comparable to travel times in other big cities, probably even less considering constant trafic jams in many places, like San Francisco.
5) The long building is preferable to square or round one because it allows more sunlight.
6) The project will most likely fail because 500 billion is nowhere near the amount that would be needed for such a grandiose project. They should have started with something smaller, to show that it can be done and create more investor interest.
That 5 m/s is way too high. High speed rail operates at about 0.3 m/s^2 acceleration and 0.5 m/s^2 declaration. That means you need around five minutes to get up to 500 km/h, or 32 km of distance. If you stations are 35 km apart then you can't even get up to full speed before you have to start breaking.
Is there any reason it cannot be 5 m/s^2? The current trains are not optimised for that for sure but why not?
It might be expensive and not practical due to increased energy use. But we are talking about people who are ready to throw a lot of money to boast their vanity. We have plenty of cars with double acceleration speeds.
Well, for one thing that's a lot of acceleration to put on random members of the public. It would be the equivalent of holding half your bodyweight while standing on a 30 degree incline, an incline that may or may not shift unpredictably between +30 and -30 as the train accelerates and decelerates. You would definitely want the passengers seated and belted in under such conditions, standing would be unwise for most and impossible for anyone elderly or infirm. Airline seats would probably be sufficient, but that significantly reduces carrying capacity and increases dwell time.
I definitely imagine seating passengers. When I travel by coach in the UK, the requirement is to be seated with a seatbelt fastened. It could be easily the same with train. If the total travel time is about 30 minutes, it seems perfectly doable. The compliance would not be the problem.
Well, I am sure that it will never be built. Or if it was, it wouldn't have the same specifications as in the ad. 20 minutes from one end to another was clearly too optimistic. But if they can make it 40-50 minutes, it would be still something that people find acceptable. Scott even quoted Tokyo with average random travel time from one point to another 80 minutes.
The thing is that we have never tried to optimise for the Line scenario. But if we could, who knows how that would work.
In my childhood I never dreamt that one day I will be able travel around Europe using cheap airlines (Ryanair, Easy jet) for the price that's not higher than 100 mile-long train journey. And yet here we are. It's probably very inefficient from carbon emission point of view but it works and probably one of the reasons why we haven't optimised trains.
Well your train would need a lot of big motors, which would add a lot of weight, which would require more motors, et cetera.
You also can't (I'm guessing) accelerate like that using the traction of metal wheels on metal rails, your wheels will just spin and then melt.
You could perhaps do it with some form of electromagnetic acceleration though, as used on some newer rollercoasters. In that case you could build all the power into the tunnels and leave the train car light weight. Then your main limitation is the limitations on the desire of squishy humans to be repeatedly accelerated and decelerated. Plus you'd need extra time spent at each station for everyone to get seated and buckled in, then to get unbuckled after deceleration and before alighting.
The more money Saudis waste on vain garbage like this, the less money they'll have available to promote Wahhabism . It's a good thing they're squandering their future.
Completely agree. In fact, if it crashes and robs the Saudis of economic, political and religious clout, Neom might have delivered a much larger net social benefit than if it sort of succeeds
This has been my favourite Model City Monday post so far.
Maldives Floating City: ah, now we know what FFXIV's next housing expansion will look like, neat! (I know developer plan pictures always have a fictive slant to them, but those photos look particularly...video-gamey.)
>This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-used urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities.
Could we possibly solve land use forever by just setting up a bunch of pseudo-Neoms everywhere, hiring any potential resident as a "construction worker", but there'd be no actual Neom to build. (Like whenever local governments decide to waste money on a sportsball convention center. Those are American Neoms.) Or maybe the Negative Externality Oppositional Mandate (NEOM) Act would authorize such "temporary development" (auto-renewed with no sunset clause) for a permanent series of ongoing infrastructure projects that never quite seem to turn into Ecclesiastes vanity cities. It'd even create government jobs too, under the reinstated Works In Progress Administration.
Apart from the public transit nightmare, the line city also seems like a security nightmare.
A line section in the middle in the desert is probably dependent on water being pumped in from the sides.
So you have a single big pipeline which provides water to millions of people. Our section in the middle is just two terrorist attacks away from being without a water supply.
Of course, this can be worked around. So have ten cubic meters of local water storage plus a year of emergency rations for each citizen. Have every section have its own sat uplink in case someone cuts the fiber cables.
Or perhaps this dependence is a feature? If the citizens in the line city ever get ideas above their station, their wise king can just turn off their water supply and interweb tubes?
My thoughts exactly. Besides water pipe is trivially easy to fix.
Besides where are they going to get water from? I now (temporarily) live in a city that produces half of its water from desalination plant. If you blow up the plant, it would probably take much longer time to restore full water supply than just one water pipe.
There are benefits and downsides to both the Norwegian state model and the Saudi state model. You're just not happy with details of the Saudi model. Not every state can save and save and save. At some point you have to implement something. Norway has lost it's ship building industry to Singapore because they utilized capital. Saudi is building. Some of it work, some of it will most certainly fail -- that is called risk -- and investors can deal with risk.
Norway had a GDP per capita of $101,000 USD in 2012, or ~S$125,000 per person
Norway is too high-wage a country to be competitive in ship-building. I suspect Singapore's ship-building industry relies on commuting Malaysian labor for the lower-value jobs, which Norway can't compete with because it doesn't have a sufficiently low-wage neighbour. It could choose to burn a portion of its nest egg to retain a ship-building industry, but that sort of resource-destroying action is usually only worth it if the industry in question is important to national defense, and Norway is part of NATO.
Norway still manages to build warships significantly cheaper than some countries though.
They sold Canada designs for a arctic patrol ship that they built for $75 Million Canadian, it cost Canadian taxpayers $716 million per ship to build them here.
Warships are much higher value-per-ton-of-displacement than most ships though, and Singapore's shipbuilding sector is 60% "offshore rig building" by value. So it's possible that Norway is good at building high-tech small ships cost-effectively since those work well with its very-high-wage labor force.
Someone must produce, take chances, create new products, and have failures. Saudi will have failures. If they have enough of them, they might have some good outcomes too. Let's hope.
Yes, the city in a long block is nutty. That rather than building bombs or financing terror against Israel. Even attempting to build it will train thousands of people in skills they can take anywhere in the world.
I see some comments here really trying to spread the “good news” about the creation of Neom, as it were. I guess you’d call that Neom Genesis Evangelion.
So, I live in Dubai and work in logistics technology. Neom is supposed to be a port city and so I was recently contacted by a recruiter for Neom and I declined to do an interview. There is no way my wife will move to Saudi, especially not to an empty city. Plus it all sounds like nonsense.
I wish I had done the interview so I could give more insight here - sorry guys!
This is the only other thing I experienced related to Neom: During the Dubai Expo, Saudi Arabia was spending massively on advertising along the main highway here, initially for Neom, and then that was scrapped after a few months and replaced with Saudi tourism. Now all of it is gone. I remember seeing that massive billboard every day that didn't even explain it was a city or that it was in Saudi, and then looking up the website and thinking it looked like a crypto scam.
These days we just have regular crypto scams advertised all along that highway.
Neom IS a billionaire passion project. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, meaning it literally belongs to the monarch, meaning it's a glorified piece of private property with an UN seat.
If your intuition is that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is squandering resources that should be going to the Saudi people, then the same intuition should apply to any resources squandered by any billionaire. If your intuition is that is that a billionaire's wealth is his to spend, then this intuition should extend to the wealth of the Saud family.
Absolute monarchy does not mean that the monarch is just a billionaire landowner. The monarch is supposed to have moral duties towards its people and the common good.
Most people in democracies already view absolute monarchy as immoral in itself. Equating it to private ownership without moral obligations whatsoever on the part of the owner/ruler would make it even more immoral and deserving of criticism.
It seems relevant that the prince is rich because of extracting resources (oil) that anyone else with the land could and would have done. Other billionaires have plausibly created huge amounts of value that would not have been created otherwise.
Would Amazon (and its undeniably impressive logistics and distribution chain) have existed without Jeff Bezos? The answer doesn't seem obvious to me.
Also, yeah, spending a trillion dollars frivolously seems bad to me regardless of who did it. I'm sad when Elon Musk buys a giant yacht instead of funding new vaccines, but it seems relevant that the most expensive yacht in the world costs ~4 billion. That's about 1/200 the scale of this project.
> Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, meaning it literally belongs to the monarch (...) then the same intuition should apply to any resources squandered by any billionaire
If someone takes entire country as a property I am fine with requiring significantly higher standards.
Also "any resources squandered"? Noone sane would be complaining that they wasted say 100$.
Your reasoning is quite flawed. Billionaires who get their wealth via markets imply that people have rewarded them for creating value. This calls for a very different intuition regarding what they can/should do with that wealth. Especially if you're comparing them to a head of state whose wealth depends on ruling a country with oil.
A model city with four sectors based on the most promising concepts which can increase their share of the city through market and/or voting mechanisms. The Saudi secret sauce will be X years of no taxes funded by oil wealth
I like the sound of Prospera in Honduras, other than that I just assume there are about 3 other potentially good systems. I think Prospera already had an allowance for some expansion
RE: Neom's dimensions - "500 meters tall, 200 meters wide, and (wait for it) 170 km long"
This reminds me of the scene in "This is Spinal Tap" where the Stonehenge prop was 18 inches high rather than the 18 feet height that Nigel had intended - because he labelled it with a double quote rather than a single quote. Is there any reason not to believe that a similar mistake has been made here? Perhaps the translator (from Arabic to English) misunderstood or isn't fully competent in English? That's all I've got.
>> But in fact, this is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, squandering public money.
On some level I agree, but on a different level this is a very strange take. Saudi Arabia has more than enough money. It also has more than enough problems. In a very real sense, Saudi Arabia - and the Middle East - would be better off if Saudi Arabia had less money. The Saudi prince MBS seems to be setting it onto a course of having less money. It will thereby have less money to do thing like bomb Yemen. As an additional upside, it will certainly build something cool in the process. As silly as this project is, I can't help but have a soft spot for it.
>But the problem isn’t just that Neom is too big. Everything about it is doomed. There are reasons most cities aren’t designed as 200 meter wide, 170 km long lines; this maximizes the distance between any two points!
You're neglecting one dimension. What this design does, essentially, is trade a horizontal dimension for the vertical one. At 500m high, even if a single level is 10m high this gives you 50 levels to work with. So the cross-section of this "city" is 50 levels by 200m = 10 level*km, which is comparable to the cross-section of a 2 km city of 5 levels.
Note that the Saudis are currently also building the world's tallest tower : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeddah_Tower . Unlike the west, the Saudis are able to build things relatively quickly, I'd put the odds of a 100m x 100m x 1000m structure by 2040 at around 90% conditional on MBS staying in power for the next 10 years.
Maybe not the best example as that tower seems to have been proposed in 2008, construction began in 2013, and has been nearly completely stalled since 2017. One of the reasons for the stall has been political infighting (MBS imprisoned the financial backers for a time and then fined them heavily). Another, COVID.
Lol I’m an ML engineer in Tesla Autopilot and trust me he means it when he says FSD next year. In his timeline we’re already 5 years late. He sure knows how to bring some energy into the team to put it mildly
With all the focus on travel time, I see the video claims a 5 minute walk to key amenities in a modular type of mixed zone configuration. Presumably there would be larger commercial sectors that might require a train but not from one end to the other of course
This sounds like a high probability white elephant but I'm not sure it's conceptually impossible. I imagine the novel construction challenge will be the key problem. I have to wonder what the comparable expected cost of the same city built as a core/suburb layout would be. No potholes!
If you have the unlimited resources and budget something like the line would require, you could try something like this for transportation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p9Ig19gYP9o
OMG! I want ALL these places to be real. I'm sure you're right and it's mostly BS, but this is the sci-fi future we were promised. I WANT IT!! WAAAAAH!!!
1. I'm not even certain why extremely rich people would want to live there. They like avoiding inconveniences as much as the next person. Given the choice of all the places to live in the world, I have a hard time seeing how Saudi Arabia managed to compete.
2. I'm not certain it is fair to refer to it as "public money" being spent. Saudi Arabia isn't a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary supremacy. It's a personal fiefdom with the external trappings of a government.
A long thin city isn't a bad idea, provided that you use it as a spine and then grow thicker along it. So you might start off with a city 100km x 500m and then widen it in stages to 100kmx10km.
Counterpoint - we're trying to get back to villages which were already open-air arcology 'projects'.
They were self-sustaining in terms of work, energy, food, water, and waste processing. Any homestead was a micro version of that. Simply surrounding the whole thing in concrete and electrical wires and plumbing is...a trivial difference which people seem oddly obsessed with.
This is like that Mexican fisherman story, where he relaxes a lot and plays guitar on the beach and some westerner gets him to start a fishing boat operation which over decades grows to a huge size, and this makes him wealthy enough through an eventual IPO so he can...spend time doing some pole fishing and playing guitar on the beach. Which he already had.
The obsession with cities and how to turn them into connected villages is something we already had and lost. We are trying to engineer our way back towards them in a seemingly blind way. In the end the 'amenities' of cities are just stupid crap for rich people which no/very few commoners need or really want. Just about anywhere people want to work close to where they live, go to a local grocery store, etc. and not have to ride a train or hyperloop or drive or walk or ride a horse very far to get there. I not only see the appeal, I'm already much happier not going more than 5km from where I live 99% of the time.
The city I'm in does next to nothing for the vast majority of people living in it, other than make everything harder and take longer. With remote working almost everything cities offer in terms of density benefits can be done remotely. Not to mention...most of the 'benefits' are just bigger profits for the already wealthy to be even wealthier and have no impact or meaning for the average person.
I think the trend will be to decentralise populations into many smaller towns and villages where life is more pleasant. It is already what most people choose to do when they have a choice - cities are a place of last resort as people fled dying small towns where big businesses rolled through with illegal and aggressive land grabs, like what we are seeing in Denmark and Sri Lanka right now under the false guise of 'organic ag' with purposefully impossible sudden death bans on nitrogen fertilisers.
There is simply no way or reason to find a way to make some megacity feel homey and small and human scale. If we want smaller, then build smaller. Going over 100,000 or 200,000 population where you can support a small university and many high schools and primary schools and such is pointless for the average person. This isn't some Buckminster Fuller fantasy, it was simply the reality for the vast majority of human history and it turns out we want to go back to that way of living, but with a few goodies from industrialisation.
After all we've done, the answers were what we already had, except we went on a journey to make it all workable with technology.
A few automated farming operations and delivery services, vertical or not, and a series of interconnected villages and towns with greenbelts around them will work much better. Despite the weird and idiotically fervent push by many employers to go 'back to work' even though everyone was already working from home just fine, with technology and just a little bit more automation than we have today, we could really improve quality of life for the vast majority of people and the answer is not going to be cities of any kind.
Apart from every other "livability" aspect to Neom, I call bullshit on the energy aspects.
There's going to be a LOT of energy generated in that dense line – how is it supposed to be removed? Simply drawing a picture with "cool air arrows" flowing into it (the famously cool desert air of Saudi Arabia?) is not a solution.
You couldn't make this scheme work with standard US energy per capita levels (and, BTW, there's no way local solar has the required energy density), and yet nowhere do you see chillers, massive AC blowers, and nuclear power stations...
>>The minimum safe interval between two vehicles is the reaction time for the emergency brake to be applied from an incident involving the vehicle above, plus the time required for that brake to bring the vehicle to a full stop.<<
Let's focus on my imagined "train" of pods.
I instinctively arranged the pods in a train because it greatly increases the space to the next train.
Pod Dimensions:
5 rows of 4 abreast seats with seat belts.
20 passengers max.
One row per meter. No aisle.
Seats load from the side.
All rows are accessible simultaneously.
Pod is 5 meters long plus rubber bumper bag.
Linear motor?
Minimal weight.
I imagined a train of ten pods which is approximately 50 meters long. The pods in the train are touching each other with a rubber bumper at the front of esch pod. One foot thick?
There is a space of 450 meters before the next train at peak capacity.
The reaction time is essentially zero. All of the pods in the train are controlled simultaneously.
For example, CentCom commands all trains to stop. Each pod has an onboard computer. The ten computers in the train communicate to bring the train to a stop.
Example: One of the pods asks CentCom for permission to exit the train and stop at a station. CentCom commands the ten computers to perform the exit maneuver.
So, let's assume 0.5G emergency braking, as that's a typical number for public transit; we have S (450m), V (0), A (-5m/s^2), we want U (maximum initial velocity): V^2 = U^2 + 2AS, rearrange to U = SQRT(V^2 -2AS) = SQRT(4500)=67 m/s, or 241 km/h.
So that's not compatible with 400 km/h running even with an instantaneous reaction time. And that's fast enough braking that disembarking passengers are doing to get noticeable marks from the seat belts digging into their skin, and items loose in the pod (laptops, mobile phones, people's lunch, drinks) will get thrown forward (so you need headrests just to protect the people in the front seats from being hit in the back of the head). That's all OK for an emergency, of course.
The key reaction time question is how long from an incident that causes the pod to need to stop to the emergency brake being applied to the pod. That depends on a lot of factors:
How quick are our sensors? - photovoltaics have a reaction time, so do piezoelectrics, then we need to account for speed of sound and speed of light delays, then for processing time, then for how fast we can deploy the magnetic brake. Even a fully-automated system is going to take tens of milliseconds, and may well take hundreds. Put a neural network in there, and you could be looking at significant fractions of a second.
Bear in mind that at 400 km/h, 100 ms is 11m, one second is 111m.
Thank you. I'm going to think about how to get more distance between trains.
But I'm curious about why one train needs to stop suddenly. What are you imagining? In fact you can't stop just one train. The train behind would run into it.
ALL OF THE TRAINS STOPPING I understand. Earthquake. Power problem. Tube break. When ALL of the trains stop, the distance between them doesn't change.
"I'm curious about why one train needs to stop suddenly."
Some examples:
It breaks down.
Someone is on the piste (ie a suicide).
Some*thing* is on the piste - a rock, a bit that fell off the previous train, a bit that fell off the roof of the tube.
The piste fails (e.g. a section of magnets pack in), and the train hits the piste.
Localised tube break.
"In fact you can't stop just one train. The train behind would run into it."
In any train system I'm aware of, yes you can. The signalling system is operated such that trains are far enough apart that you can. If someone standing on a bridge drops a block of concrete on the track, stopping the train dead, then the next train will not run into the first one.
The same should theoretically apply on the road - the recommended or required separation distance in almost all jurisdictions is that if the vehicle in front stops suddenly, then you should be able to stop. Almost no-one ever actually does: the standard stopping distances in the UK Highway Code are about twice the separation found on actual British roads.
"I'm going to think about how to get more distance between trains."
The easy way is bigger trains. That means timetables and regular service, rather than pods being routed on the fly - just catch the train that's going where you want to.
What happens when a train collides with a foreign object? Or when CentCom loses control of a train? Or the maglev system fails and the train collides with the piste? Or the lateral station-keeping fails and the trains turns sideways, or slides into the other lane? That train will stop without instruction from CentCom.
A vehicle has just stopped catastrophically. We're talking going from 400kph to zero in a second or less, which is going to be 12G or more. Many of the passengers are dead. How do you stop the next train from hitting it and making things worse?
Answer: the next train has to be far enough away that when CentCom realises that one of the trains is no longer responding, it then automatically signals the emergency brake, at which point you need to brake hard. You need to look at what acceleration and deceleration is actually possible for maglev; there's no friction to help.
At that point, presumably CentCom sends the emergency brake signal to the train(s) approaching that one, and sends the non-emergency brake signal to other trains that are not in immediate danger of a collision. I mean, that's what an ROC would do, and CentCom is basically a ROC.
ROC: Rail Operations Centre, ie a giant signalling facility with a massive board showing where all the trains are and all the tracks.
Thank you for this input. This is exactly what I need.
One train hits an unexpected obstacle. The rubber bumpers are a meter thick and compressible to 50 cm. In a train of 20 pods that is 55 m of additional stopping distance (plus the crumpling of the first few pods). CentCom orders all trains to stop. However today due to a software bug, CentCom goes out to lunch and can't broadcast the ALL-STOP signal. But that means it stops broadcasting the ALL-IS-WELL signal which normally goes out ten times per second. In the absence of this all of the onboard computers know that all trains must stop.
A modern train signalling system (CBTC - communications-based train control) works by continuously transmitting the equivalent of an ALL-IS-WELL signal - actually transmitting to each train the authorisation to move up to a certain point (e.g "you may advance to position 2350" - to a train at position 2300, so if they get 50m before getting a new authorisation to go further, then they emergency stop).
ERTMS/ETCS (European Railway Traffic Management System/European Train Control System) level 2 is a fixed block system working like that (ie there are certain fixed authorisation points, rather than continuously authorising every metre). Level 3, which is a moving block system is still being worked on. The point of ERTMS is that it's a standard, so a train can have equipment from one supplier and the trackside equipment can be from another and they will be intercompatible.
At the moment, all moving block systems are proprietary, e.g. Siemens Trainguard, or Thales SelTrac or Bombardier CITYFLO. You would want a moving block system for what you need.
They aren't exactly off-the-shelf systems; there is an enormous amount of work needed to ensure that the radio signal gets through to the trains, as rail tunnels are awful environments for radio signals (OHLE spews out masses of radio interference, as does a maglev piste). They will install trackside beacons, then run hundreds of tests, then move beacons and probably install a few to fill gaps in the coverage, then run more tests, and probably do several more cycles.
You make a lot of comparisons to existing train ststems (which may reflect your expertise,).
However the proposed system is a one-dimensional evacuated-tube-transport system which has little to do with existing systems. For example no one is going to drop a concrete block from a bridge inside a vacuum tube.
I think the difference between us is not our safety margins but the fact that I am working theoretically (a priori) and you are working from existing knowledge. Rather than being a problem, this allows for excellent synergy.
On-board (pod) computers are constantly communicating, both within the train and to the fore and aft trains. In the case of an emergency and in the absence of direction from CentCom, the ALl-STOP command is propogated within the entire tube.
>>First, 1km intervals is reasonable for a public transit system. You'll get a few complaints from mobility impaired people, but they'll cope; people who can't walk 500m generally have mobility aids (e.g. a wheelchair). <<
Practically I like the 1 km spacing. One source says an average person can walk 500 M in 6 minutes. So by expanding the 5-minute walk in Neon to 6 minutes, everything jives.
In a carfree city, most wheelchair users should have no trouble at all going 500 M. They get a special pod also.
And conceptually I love the 1 km spacing. 100 kilometer city, 100 stations. Perfect.
>>Second, you're not running a fixed schedule. That means you're relying on passengers providing correct information before boarding as to which station they want. <<
Busses in the Dominican Republic (where I live) don't have a fixed schedule, they just come every few minutes. Work's just fine.
The ID card stores the rider's common destinations. When they enter the station, a touchscreen displays their top ten destinations. They touch one. Terminal confirms choice (visually and audibly) and asks the rider to press the OK button. Microscopic error rate.
>>If a passenger changes their destination while on-board (e.g. they get a phone call causing them to reroute), then can you reroute the vehicle without causing a problem?<<
Change your mind? Tell CentCom with your smartphone. Unless your new destination has already been passed, CentCom can probably accommodate you.
>> How are you going to ensure that the system the passenger uses to select their destination works for everyone? I'm mostly thinking about language barriers, but there's also people with various disabilities (blind being the most obvious choice).<<
I'll add preferred language to the ID card. CentCom is multilingual!
Thanks to NFC technology a blind person doesn't need to insert their ID card (no one does), just wave it around close to the card slot. (The card slot has a tactile border around it.)
Now the door knows they are blind and interacts verbally. Also note that blind persons get a special pod with a sighted attendant!
>>Next, your boarding time is reasonable for small pods, provided they have internal circulation spaces, or they are fully open (ie the platform has direct access to all the seating, rather than there just being doors), <<
An entire wall of the pod rotates upward exposing all five rows of seats. No aisle so no wasted space.
>>and provided you don't need seat belts.<<
Of course we need seat belts. Folks can fasten their seatbelt while the airlock is cycling (about 30 seconds). The onboard computer knows exactly which seatbelts are not fastened.
Computer voice: "Passengers in seats B3 and D2, please fasten your seatbelts."
You can be sure that won't be me!
>>You'll need additional parking space at the stations for the occasional pod that is delayed by a disabled passenger (like me), or someone who can't or won't follow instructions. >>
Parking space for pods? They line up close to the station in the slow lane.
>>I'd push that to 60 seconds if people need to wear seat belts, and increase the allowance for delays;
Now allowing 60 seconds for everone to get seated plus 30 seconds for the airlock to do its thing. If someone doesn't have their seatbelt clasped the pod will still exit the airlock and move 20 meters down the slow lane, but it won't accelerate until all seatbelts are fastened.
>> Acceleration; 1G is excessive even in a car - it's equivalent to a 0-60 time of 2.74 seconds. Passengers are not going to accept the acceleration of a supercar at its performance limit as a routine part of travel. 1G deceleration (which means pushing the passenger into the belt) is emergency braking, not routine operation; there is no way that will get widespread passenger acceptance.<<
New specs:
Standard acceleration: .5G
Standard deceleration: .5G
ID card can specify slower A/D.
Emergency acceleration: 1G ?
Emergency deceleration: 1G ?
>>Trains, which admittedly have to deal with standing passengers, tend to find that 0.15G is considered pretty quick acceleration; they usually have an emergency brake, that will achieve about 0.45G (using a magnetic track brake entirely possible for a maglev system).
Emergency braking is reserved for emergencies, as it will knock standing passengers off their feet, and result in any loose items (e.g. laptops, phones, etc) flying around and being turned into projectiles. It's only used in an emergency; normal braking is at 0.10-0.15G. <<
I want to use .5G braking to clear the A/D lane faster. Many production cars brake faster than this.
>>Sideways acceleration limits are normally even lower;<<
I suspect the true purpose of Neom is to transfer money out of the national treasury, or the royal coffers, and into the hands of select people, in a way that's more-legal or less-offensive than direct payments.
Actually every pod has three on-board computers. They execute in parallel and compare results: if one cpu disagrees, it is ignored, the malfunction signal is sent, and that pod is taken out of service ASAP.
We can do .5G. Originally I was thinking that 400 kph must be reached before the next station is reached, but with a continuous A/D lane, that is not necessary.
>>I think you're going to have too many conflicts between accelerating and decelerating pods; the better option would be to have separate acceleration and deceleration lanes either side of the fast lane, a grade-separated bypass route for pods that can't reach full speed (that probably means an exit on the opposite side that goes to an overpass that delivers the pod to the deceleration lane).<<
Peter's latest brilliant idea: A/D lane switches between accelerating and decelerating every 15 seconds. 12 seconds to clear the lane.
>>CentCom is just your signalling operations centre, right?<<
CentCom directly controls the entire system. Well, it tells the onboard computers what to do.
>>Your calculations of the numbers of trips per hours assume that the service is not peaky; typical public transport is peaky enough that they get 50% of their weekly trips in two 90-minute peak periods on just the five weekdays, one before work and one after. Obviously, in NEOM or something, you could maybe manipulate work hours to be more evenly spread out, but people will still prefer to all have their leisure at the same time, so there will be some peakiness whatever you do. <<
I'm working on peakiness.
>>"The stopping pod sidles to the right into the A/D lane and decelerates." Annoyingly, this has never actually been demonstrated on any maglev system; normally, maglev vehicles are maintained in the centre of their piste by the magnetic fields being shaped to do so, rather than by controls in the vehicles themselves. Points are achieved by dynamically reshaping the fields, or by mechanically moving a swinging section of piste. Neither of which would really work for what you are trying to do. <<
From the internet:
>>The hyperloop itself is completely levitated, stabilised and propelled by magnetic forces, so there is no physical contact with the infrastructure; therefore the operation expenses are extremely low, as the loop is near to maintenance free. The lane switch technology is also based on magnetic fields – without any mechanical context or moving components we can chose to go left or right just by controlling the magnetic field of the vehicle. It is very convenient to have vehicles that can switch lanes at a very high frequency. It is the combination of frictionless movement and magnetic propulsion that allows it to be very fast.<<
It's a lot of fun to imagine something and then go find it!
>>I like the buttons system (like a lift), but you probably want to add on a mobile phone app so passengers don't have to queue to push the button. <<
I abandoned the button idea because I want to know the identity of riders. (So they can be called to the platform by name, so we know health requirements, so we know typical destinations, etc.) Mobile app -- definitely.
>>You'd need to do a simulation to make sure you actually have enough acceleration/deceleration space, there are going to be big speed differentials on that A/D lane.<<
I'm thinking about making the airlock lane continuous.
Fast Lane: 300 kph
A/D Lane: 100-300 kph
Slow Lane: 0-100 kph (airlock lane)
The slow lane is actually 100 lanes of a kilometer each separated by an airlock.
CentCom would have a rule: only two moving pods in a slow segment at a time. It has about a minute to get a pod out of an airlock segment after acceleration begins. That gives CentCom some flexibility as to when a pod enters the A/D lane.
Note that a departing pod can sit outside of the airlock indefinitely. CentCom can easily wait 15 seconds for the accel phase before accelerating the pod.
It takes less than 12 secs to accelerate from 100 kph to 300 kph at .5 G. Same time for deceleration at .5G. Note that the less time a pod spends in the A/D lane the better.
Average speed in the A/D lane is 200 kph. At that speed pods are moving 55 m per second. In 12 seconds they will move 660 meters. If every pod has 660 meters for itself, there will be no collisions. There could be 150 pods in the 100 km A/D lane.
The maximum rate of turnover at a station is one pod every two minutes. 100 pods arriving and 100 departing every 2 minutes. Pods pass through the A/D lane in 12 seconds. Imagine that every 15 seconds the A/D lane switches from accelerating to decelerating.
100 pods accelerate: 15 seconds
100 pods decelerate: 15 seconds
90 seconds: no pods in A/D lane.
More realistically pods leave and arrive at random times. So 200 pods distributed randomly over 120 seconds (according to the Poisson distribution I believe)
Wild-ass guess for typical max per 15 second interval: 40 pods. Note the max figure is not actually random, but is under the control of CentCom.
So we have 40 pods in the A/D lane rather than 150. PLUS they are ALL accelerating or ALL decelerating. That's bound to help.
>>If it doesn't work, then you can still solve most of the issues with a more conventional approach: three lines, one ("slow" or "local") that stops at all 100 stations, one ("semi-fast" or "local express") that stops at 20-25 stations, and one ("fast" or "express") that stops at 4-5 stations. The fast line would likely need to be maglev, the semi-fast and slow are probably better done as regular trains (you don't need airlocks then); you arrange for cross-platform transfers (ie you step off one train and the same platform has the other line on the other side). I expect that most passengers would stay on the slow until they reached the fast station rather than switching to the semi-fast, even though they would actually save them time (people hate transferring)<<
"But in fact, this is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, squandering public money."
Not really. Saudi Arabia does not have a public thing, a res publica. It is not a republic. It is something much more medieval.
This does not mean that he is going to get away with. It is not his money. his father is still alive and is still the King. If it's anybody's money it is the King's. Or, it is the family's money. The family being the descendants of MBS's grandfather Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who number in the thousands.
And here is MBS's real problem. He needs the approval of the family to be crowned as his father's successor. In Europe kingship is inherited by very specific rules of legitimate inheritance. We know the names and faces of the next three kings of England. Islamic lands never adopted those types of rules.
It is the same problem that the Roman's had. If you want a model of the bad possibilities read Shakespeare's plays about the War of the Roses.
Just discovered your Model City Monday posts - refreshing, thanks so much. I find the NEOM project to be not very sustainable but I am glad interest in model cities is growing and I hope to see more in North America.
Have you discovered any model communities focused on sustainabiilty and smart communities in the U.S.? Given the housing shortages on the West Coast and growing interest in sustainability, net zero and ecocommunities, there is likely almost unlimited demand if a network can build the right communities.
I ask because this is a topic of great personal interest and because we fabricate wooden buildings in our factory in Oregon and we are very interested as acting as suppliers and partners to develop these kinds of communities. We see scaling sustainable building systems by developing communiites as opposed to only custom buildings as the best way forward. We have experience on over 1,000 buildings already and are investing in a new factory, CNC machines and industrial robots and are creating a housing innovation cluster in Oregon. Here are some examples of our buildings
Let me know. We are connected to many other innovators working in the building industry that share our interest - here are a 37 innovators on my Youtube channel as an example of people working at the literal cutting edge of timber, technology, robotics, digital fabrication and helping software eat construction https://www.youtube.com/c/MassTimberCity/videos
and we would like to connect to a larger community like the one you have created.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Surely that's a hexagon?
I expected someone to make this comment! If you look closely at the image I posted, it seems asymmetrical in a way that makes it an octagon in the end.
The project is called "The Oxagon", which I admit is pretty ambiguous between octagons and hexagons. Still, the highest quality images I can find (see eg https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0838/production/_122040120_octagonprojection.jpg ) pretty clearly show an octagon. So I stand by my original claim here unless someone else has additional evidence.
I think it's not asymmetric, it's a *regular* octagon as seen in a close near-horizontal perspective which makes the near sides look more parallel and the far sides look shorter than they would from straight overhead.
(The Atomium in Brussels is just a cube plus an extra ball in the middle, but no-one would guess that from a picture taken from close by.)
I thought your preview image of the folding city was another Dall-E image.
As galling as everything else is, "The Oxagon" is a special new level of galling.
If you look at the grid of buildings, you can see that the two edges on the sides of the picture aren't actually parallel; they just look that way because of perspective.
Yes and don't call me Shirley. But primarily it is a concept art for an idea which also happens to be a bad idea. The bees and hundreds of millions of years along with geometric truths on 3d planes of existence are correct and hexagons are the best.
You don't need a train that stops 85 times. You need log2(n) tracks and and at most log2(n) transfers.
I think this is what I meant by " You can do slightly better than this with a combination of express and local trains".
If I'm understanding correctly, n = 85 here, and log2(n) is about 6. That means six stops per ride, which not only means that you have to add six times your transfer time to the trip length, but that each train will only be going a few minutes between stops, most of that time will be spent in accelerations and decelerations, and you won't be getting to the 300 mph speed very much.
People have tried to draw up concepts for the "hyperloop" where you have cars that seat a small number of people, and you hit a summon button at a stop, an empty car leaves the loop at your stop, and then you get in and select your destination, and the car slots itself back into the flow of cars in the loop and whisks you to your destination.
It's a car/pod with an EMPTY SEAT which is going to your destination.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
That can't possibly solve the problem, come on, think about it. If you have trains which are going to be carrying millions of people-trips a day, maybe tens of millions, which is roughly what you're talking about for a NYC or Tokyo-scale city-wide 'this is the only way to get around' subway/train system, even assuming a lot of overlap among popular destinations, that still breaks down to 'we have to stop every kilometer on every trip'. The only way this won't happen is at like 4AM when no one is riding the trains, just one late partyer who can go express home. Which is also when it least matters, and it'll be worst when it most matters - like at rush hour and the maximal number of people hit every single stop along the way.
In theory if you have enough precision in your controls, and appropriate accel / decel branches on both sides of the main loop, it's possible to get the math to where you can squint at it and believe maybe it'd work. Like I said, people have proposed this with hyperloop as well. But I'm not convinced anyone actually has the tech to do this reliably, for millions of trips a day, for years, without having some kind of horrible 2000-car pileup at 300 km/h that kills a bunch of people. Like, the system needs to coordinate having thousands of cars whipping along in the main tube, and cars coming in from the stations need to accelerate to parity with the system and drop into an available slot, and if your entry into the main tunnel is off by a few hundredths of a second, things go pear-shaped.
If you don't think about it long enough this is just how a highway works.
The trains stay in the cruise lane at 300 kph (200 mph). One pod detaches, moves into the accel/decel lane, and then into the airlock lane.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Apart from all that, yes, admittedly most trips consist of moving a human body from here to there; but there are still an awful lot of trips that require moving me and my groceries/new couch where walking 1 km is not really an acceptable solution.
Not to mention how Manhattan (for example) is taken over by delivery trucks at night every night...
Once you ban the cars, how exactly do the groceries get in every day?
You could have an express train that runs non-stop end to end, and then have local trains dock to it in motion. There have been some attempts at this elsewhere, but I don’t know if there’s a working system.
https://youtu.be/19hXm0J_3Uc
I can imagine such system working quite well. The boarding would be similar to taking a train at some airports. Those trains are automatic and don't have drivers. You just wait at the door that opens only when the train has arrived.
The difference is that for a high speed train you would need to be seated during the travel. You would buy a ticket with a seat number on your phone app, then you would be requested to go to the specified boarding door (receiving advance notices on your phone) and wait there for boarding. If you miss the boarding, you miss the train. Hopefully they would run every 5-10 minutes which gives you enough time to rebook and try again.
Doesn't seem any worse than switching between the express 4 train and the local 6 train in Manhattan.
I used to get a train that merry splits in two and that was a nightmare. People tended t stay away from the middle coaches.
This is the least of the issues.
OF COURSE you will use your phone to tell you which track/train/whatever to use!
That's not a serious concern.
The serious concerns are with things like the actual mechanical engineering; the times, speeds, accelerations, the transit between elements, the routing, etc.
(And not forget the more mundane issues like simply MOVING the amount of air required by all these concentrated people, if they're essentially living in a tunnel 24/7...)
You could also jettison people out through a tube. There would be a massive deceleration which would take some training to get good at (and to survive). I imagine it would work using a pull cord strung along above the windows.
Maybe you could suck people through pneumatic tubes from one end to the other. Just spit-balling.
A row of conveyor belts that is slow on one side and progressively faster towards the other. Pedestrians simply walk on to the outside belts, move inwards to gain speed, then walk back towards the outside to disembark. A phone app can help you with timing when to start moving off and how far in you should go so you don't blow past your destination. Google tells me a typical moving walkway goes 1.4mph, so you'd only need... 428 walkways for bidirectional travel at 300mph. Pro-tip: wear velcro shoes.
The Roads Must Roll! but Saudi style, so if there's a labor dispute you just kill everyone.
+1 for the Caves of Steel reference. I always wished I could try out their crazy conveyor belt highways.
Always thought it would be cool to do an accelerating horizontal escalator (also spit-balling). You could achieve accelerating by making them work like slinkies with overlapping plates.
There's film of the two-speed moving walkway in Paris in the 1890s https://youtu.be/fo_eZuOTBNc?t=297
LOL!
If you evacuate the tubes and fire the people through them, what's the maximum distance you can fire someone before they suffocate etc.?
I suppose you would have to include deceleration and repressurizing at the other end, which would cut down on the distance.
/sarc of course.
Although on second thought, I suspect the mass transit part is for the workers. The princes get helicopters; mustn't mix with the hoi polloi.
This is one of those "real things that look like a shitpost" videos.
Amazing, in both the audacity and the fact that it looks kinda sorta viable.
Yes, docking would be essential. We do this in space at 20 thousand miles an hour, so seems like it aught to be doable on land with trains. You'd probably want to have a car that travels between trains so the motion between trains is fully controlled. Or possibly you could get away with an escalator between docked trains.
In space velocity doesn't matter - you're at an arbitrary velocity towards any reference point you want, there is no medium that's giving you resistance.
On Earth, not only there's an obvious reference point of all the obstacles that are stationary and you can collide with, but at high velocity everything turns into an airplane whether it wants to or not.
Yes, they're not equivalent problems. A pointless example I suppose, but my point is it's clearly solvable in the limit, or at least there's certainly no real attempt to construct an argument that a docking system between trains in motion is infeasible.
However, my guess is it would be more economical just to have lots of smaller pods that merge on and off the main highway, which is certainly doable.
New York City. 1 train, local, 2 & 3 express. (Okay, they don't dock to each other "in motion", but that guy sleeping in the last car is doing some kinda' motion in his pants. Close enough.)
You could have a movable walkway system with the fastest walkways near the center, slowing until you can just walk next to and step onto the outermost ones. Robert Heinlein invented this in the 1940s for The Roads Must Roll. Fits really well here, though, since not only can you have very rapid transit, but you're still walking everywhere!
Well, they did say it would be a "five minute walking community..." I think I could walk across 60 lines in just about 5 minutes. Horrifically dangerous of course, and a massive waste of energy, but it would make for an exciting commute!
And if you trip you potentially kill hundreds of people in a massive ball of bone and gore
Why? You don't put the 500km/h one next to anything that's at a standstill, so if you took a tumble you would lose your momentum before you hit anything with a high relative velocity.
Standing in 300mph wind would also be a bit of a challenge.
these walkways need to be thin, they can't control the airflow that well. Plus, moving that much air is expensive.
They should evacuate air from the entire tunnel, creating a near vacuum. I can stand just fine in 15 mph winds at one atmosphere, so logically I should be able to stand in 300mph at .05 atmospheres. Commuters will be required to put on a space suit. Its not like this is any more ridiculous than the rest of the city.
Put it in a vacuum and make everyone wear spacesuits
In "The Caves of Steel" (which is where I first was introduced to this concept) the central (fastest) "acceleration strip" has cars on it for this purposes. Although IIRC it also maxed out at closer to 60mph than 300...
Could they put some solid "walls" periodically on the walkway to push the air, that people could shelter behind?
Ah, "Neom" is the sound of a 300mph pedestrian whipping past your mid-desert cafe experience.
bravo!
not to mention the breeze in your face
Not exactly. Each train would only have a start and a destination. Every time you transfer you cut the distance to the destination in half using a divide-and-conquer style. I think you'd need n*log2(n) trains to make it work.
Also, since we're discussing and idiotic fantasy world with a practically unlimited budget here, we can reasonably (um...lol) assume that the trains accelerate/decelerate at 1G so it'll only take about 14 seconds to reach 300mph.
We can also assume that in this fantasy world all the citizens are perfect team players who follow all the instructions and transfers only take 30 seconds.
Even if destinations were random and not have a higher probability to be local, the expected travel time could actually be around 20 minutes.
Bonus:
If you mass produce these fantasy Noams by the millions, it'd probably be possible to work all the bugs out with lean, just-in-in-time, and continuous improvement manufacturing philosophies within a few centuries.
It can theoretically be done with a single train! It just requires deeply stupid train schedules. The train painstakingly moves between every ordered pair of possible train stops. From 1 to 2 and back, from 1 to 3 and back, etc until after 1 to 85 and it goes from 2 to 3, from 2 to 4... There are 7140 possible routes, after which it will repeat. Every trip will take less then twenty minutes, but you will have to wait 6 and half weeks for the trip you want to come up again.
Made me laugh out loud, thank you
If you make the line a circle instead, then you can make your one train the length of the line, allowing you to cut down your schedule length to just 85 “routes”. Now you can get anywhere and back in just under three days worst-case!
good idea, but what if someone tries to cheat the system by just walking across the center of the circle instead?
This is the content I love this community for
Comedy gold!
Sure, you could fit a city with the same surface area into a circle and walk 6.5km end to end, but is that the optimal design when the oil runs out and people want to riot?
An interesting question is whether a line with unscalable walls is a good design for a totalitarian regime trying to hold power. I’d think there are some benefits, but also disadvantages (rebels could split the city effectively at one point).
Unless you're making those walls armoured, "scaleable" doesn't matter much. Get an axe and a sledgehammer and you can make doors almost anywhere. Add some C-4 and a plasma torch and, well...
How many stops would it take to reach Mornington Crescent?
Another alternative is to have personal trains that uses the mainline highway but only decelerates at the station where you want to get off. Technically this is not mass transit but given that rail transport is now so much faster than road transport this personal train type of transportation should be much quicker than traditional car transportation. As an added bonus it should be a walk in the park to make the personal trains self-driving.
May be steelmanning excessively here, but do we *expect* large percentages of inhabitants to use the trains daily when one of their other bullet points is "five-minute walkability"?
If the full-length, full-speed train is reserved for maintenance workers and/or VIPs, I can imagine that being low-traffic enough to actually allow for the advertised speeds (though not the implied availability).
The rest comes from discounting the possibility that any Ordinary Plebian might want to live at Kilometer 25 but work at Kilometer 100.
So it might be aiming for a target of "not really one big city, so much as a string of one or two hundred closely connected mid-size ones".
Edit: ninja'ed in a different thread by Crazy Jalfrezi here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122/comment/8135168
The way this works out in real life is that wife wants to work at a company located at mile 17, husband at a company located at mile 87, and kids want to go to school at mile 124...
Meanwhile the only apartment they can find is at mile 39.
Now you can make various (classist? sexist?) statements about how for most people most schools and jobs and fungible, but that's the way it seems to work out in most cities right now. Unless we also have some sort of co-ordinated matching engine that handles all these dimensions simultaneously (in which case bring on the wholly *different* set of complaints and concerns...)
I mean, the issue with "job offers in two different cities" already comes up fairly regularly in real life. (Or, "tempting job offer in existing city x-hundred-miles from current residence, see: San Francisco and NYC housing prices")
The argument that the line-layout will severely exacerbate this problem is *mostly* convincing to me, but it's one of degree, not kind.
It does come up. But when the cities are "close enough" people drive.
The whole point is that Neom is dedicated to removing that solution on the grounds that it's supposedly not necessary...
The fundamental idea of NEOM is fine. Basically they picked a bay near the Suez canal (a very busy waterway!) that's close to the population centers of Israel and Egypt (and to a lesser extent Iraq). And because of the Suez it's close to Europe too. The basic idea was to build a port and a startup city with various kinds of connectivity to these other places. And because the land was uninhabited (or at least it was after the expulsions) the religious scholars and legal apparatus of Saudi Arabia had no existing infrastructure and could be a sort of direct and absolute region MBS could set the rules for at whim. Besides, it's so far removed from Saudi Arabia's main population centers that people could just ignore it if they wanted to. So he could bring in foreigners or whatever. Even the ski resort idea isn't insane: Saudi Arabia's mountains get very cold. Lure people in with first class amenities, aristocratic luxuries like servants, regulatory/cultural freedom, and fat Saudi salaries/funding. Convince them to ignore that they're working for a murderous dictator. And there you go. It's basically a variation of the Chinese model which worked pretty well: designate a province as a special economic zone and dump money in and shoot anyone who dissents.
A lot of the initial decision making makes sense as a reaction to the previous model city project they had. It was set in a much more dense area and interlinked with Saudi transport to bus in workers. Not a bad idea but this meant it just kind of became another Saudi city, albeit a well planned one.
The thing is the Chinese didn't build giant Communist palaces. They built factories. Lots of factories. And boring Communist apartment blocks that are ugly and not great to live in. But they do at least house people. Meanwhile the first thing to be worked on in NEOM was the palace followed by workers quarters (of varying quality depending on if you're a western expert or a poor worker). The entire thing now appears to be a monument to MBS. And not even one that's been built yet.
If they actually wanted this to work they should be building a port and airport, industrial/office parks, wiring the entire thing for fiber, and building normal upscale apartments with retail and all that. Money could do the rest. And then if they want to they could build a solid gold statue in the center of MBS or something. Instead they're making plans to build a marina for yachts before a major industrial port.
You know, I'm beginning to think absolute monarchy might have some flaws as a form of government.
In this case, the problems with absolute monarchites is that they are a form of command economy, and command economies don't work well.
The thing is that command economies can do these giant special economic zones backed by money and get something that kind of works. This is just an especially incompetent version of it.
Was the US a command economy when it built Washington? It’s a common enough practice for many countries to do something like this.
> Instead they're making plans to build a marina for yachts before a major industrial port.
This makes sense assuming the plan is to build a Monaco-style tax haven for the wealthy rather than an actual city.
I don't know. Monaco does have a port even though southern France isn't nearly as desolate as Tabuk. How do you think they're going to get all the stone and marble for all those fancy rich people mansions?
> And boring Communist apartment blocks that are ugly and not great to live in. But they do at least house people.
Apartment blocks were one of few communist successes - they are more than passable and solve real problem.
Ultra heavy industry fetish has not worked so well (except producing enormous amount of tanks - which for additional irony most of post-communist countries are now sending to Ukraine)
I think we might have different definitions of "more than passable." As for solving a real problem: Yeah, they housed people and were often better than previous accommodations. They had less space (often much less, being in some cases only 50 square feet!). But they also had access to electricity, running water, etc. Just as those factory jobs were often better than backbreaking work in the fields.
If it wasn't apparent I'm somewhat ambivalent about the Chinese government's form of modernization and industrialization as a matter of human flourishing and economic efficiency. But I also think it's a working model. China's industrialization, including those apartments and factories, was a success.
I suspect you're talking about different things here. Your point is aimed at the Chinese and the ugly, boring and not-particularly-livable way they built apartment blocks. He's responding to a claim that "Communist apartment blocks" are boring, ugly, and not great to live in.
(On the bare communication level, the misunderstanding is purely on him. In the wider context, it may still be pointing to something important. I know next to nothing about China, and what I've seen of their housing developments does look ugly and boring and generally unappealing. But if I judged my own country's "communist" housing estates solely from the media message generated about them, they'd also look boring, ugly and unappealing. But here on the ground, many are outright great places to live in, especially once compared to the actually existing contemporary "capitalist" developments that followed them.)
I agree we're not really in disagreement. My point was (as I say in the last paragraph) to hold up the Chinese as doing it better. Whatever else you can say about Deng towns or Khrushchyovkas they were not mad follies that were outside the reach of their governments to realistically do. No one stood in front of Khrushchev and said, "Two bedroom apartment blocks? You're a madman comrade! A MADMAN!" And not just because of oppression. The goals were actually quite achievable which is why there are so many of the things.
In fact, while I stand by the fact they're ugly and generally have issues, my pointing that out wasn't meant as an insult. It was meant to contrast with the absurd luxury of a palace with gold and marble like the Saudis have. The Communists built ugly functional stuff. Especially after the 1950s. I'm saying, in effect, "If you're going to do the authoritarian model of special regional development then you need to build boring functional stuff like the Communists."
Though I acknowledge my tenor might be a little off because I am DEEPLY skeptical of such authoritarian regimes and their moving people and capital around on the state's whim.
I agree with what you describe here, and separately I wanted to express that I would rate Communist apartment blocks higher than you described.
What would make Saudi palace-city-lane-failure even more lame.
I lived in one for 25 years and it was quite OK. And as far as urban planning - better than most of modern apartment blocks.
Maybe mine was unusually well done? I know that some have terrible problems with noise isolation.
Or maybe I have low standards.
I was surprised by the article about Latin American drone ventures. When they started by talking about the expensive “middle mile” I at first thought they were using a recombinant buzzword generator. But then I realized this could be exactly the comparative advantage of an aerial system in an urban area. Have a few big users put a little bit of investment into a few hubs for their sites, and suddenly it’s easy to get stuff from hub to hub, and the big user can have their own personalized last mile solution on-site. This is for a very different sort of application than mass transit, which is specifically about creating infrastructure in a dense city for getting through some linear network that is moderately close to many points in the city - but then still has trouble getting you the last mile if you are mobility impaired or carrying a package. This “middle mile” aerial shipment doesn’t solve the problem of urban transportation, and doesn’t expand anyones world the way that twenty minute access to the city does (or three hour access to all the major cities of the continent). But if you can’t retrofit your city with good uncontested travel, your institution might still be able to set up multiple sites where small packages are sent around efficiently (whether for light manufacturing or pharmaceutical delivery to hospitals or whatever the need is).
You think there is a less than 25% chance that the NEOM venture completely disappears in a couple years?
You know, I made that prediction on an earlier draft before the latest round of crazy revelations, and I assumed that even when all the crazy stuff failed there would at least be an airport, some basic infrastructure, and some houses, and sure, why not live in it? But you're right that I'm starting to doubt they will ever even be able to begin real construction and maybe I should lower that to 50-50 or something.
Lots of us cringe at the word 'crypto' - some are no-coiners, but others are bitcoin maximalists who are every reservation you have about the "cryptocurrency industry" but believe bitcoin is different for a number of reasons.
If we want you to do a deep dive on bitcoin maximalism, what format can we put on prediction markets? Any advice there?
So now I'm curious: what is the optimal configuration for public transit? Let's say you want a city of comparable volume (500 x 200 x 170000 = 17 billion cu m). You've got access to all of MBS's money, and as much Saudi desert as you want. The goal is to be able to get from any point A to any point B as quickly as possible.
First, your city is a circle.
Second, we want everything to be in a straight line, so you probably put the public transport underground where there aren't any buildings in the way
Third, we want to avoid the need for transfers as much as possible, they add lots of time, so tracks are a no-go
In conclusion, giant underground bumper kart ring; individual pods driven by an AI monitoring the whole system, depositing you directly at your desired exit to the city above.
If self driving cars are ever a thing, then that’s the way.
It's probably doable with the tech we have already, as long as you're building from scratch in a small enough system. You don't need general intelligence, just a system that can handle organizing and directing all the little pieces moving around.
Would self-driving cars really be more efficient than trains? (Given that we're designing a city completely from scratch.)
Granted, there are a whole bunch of variables here. If our city is populated mostly with rich people who hate trains, or with people who are afraid of trains because of covid, then cars would certainly have an advantage. But from a purely theoretical point of view - how do we move people around as quickly as possible - it seems like trains would be better.
Though, hm, given infinite money, my intuition might be completely wrong.
I can't think of a way to do multiple tracks without line switching or multiple stops, which I'm pretty sure is slower than cars/buses taking a direct route on demand
That probably depends on how people you want to move around. A train can carry many more people per square foot than a car can, so a rail system can cope with numbers that would cause massive traffic jams on the road.
I do agree that having an underground layer (or two, or three) dedicated entirely to transport would be the way to go - almost regardless of geometry and type of transport, etc.
Remember MBS has money. Maybe his optimal city is a (hemi-)sphere instead...
This made me think about the idea of using diamagnetic levitation as a "passive lift". Then I remembered that if the magnetic field was on all the time, you'd have a very hard time getting into the lift on the ground floor.
(Also, any loose change would rip itself out of your clothes and kill everyone ascending below you.)
Antilogomena:
The city's radius would be 4.5 km so trip time between two random points (assuming 50m/s top speed and 0.25 g max accel/decel) looks like ballpark 3 mins (check me on that).
The karts might get their motive power from ceiling or floor to reduce onboard mass.
4.5 km is too small to take advantage of the following, but an option to improve aerodynamic efficiency in significantly larger cities might be to enable karts to self-assemble into ad hoc trains (or are these your "pods"?).
Don’t let people leave their homes.
A complete graph on N vertices. Basically every station would have a direct line to every other station (probably a sphere would be best for this). The problem is there are a lot of costly tradeoffs you’d need to make to let that many transit lines run through your city.
What sort of tradeoffs, given we're designing a city from scratch here?
Space, primarily. Transit lines take up space that can't be used for anything else, which pushes everything else further apart, which makes the city less walkable.
So vertical spacing is important then. Either dig down, or build high.
Indeed - transit people call it "grade separation".
But there are still limits to what you can do; the right approach is to have a network that is designed so every line has an interchange with every other (so you have a two-seat ride from everywhere to everywhere else) and to have enormously high frequencies so the delays at interchanges are minimal.
If there's a train every five minutes, then the average delay at an interchange is 2.5 minutes + the walk time from one line to the other. The maximum is 5 minutes + walk time. People hate interchange delays, but when they are that low, they don't mind all that much.
And really good mass transit is much more frequent than that. London's Underground runs at least 20 tph (trains per hour) on all central routes (ie where the interchanges are), that's a train every three minutes; the best line is 36 tph (less than two minutes between trains).
At those kinds of frequencies, even multi-interchange routes will only add a few minutes to travel time, and - importantly - Londoners know that.
London is far from being the best transit network in the world (that's probably Tokyo), it's just the big city with a good network that I know best.
I'd probably go with a roughly circular city, with an underground/metro system.
The tube lines would be laid out on a hexagonal grid, with sides about 15 minutes walk long. Some of them would be designated "hubs" and "superhubs".
Trains would run around this network in a wide variety of routes*. Some would be slow trains stopping at every station on their route; others would go directly from hub to hub or superhub to superhub.
* I suspect there's a reason this is actually a bad idea - in reality, most underground systems have a small number of lines, each with their own track, and trains only run along those routes. And there's probably a good reason for that, but I don't know what it is.
Money, I believe, is the inhibiting factor. Digging subway routes is really expensive. If you were building a city from scratch, it would probably honestly be cheaper to do your subway at the ground level and then just build up everything around it
To be specific, tunneling costs hundreds of millions of dollars per mile, and that's cheap: https://tunnelingonline.com/why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world/
A hexagonal grid with edges wide enough to accommodate multiple trains would be insanely expensive.
That's what we do in Europe - many more cities in Germany have streetcars than metros. The drawback is that streetcars cannot go faster than my bike, because if accidents happen (they do often) these accidents are not always mortal that way. Metro has no obstacles, so it can accelerate to >70 km/h between stations and cross the city much faster.
There s s way of creating a subway that's not very deep , and relatively cheap: you dig a trench down a wide street, then roof it to restore the road surface. (Cut and cover). You need wide roads, but that shouldn't be a problem if you are starting from scatch.
If you're starting from scratch, you dig the trenches first, then you build the roads on top of them.
If you're starting from scratch, why have an alternating lattice of ground-level trains and roads for cars+trucks [no sidewalks at all, so no pedestrians interrupting the flow of traffic], with inexpensive wooden boardwalks covering all of them so pedestrians can walk around at 2nd storey level?
If the trains are on the same level as the cars, theyll get held up at intersections.
You don't cover over roads if you can avoid it becuase the ventilation you need to deal with the exhaust fumes is expensive. Road tunnels are notoriously expensive for this reason. Also, internal combustion engines are a fire hazard, and a fire under a wooden boardwalk sounds like a terrible idea.
Now, a more interesting question: is it cheaper to lay out the rail at ground level and then build all the roads a level up, or to dig trenches and have the roads at ground level?
You need roads to bring equipment in, and get rid of excavated material.
No you don't. You haven't built the buildings yet, so you can just drive over the flat ground where the buildings are going to be.
My staged process for building a model city from scratch is:
Dig trenches for cut-and-cover subways (on some streets) and for utilities (on all streets).
Build roads over the tops of the trenches.
Build the buildings between the streets.
Heavily curved routes and high speed rail don't really mix.
So... Paris? (Not exactly, but that's reasonably close!)
With infinite money the optimal solution probably looks like one of those robot-filled Amazon warehouses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E
Build an entire lower deck of your city which is a vast open space filled with fast-moving robots on tracks, then dot the streets with little booths. You get in a booth, dial in your destination, and the next available robot will suck your booth down to track level and speed you off to your destination.
What happens if someone else is using the same track?
The robots program their routes to avoid collisions just as they do in the warehouses.
I think the optimal configuration for practicality and cost is effectively a boring old spider web. Lots of straight lines running through the center of the city and rings of loops between them. People ride to the relevant loop, switch to a loop train, and then ride on to their destination. Ideally the city is a circle. But if it's a semi-circle (such as for a port) you can either have the loops all run along the coast or a separate special coastal line.
I was thinking about the circular solution, but I wonder if the central hub station would be so large as to be inefficient.
Another option is a square with north-south lines spaced 0.5 km apart and east-west lines also 0.5 km apart. Your ride would never be more than two trains. Seems like it's roughly the same number of tracks as the circular approach, but the stations and crowds are more dispersed.
Yes, that's why I said "effectively." Something that's close to a single central station but might be split up (with maybe trams between them) could work better. And it could force walkable urbanism for a vibrant center if you want it. I'm not sure there's a right or wrong answer there. Whereas nodes with direct lines everywhere is wrong because it would be EXTREMELY expensive.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Thank you, I'll take a look at this.
Not trying to make you feel guilty...
The plan is much better now, and I would love to know your thoughts.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Would you strictly need to have a cental hub station at all? Say you had series of concentric circles crossed by four 'spoke' lines going north/south, northeast/southwest, east/west and southeast/northwest. In the middle, inside the smallest circle, the four pairs of tracks cross each other (either stacked vertically or with crossroads and very reliable signalling to prevent collisions), and thus no station is served by more than two lines.
As I said above, the optimal configuration is eliminating travel as much as possible period.
Maybe coffin apartments around central plazas that contain all services someone regularly uses. Everyone must work from home unless working in the service sector in central plaza. you don't need public transit because no one is allowed to or needs to go anywhere. Central plaza 86 is identical to central plaza 13.
The solution to public transit is not needing central transit might be true in a spherical cow sense but doesn't really fit mission parameters. That said I agree a more distributed city is better. But you can't actually achieve it completely. The center always has more density due to the nature of geography.
I'm curious as to whether you would actually want to live in this kind of city, or whether you are just suggesting this as a mathematically idealized abstract solution to an abstract problem. Because as much of a homebody as I am, that sounds absolutely miserable to me. No unique neighborhoods? No variety in the kinds of places you can go or be? No visiting your friend who lives just ten miles away on the other side of the metropolis?
It was meant as a reductio. Urbanites always get so wrapped up in efficiency and ecology they mostly tend to ignore what actual human people want.
I was pointing out that if the mission is “most efficient use of public transit”, is next to no transit or movement at all.
Everyone being confined to coffin apartments they can only leave for emergencies is hyper efficient!
Once you start taking actual humans actual preferences into account you end up with a lot more inefficiency.
Gotcha; thanks for clarifying.
Alon Levy, at Pedestrian Observations, would probably recommend a Soviet Triangle: three subway lines that meet in a triangle near the city center.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/01/16/transit-and-scale-variance-part-2-soviet-triangles/
This is hardly scientific, but when I play OpenTTD (https://www.openttd.org/) I get great results when I try to avoid building rail intersections whenever possible and instead use rail interchanges, with the trains passing under and over each other whenever possible instead of having to wait at intersections. Accordingly, maybe try applying that idea IRL? Take a standard city grid and replace all the intersections with interchanges, or just bury/elevate one set of roads below/above the other, or replace one set of roads with a set of subway tunnels or elevated rails. The goal is to be able to get to anywhere in the city while only stopping once at a single interchange to transition from North/South to East/West (or vice versa), and for the city to be able to grow because no circles are used, just tileable squares/city blocks.
IIRC Berlin's central train station is built that way - it's literally two perpendicular train hubs stacked on top of each other.
Note that in OpenTTD tunnels and bridges are almost free compared to reality
On the other hand, parent comment asked for a solution given Mohammed bin Salman's money, which is in the trillions.
Disk-shaped city and extremely boring grid layout. Dedicated lanes for mass public transport, public automated fleet for last-mile. Roads are very structured so there is no need for advanced automated driving. At the city center we expect more traffic, so we add more lanes and replace traffic lights with underpasses. Blocks are larger at the city center (1x1 at the edges, then 1x2 when getting closer, and 2x2 at the core). If anything larger than 2x2 is needed (stadiums? palaces?), just make a huge NxN superblock and increase the capacity of the roads encircling it accordingly.
Who ever thought that a grid layout was a good idea, other than shoe leather salesmen?
It will be some kind of square/circle shape, with a grid network. https://humantransit.org/2010/02/the-power-and-pleasure-of-grids.html Transfers are not a problem if both lines are high frequency (<5 mins) and each grid intersection is only serving two lines so it's a small station/interchange/two bus stops at a crossroads, with minimal distance to walk between the two lines.
Jarrett doesn't discuss the third dimension but if you want to go tall I guess you follow the same approach: high speed elevator at every stop, which itself stops at a spacing that people are happy to walk, maybe every few floors. (Though, while disabled people could live on elevator floors, it would be depressing if they could never reach the other floors, so additional lower speed elevators or ramps should be included).
(I'm not endorsing the spacings given in the link. Say the Saudi city stays 500m high. To get the same volume it would have to be 5.8km x 5.8km. 10 lines each way gives a line spacing of 530m (as there is an edge area outside the lines) and a maximum walking distance ~375m to an intersection. So you could do away with stops between intersections if using this close spacing, or leave them in depending how hard you're happy to accelerate people. Without them you can easily get end to end on each line in <10 mins, so the worst case trip end to end on two lines is still under the same time of 20 mins. And it would look like trackless trams or trams, on their own rights of way, all at the same level but coordinated so they don't have to slow down for each other's crossings).
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
A few things that I think "The Line" might actually have going for it (reservations about MBS and the Saudis aside, obviously) are that
(1) The Mirror-sides are probably actually load-bearing rather than an aesthetic flourish in the Saudi desert as an attempt to keep the interior temperate, and that's something you kind of can't do with a sprawl-model, and
(2) Building and expanding public transit can just take place with cheap cut-and-cover or analogous trench construction outside the city itself (or even aboveground, although environmental control would probably be easier underground) with lateral or funicular connections to the city itself, with no infrastructure to dig through.....ever, and the simplest possible track and acceleration models. Expansion and building for transit, infrastructure (pipes, cables, etc.) compared to basically any other urban design is an absolute breeze.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
The one thing about the design that strikes me as not stupid is that whole thing is one giant tall building. Being tall means you have more places nearby. Regular cities with skyscrapers sort of do this, but you have to go all the way down to street level to get to the next building over. Also a street in a regular city takes up a huge vertical space even though it only uses the bottom of that space.
I'm envisioning a giant high rise building with a floor devoted to north-south rail lines, and another floor devoted to east-west. Some of the train lines are high-speed with few stops, others are low speed with many stops. In terms of travel times, it would make sense to put these floors in the middle, but for weight reasons they might need to be at the bottom.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Optimal? How about everything is a pod the size of a smallish shipping container, and autonomous crawlers shift them around like eggs in an ant colony depending on demand?
Why commute to work across the whole place when the crawlers can shift everyone else slightly and put my pod next to work? They can put me on the side of work where the new coworkers I like have their pods. We can walk from there to the restaurant pod that our living nearby attracted.
One-off travel by self-driving quadrotor drones.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
I have a heightmap of the relevant terrain lying around somewhere if anybody wants to import it into Cities Skylines and have a go. (trying to replicate The Line did not go well)
> The goal is to be able to get from any point A to any point B as quickly as possible.
Well, that depends how exactly you measure that. If you take for example "average commute from home to work", then the solution is something like work from home, everyone has an office at home. Commute = 0. I think it's kind of fair, but work and home are only some of the places you go in a city. For buying stuff, delivery and a corner store in your building. I imagine big multi functional buildings, probably skyscrapers because elevators are the most common mechanized way of moving inside a building.
But then there's the hard part, which is stuff that people don't do all the time, but still do. Go to the cinema, shopping (as in, the experience of being in a store), going out with friends. Maybe you can use some kind of matchmaking program to put people together and build stuff near them if they have shared interests. I don't know how much interests overlap in real life. For example, take the opera. Do the people that go semi-regularly to the opera work in the same kind of companies, go to the same kind of restaurants? If that's mostly true, this could work. If it's not, it gets harder but you could imagine some kind of program that see where you go and try to optimize where you will live so that the time spent moving will be the smallest possible. This also gives you a good excuse/reason to track people, which might be a big plus for Saudi Arabia. And if the interests of people really overlaps and are correlated with something like income/class, you get class division for free, justified.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Your description of Neom, as scathing as it is, still does not capture the sheer stupidity of this project. My former company landed a contract with the Saudis to contribute tech to Neom, and while I can’t reveal much due to NDAs, that project remains the most memorable clusterf*ck of nonsense I have ever experienced. The average 9-year-old addicted to Minecraft could probably craft a better city than the fools running the show at Neom.
So much arrogance. So much stupidity. SO MUCH MONEY.
The Saudis had absolutely asinine requests that they refused to compromise on, despite us telling them it would never work. Our project team kept helplessly cracking up every time we did our internal review of design docs. Usually this review was quite a serious matter, but we’d just all be helplessly laughing at how stupid and impossible our proposed builds had become.
You may be wondering why my former company was willing to create design docs for impossible builds… It was because we all knew Neom would NEVER reach the point where they could actually try to implement the build. The project would crumble far before then, and the CEO was quite confident his company could then say, “Aw, shucks, too bad we never got the chance to actually build this for you! Thanks for the millions you gave us for the design plans.”
The most bizarre aspect of the whole thing was that all the Saudis seemed deadly serious about the whole thing, and excitedly ate up every single preposterous deliverable we gave them.
I never managed to tell how many of them were just too terrified to point out the absurdity, and how many truly believed in the project in all its ridiculous glory. I got the feeling that a few key leaders were true believers, while everyone else was just keeping their mouths shut.
One thing that’s worth pointing out is that the Saudis have a major issue with unemployment, so many Saudis may be fine with the stupidity and waste, as long as it’s making massive amounts of jobs. And it currently is, soooo, goal accomplished? But this is obviously a very poor bandaid on their employment problem that will definitely come back to bite them in the butt.
Years later, I still don’t know how to wrap my head around that project. It all just feels like a fever dream. But I will greatly enjoy watching it go down in flames, especially after their horrific treatment of locals at the build site.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
This is making me genuinely wonder if you were on my project team. Our nickname for the project was “Operation Red Lines” in reference to this sketch.
Haha. You know, I watched that sketch again just now, and I actually think they could have done it. They just needed some weird möbius surface and maybe putting green and blue inside the red lines. Failure of creativity. Not nearly as doomed as this project.
Haha. This is very true, the sketch’s project is far more doable than Neom.
You could draw the lines as great circles on a glass sphere, that would be cool. I'm not sure about the kittens though. I guess the line could be the outline of cat. Er, kitten I mean.
I'll just leave this here: https://youtu.be/B7MIJP90biM
Nice!
You can draw brown lines using transparent ink - or, at least, ink which is transparent at the time of writing. Use an invisible ink such as lemon juice, and heat it up to make it visible. I wonder if there's any green ink which can be developed (through heat, ultraviolet exposure, etc.) to turn it red.
Perfect.
you just need 7 dimensions.
I know the US spends lots of money, sure, but who's going to keep them in check, now if the Saudis are going to throw $1T down the drain like that, at what point does it become ethical to intervene? I'm pretty sure if they started believing that oil came from the devil and started digging all their oil and burning it a lot of people would be in favor of intervention. This is not that much farther.
The only circumstance where I could see it remotely justified would be if the mismanagement created a humanitarian disaster with waves of refugees destabilizing neighboring countries. But even then, the costs for the attacking powers would be huge (see Somalia), not to mention the toll on "beneficiaries" of the alleged humanitarian intervention.
The other circumstance would be if you're causing a humanitarian disaster outside your country through side effects, like pollution or depletion of valuable resources.
And to paraphrase W.C Fields, the rest is wasted.
Thanks for the hint. I thought this was genuinely from George Best. Now I heard for the first time about Channing Pollock. Probably it's even older. I suspect Tutenchamun.
Intervening because they are building a city? Ffs. There’s all kinds of reasons the US shouldn’t be allies with Saudi - see Yemen, or its death penalty for homosexuality. How they handle their economy isn’t one.
Well, I agree this case probably doesn't meet the bar, but there has to be a bar on "burning natural resources" before we do something.
It’s not an issue for the US. Do you think a future China should invade the US for its inevitable future deficit. In any case the money spent here isn’t “burnt” it’s flowing out of Saudi but not disappearing. Quite a few western architectural and construction companies are benefiting. From the point of view of the Saudi people some money is disappearing.
If you build a 34km^2 ghost city, from the point of view of humanity, you're definitely burning a bunch of energy and raw materials. Some of the money is paying for services and will get recirculated, but a lot of it is paying for materials that will be wasted there.
In the end they claim it will be carbon free. Which will be the first for a city that large. I don’t think it will ever be built but if it is then it will have some carbon reduction compensation for its build.
I’m any case you don’t seem to understand the political reality of the US Saudi relationship, which is one of allies. This is despite the fact that the kingdom is a vicious dictatorship and despite its treatment of lgb people (which isn’t just the worst in the world but historically amongst the worst ever). Also despite the grubby war in Yemen, where blockades leading to starvation have seen the US remain allies with, and in fact join in with the Saudis.
So the US isn’t going invade over a city. And if it did, the Islamic world would be in greater upheaval given the area is considered holy.
Are you always this obnoxious? "Ffs", "you don't seem to understand". You failed to understand that it was an ethical question on hypotheticals, not a practical question on this exact matter.
> they claim it will be carbon free
so what?
>In the end they claim it will be carbon free.
They're claiming a hell of a lot of things, none of which seems to be in touch with reality.
> Some of the money is paying for services and will get recirculated, but a lot of it is paying for materials that will be wasted there.
I don't understand the contrast. The money will be recirculated regardless of what it's paying for.
In the case of service you're paying for someone's time. Time is arguably finite but extremely abundant today. So you put the money in circulation in exchange for a renewable resource. When you're buying energy or raw materials, there's a high likelihood that you'll make them unusable again (energy is always one way, it's hard to recycle other materials and even when you do you lose some of the material in the process). So the money part is also recirculated but in exchange for resources that are not renewable.
Maybe, but it seems a lot less less wasteful than a US-Saudi Arabia war.
"there has to be a bar on "burning natural resources" before we do something."
Good idea. Cut the power to FAANG when?
I would give better example. Bitcoin. The recent fall of BTC price wiped out about 2 trillion of wealth. Was it all virtual anyway? Not really, the amount of energy burned to produce these bitcoins is really mind blowing (probably close to 500 billion). And yet, it is not high enough to damage the western economy yet.
Neom might be a big waste of money and resource but I consider it much better waste than bitcoin. They will most likely fail but it could identify what are real problems and maybe even ways how to solve them.
"The recent fall of BTC price wiped out about 2 trillion of wealth. Was it all virtual anyway?"
Yeah it was. It's like buying 100 share of a stock at one dollar per share, then having it go up to fifty dollars a share, then going down to two dollars a share. Has 4800 dollars disappeared from the world? No, because you didn't trade it at that price.
The point is that also energy was wasted to obtain those coins. That energy was worth billions of dollars that could have been used for different purposes, like building cities :)
Every riyal spent on NEOM is one that will not fund ISIS or Al-Qaeda, nor bombing poor Yemeni civilians, or teaching hatred to kids in Pakistani madrassas. Plus a lot of it is exfiltrated to the West and is as close as it gets to Keynes’ thought experiment about burying money in a pit then letting people dig it out. What’s not to like?
The US wastes orders of magnitude more money than that on the military (almost a $1T/year), a waste of resources with negative public good value, if there ever was one. By that logic it should invade itself ASAP.
> a waste of resources with negative public good value, if there ever was one
No, that goes for Russian military.
You seem to have a very much US-centric view.
Polish-centric to be more specific.
For obvious reasons I do not have big problem with USA military, and I hope that 90%+ of Russian tank fleet will end destroyed. Hopefully with as small Ukrainian losses as possible.
Presumably, if I would be from Central/South America my opinion would be likely flipped.
Still, Red Army murdered/raped/looted far more than USA army in time since Red Army was created. And I would prefer to be invaded by USA than Russia.
I don't disagree with your assessment of the European (and especially Eastern European) realities. "Being invaded by the US" worked out well for Europe (and Japan) for the most part. Not so much for other places. The Soviet Union/Russia, on the other hand, has a consistently terrible track record treating the locals.
Still, most of that $1T a year US military budget is pure waste.
If spending your own resources on things which you like but which aren't particularly useful is a crime worthy of being shot, 90% of us are going to the wall.
Scott really angling to get Kashoggi'd, here
Even Mohammed bin Salman doesn't have enough money to kill everyone in the world who ever said anything bad about him. Khashoggi did a lot more to oppose the Saudi monarchy than "one critical blog post".
I’d definitely visit Neon, when built.
You can visit Naypyidaw today, if this sort of thing appeals to you...
…why is it a line??
As god is my witness, I have tried, and failed, to find the answer to that question. The only thing I can even begin to think of is trains and subways going faster if they don't have to turn. But they have to stop along the way, unless you construct an ungodly number of them for every station. They must know this.
I'm confused. A line is the worst possible contiguous shape for a city. It would literally be better if Mohammed bin Salman tried to use the city to spell his name. More to the point, its *obviously* the worst possible shape for a city. I have to conclude that its shape is not about being a good city. Is it meant to be a controllable city? A sector misbehaves, and gets locked down with only two points of entry or exit. Is it meant to be an advertising stunt? People talk about the Line more than other, less stupid projects.
I have no idea what is going on. Is the entire thing for funneling money somewhere secret? Why bother, if you can fund this atrocity of a project to the tune of a trillion dollars, you can buy whatever you want.
I can't believe I'm considering "The crown prince is actually just that stupid" as a hypothesis. Its a trillion dollars. For an idea that was clearly unfeasible when they were going to build it at ground level. I feel like I'm reading a fantasy novel, toward the beginning, where a foolish and wasteful king is about to be deposed, sparking an age of strife.
With a hereditary monarchy, "the crown prince is actually just that stupid" would always be my default assumption.
Ibn Saud (1875 - 1953) presumably had the combination of intelligence and specific personality traits to do something as impressive as 'founding a country'. But MBS is his grandson -- and not even like a favourite, especially talented grandson. He's much more likely to be just 'some guy', rather than anyone particularly smart or talented.
MBS is optimized for "consolidating and holding power in an hereditary monarchy", not any sane measure of utility.
I reckon early on, someone googled “largest thing ever built,” accidentally hit on either the Great Wall of China or the Game of Thrones wall, and the initial dimensions were ripped from there.
Or MBS put a typo in an early email, and no-one dared question it.
Or the brief was “tower that reaches the moon,” and and at some point they were told the only way to do it was put it on its side.
Humourously nominatively determinative architecture? It opens up so many great puns. The Line in the sand. Hold The Line. The Line dancing (forthcoming euphemism for its public transit). Snort The Line (drug tourism). Hook, The Line, and sinker (investor gullibility and/or regional specialty cocktail).
Otherwise I am genuinely not sure, it just seems suboptimal for most practical equilibria. I live in a roughly-square city and can't imagine what worthwhile tradeoffs one would get by cutting it in half and stretching it way out along one dimension. It'd make the major road/subway line more convenient, but as already noted, adding stops cuts into that efficiency. Narrow rectangle seems like the sort of funny shape imposed by hard physical constraints, like building in a valley or alongside bodies of water...not out in the open.
(I wonder if the roof will just be solar panels, or maybe it'll be a great tarmac for jet takeoff or whatever. Like a beached aircraft carrier?)
If the location I've seen is right, part of it actually does face onto the Red Sea.
Ethics Gradient has the best answer Ive.seen: it's because of the walls, which you need to.shade the interior. If you move the.walls apart into more of a square shape, the interior will fry when the sun is overhead.
Making it mirror the outside endorses that hypothesis. They're worried about the heat.
I'm still not clear where the solar goes. If it's a separate solar farm, they're lying about the environmental footprint. If it's built-in, you could put it on a roof , and that solves the overhead sun problem, allowing to you to adopt a more square shape, with a more sensible transport layout.
But then the core, the centre wouldn't get much light or fresh air. So what you actually need is a plus or X shape. That allows you to use a 2d transport layout, halving the worst case journey length.
Certainly the outside walls would be completely covered with solar collector materials. It can pass light , you know.
https://solarmagazine.com/solar-panels/transparent-solar-panels/#:~:text=A%20transparent%20solar%20panel%20is,the%20purpose%20of%20utilizing%20sunlight.
Then why is it a single line instead of ten parallel lines connected by a subway system, which would be much more efficient?
Almost everyone would be looking out of a mirrored wall at another mirrored wall? A Line ensures everyone gets an uniterrupted view form front and rear..but crosses are pretty good too.
The next parallel line can be one mile away, which is close enough to reduce travel distances by an order of magnitude, but distant enough not to make you feel claustrophobic.
We're changing one 170km long line to ten 17 km long lines. If they are built within a 17 km wide square of terrain, then they are 1.7 km apart, or about 1 mile.
If you can go from one end to the other in 20 minutes, why do you care how long it is?
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Your link says It would take more than that:
"Including a six-minute walk on each end, plus a twelve-minute wait for a pod, and two two-minute midway stops plus a two-minute fudge factor plus the 30 minute end-to-end travel time (6+6+12+2+2+2+30), the longest conceivable trip in The Line would be one hour; 20 minute trips would be common."
But whether it's 20 or 30 or 60 minutes, why does it have to be that much when it can be less? What's to gain from making this city a line?
Right. This seems like the obvious answer. Assuming there's good bedrock there, you can dig deep and get cheap cooling, and long and thin and designed to deflect the sun may actually be a legit good shape to pair with geocooling. Great big thick stone walls with shutters would be better than all the glass, of course, but not cool enough to get magazine articles.
Because it works.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Unless I've missed something (I suspect I have), wouldn't pods need to accelerate/decelerate for less than half of the distance between stations for the two-lane system to work? For Example:
Two pods travelling in the direction of station 100. Pod A is travelling to Station 9, Pod B is departing from Station 8. Pod A needs to enter the A/D lane .6˙km before Station, so .3˙km after Station 8. At this point, Pod A is travelling at top speed. .3˙km after Station 8, Pod B is travelling at half of top speed. If Pod B is between .3˙km and .5km, Pod A can't enter the A/D lane without colliding with Pod B, and can't stay in its own lane without blocking the whole line.
This is fixable by changing the specs slightly (having the pods accelerate at around 1.4g, or put the stations slightly further apart).
JJS: I'm just now reading your excellent comment.
First let me see if I can make a schematic. I'm just drawing the Up Tube (increasing station numbers). The Up Tube is 3 lanes wide near a station.
[AL] = airlock
..... short airlock lane, 100 meters
****** A/D lane, 0 to 300 kph or 300 to 0
>>>>> cruise lane, 300 kph
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
*******************************************
..... [AL] .... ..... [AL] .....
[L1 wait room] [L2 wait room]
The system must certainly avoid deadly conflicts in the A/D lane.
There have been changes in the specs. Top speed is now 300 kph which is reached in 18 seconds and .75 km at .5G. Deceleration is at .3G, perhaps 30 secs.
Two pods leaving adjacent stations (L1 and L2, 1 km apart) at the same time would not conflict.
However a pod stopping at L2 could definitely conflict (violently) with a pod leaving L1.
Nothing happens without CentCom's approval, so it's up to CentCom to not allow this scenario.
The simplest way to avoid a crash is to have the pod leaving L1 wait for 30 seconds outside of the L1 airlock but still in the airlock lane. When the pod approaching L2 is safely in the L2 airlock lane, then the pod exiting L1 begins accelerating.
30 seconds is not a long wait. The passengers leaving L1 might not even notice.
The onboard computers would also have knowledge of other pods in the A/D lane and could order emergency maneuvers if necessary.
I'm pretty sure you've solved it. If you make each airlock lane a little over three pods long, pods can also queue up to join/leave them (maybe a pod each side), so I don't think it's more computationally difficult then just wait 30 seconds if there'll be a pod you'd otherwise intercept in the A/D lane. Frankly, given the costs you're already incurring (and my bold assumption that the cost of maintaining a vacuum this size increases linearly by volume and not exponentially), you could make the airlock lane the whole length of the loop for use in emergencies/for maintenance vehicle access (obviously ducking into the A/D lane as needed, on something more like manual manoeuvring).
That is what I have done. The airlock lane is now continuous (except for the airlocks).
It is also used for travel from one station to the next at 60 kph average speed: one minute of travel.
The airlock lane is also used to accelerate to 100 kph before entering the A/D lane which reduces the disparity of speeds in the A/D lane. (Every pod is moving between 100 kph and 300 kph) Same for decelerating from A/D into the airlock lane.
Substack strips out my blanks. Grrrr. Trying again.
The Up Tube is 3 lanes wide near a station.
[AL] = airlock
---- short airlock lane, 100 meters
****** A/D lane, 0 to 300 kph or 300 to 0
>>>>> cruise lane, 300 kph
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
*******************************************
...... ---- [AL] ---- ................. ---- [AL] ----
.... [L1 wait room] ........ [L2 wait room]
Speaking of SimCity, when is someone going to build an optimal SimCity city in real life? Now that is a utopian project that I would love to see and that may have more than a snowball's chance in hell of working out.
If I remember correctly, an "optimal" city was optimized for density and revenues.
It was a dystopian nightmare where people died around 40, no education, unchecked crime rate and a single tree every 10 km. I wouldn't love to see it at all.
Or perhaps you're refering to a city that would be optimized for inhabitant happiness?
I love understated British humor: according to the listing, Bull Sand Fort's property type is "detached."
I looked at that semi-seriously.
I mean, I could sell my small terraced house, buy that and have significant amounts of money left over.
OK, so I might need to buy a boat.
Apparently though, it sold already for £490,000.
OK, let's do the math. 1WTC has a 56x56 meter footprint. If NEOM is 200 x 170,000 meters, that's a about 10,800 1WTC towers. 1WTC cost $3.9 billion, so NEOM should come in at $42 trillion. OK, let's credit them with a learning curve at an exponent of 85%. It would still cost $4.8 trillion, approximately seven years of Saudi GDP.
And some things don't have learning curves. 10,800 1WTC towers means 486 million tons of structural steel, and 2.16 billion tons of concrete. At current prices of $1220/ton for steel and $80/ton for concrete, that's $765 billion for the most basic raw materials alone. And really, purchases at that scale will distort the market so that they're spending a terabuck by the time the project is just a mountain of I-beams and bagged cement on the shores of Aqaba.
Why not start with the first km first, and then see how it goes? :)
*Narrator voice* "The line is optimized for scalability and extensibility"
To be fair, it's supposed to have a population of nine million people. So you recover the $42 trillion cost by selling off nine million apartments at a price of $530K each, which is fairly normal big-city prices. All you have to do is find nine million people who have $530K and want to live in this crazy thing.
Now, that's still not going to happen, but it sounds less insane when you put it this way. And if you scale down your ambition from a 130 km city housing nine million people to a 3km city housing 200K people attracted to this Monaco-of-the-Middle-East by a favourable tax situation then maybe it starts to seem reasonable.
Now I'm wondering whether the real agenda here is the desire to build a city where rich people can live without even needing to see the houses of poor people. If you go to Dubai then you've got (I assume, having never been to Dubai) a bunch of apartments housing rich people, whose amenity is spoiled by being surrounded by the ugly houses of all the poor people needed to keep the rich parts of the city going. In a linear city, on the other hand, all the rich people can have their apartments up one end and the poor people live up the other end; the rich never need to see the poors' houses nor interact with them when they're not actively working; the poors will be delivered by high-speed train every day to do their menial jobs and then whisked away to their vertical slums which, thanks to geometry, cannot even be seen from any window in the rich part of town.
I don't think this is what people are thinking. There are plenty of neighborhoods all around the world where rich people can't see poor people. All suburbs and a bunch of nice districts in cities.
I don't know. I mean, if you live in Beverly Hills you don't have to see poor people as long as you never actually leave Beverly Hills, but if you actually want to go to the beach or the mountains you've got to pass through poorer neighbourhoods, even if it's on a freeway.
The Line lets you pass straight from a super-rich dense walkable city to unspoiled wilderness within minutes . Now, maybe there's a few places in the US where you can get some approximation to that, but The Line probably isn't trying to attract people from there, it's trying to attract people from Mumbai and Moscow.
You probably never been to Moscow. Because Moscow is actually very nice , convenient and green city. Among top 10 in the world
Yeah and it has pristine wilderness in the oblast with 45 min train ride.
Now Mumbai yeah...
$530,000 * 9,000,000 = $4.77T, not $47T.
Hey you're right. I actually meant to use the OP's second estimate (which was $4.8 trillion) not the first one (which was $42 trillion).
(I do think you can mass-produce skyscrapers in the Saudi desert using Pakistani labourers cheaper than you can build a one-off skyscraper in downtown New York City using New York City union labour, so the $42 trillion is definitely an overestimate.)
You're ignoring the part where building the WTC doesn't meaningfully impact the market for raw materials, whereas building 10,000 WTCs all at once does. If its even possible to produce the supplies necessary for this to be done by 2030, it would only be possible by prices for materials skyrocketing and inducing supply, blowing out any cost estimate.
Right, I definitely wouldn't say that building the whole thing by 2030 is within the realms of possibility.
The main point I wanted to make is that as long as you consider this a _city_ rather than a single structure, the materials and cost requirements no longer seem insane. (The layout is still insane.)
But the cost of building any city of nine million from scratch would seem prohibitive if you tried to do it all in one go, securing all the funding before the first house is sold.
The Burj Khalifa is about 1/3rd of the cost of the 1WTC per cubic meter of area, if wiki's claim that it cost $1.5B and Quora's claim that it has 1.6M cubic meters of volume are true.
The question is, how much lower than the Burj Khalifa can you go? If you are trying to finish this project by 2030 you're going to need enough concrete and steel to impact the world's production of those two goods I think?
" 10,800 1WTC towers means 486 million tons of structural steel, and 2.16 billion tons of concrete"
World production of steel: 1,950.5 million tonnes in 2021
World production of concrete: 4.4 billion tonnes in 2019
Hmm, so actually if your consumption is smoothed out over 8 years, you'd need 3% of the world's steel per year, and 6% of the world's concrete per year. That's not likely to affect the prices directly, but I would wonder how transportation to the site will work.
That's the plot of Snowpiercer
$530k may not be crazy per-apartment, but it's crazy per-person.
200 m x 200 m x 100 km
2 million persons
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Are we assuming that they're telling the truth about the dimensions? What if we start by assuming there's a ton of "advertising puffery," aka bullshit, going on. Then it's not literally 500m tall and 170km long, it's just "tall, narrow, and long". You could do 20m tall buildings along a 10km line, new-urbanist style, and that would still give you room for a lot of people (200 wide by 20m tall by 10,000m long is 40 million cubic meters, enough for 400,000 people to have 100 square meters each) with a reasonable commute even with stops along the way. You might have to travel farther than you would in a normal city, but it's made up for by never having to wait for a transfer or walk too far from your stop. And presumably they'd go all-out on transit since that's the only option.
When you put it that way, it starts to make sense. Build it along a nice beach somewhere and you can actually justify the linearity, too.
Imagine a version of Miami where everything has been demolished except that thin island that runs north-south from South Beach to Palm Beach, with cars banished to the mainland and an ultra-efficient north-south transit corridor installed. It sounds like a pretty nice place to live.
The Nazis built that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora
200 m x 200 m x 100 km
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
At this scale it would be worth it to vertically integrate everything. Mine the raw minerals from mines that you own, and build the factories to do all the processing yourself. No way this is done on a timescale less that several decades, and there's a huge list of reasons why it wouldn't work at all.
Thanks for some approximate numbers. That was my first impression too that 500 billion is way too low.
It should be even more costly now due to construction costs skyrocketing for various reasons, inflation and promised high-tech.
My favourite thing about NEOM is how much more sensible it would be if it you simply made it 200m high and 500m wide instead of 500m tall and 200m wide. It would be vastly less expensive to build, and vastly easier for people to get around.
Don't get me wrong, it's still an insanely stupid idea even when it's on its side. But that's what I like about it; it's an insanely stupid idea made even more insanely stupid by the simple stupid decision to make it taller than it is wide.
"Wayside School was accidentally built sideways. It was supposed to be only one story high, with thirty classrooms all in a row. Instead it is thirty stories high, with one classroom on each story. The builder said he was very sorry."
While we're talking about Neom, Egypt is relocating its capital to a new city (named the New Administrative Capitol) being built in the desert, designed <to make sure the government listens to the demands of the military instead of the demands of the street> to relieve congestion in the capital. It's going to include widely separated single-use neighborhoods, a new 22 mile long river, sporting facilities for an Olympics that may or may not come there, the largest military headquarters in the world, and a 1 km tall obelisk. While it's not as absurd as Noem, I find it more objectionable because Egypt isn't rolling in cash like Saudi Arabia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Administrative_Capital
There is some precedent for doing futuristic things by using Native Americans' special legal status to avoid regulations. An ocean fertilization project off the Pacific northwest was done in collaboration with the Haida nation, before international political backlash stopped the project.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering
Greg Cochran instead recommends the Saudis instead use their money to make bets with potentially huge payoffs:
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1547989875734941697
On the one hand, isn't this Neom thing just a really inefficient arcology ? Arcologies have been proposed in the past, and sadly, the way things are going, they're probably the future.
On the other hand, insane projects such as these are usually just vehicles designed explicitly for embezzlement. Actually building anything out in the real world would be extremely counterproductive for that purpose. You want to embezzle the money, not sink it into parts and labor !
Why "sadly"?
Also, Mohammed bin Salman seems to be directly involved in this, and he has no need of embezzlement vehicles - he's absolute monarch accountable to no-one.
Technically I think he's still accountable to his dad; but for all practical purposes yes.
Maybe I'm too embroiled in the Russian perspective on this; but, in Russia, if a monarch wanted to give out little gifts to his barons in exchange for their loyalty, this is how he'd do it.
That would depend on how involved he is in coming up with the idea. If I were an advisor of his who owned a construction company, I would tell MBS to build something like this and rake in the cash.
Also, it's a great way to distribute money to a wide variety of people in multiple industries without the transparency problems of just handing it out to your closest friends and asking them to share it around. $1 trillion pumped into the economy using specific channels will result in your people getting real world experience doing all the things needed to build massive projects.
It's not nearly as nice as getting a good project done, but if you think this might work at all it's a great OTJ opportunity that might just pan out into a decent final product.
Something I wonder from time to time is why no one tries to make a charter city in America.
80 percent of the regulatory burdens that block places like eg, San Francisco from becoming denser or building more trains are city and state level political issues that you could avoid by not being in California or SF.
If you put a brand new city in the middle of Nebraska or something on cheap land, you wouldn't be able to get out of federal taxes or federal drug laws, but you could still compete in a lot of ways with US cities, and you get a huge natural bonus of cheap and legal immigration from the entire United States, free trade with US, etc. etc.
There are already plenty of small towns in flyover America. Some have died to the point of selling the rights to Hollywood studios to blow up their remaining buildings.
Coordination problem. Everybody wants to live in a brand new city with forward thinking civil codes and walkable design etc., but nobody wants to be the first person to move to a field in Nebraska
This is surely a problem with charter cities anywhere, not just in the US.
It is, which is why the drawcard for a charter city needs to be something a lot stronger than "nice urban design".
The only ones that have a chance are "no income tax" and "very lax labour laws combined with free immigration from poor countries".
The reason tens of thousands of people live in Falun and Kiruna are the iron mines. Surely a charter city could be created around the extraction of some natural resource.
> Everybody wants to live in a brand new city with forward thinking civil codes and walkable design etc
Actually I think not all that many people even want to do that, it's just that the people who _do_ want to live in a place like that are massively overrepresented among people who write a lot of comments on the internet, and most of those people are too young and poor to be buying houses.
By the time people get to house-buying age most of them seem to be willing to trade off walkability for space and quiet.
Eh plenty of people with money are willing to pay a big premium for walkability, otherwise prices in Manhattan wouldn't be so high. I think it's more that people aren't willing to trade being in the middle of goddamn nowhere with no jobs or amenities for walkability.
I strongly agree. Even within NYC, you pay significantly more per sq. ft. for space in Manhattan than space in near-Brooklyn, and way more than space in far-Brooklyn.
Walkability is something that is undersupplied in the US housing market, so it commands a premium price. However that's only if walkability is walking to: {an excellent suite of restaurants+bars+cultural amenities} + {high-status jobs}
People with money also pay a big premium for
- large houses OR
- gardens / swimming pools /views
Both of which you don't get in Manhattan or similar.
Melvin is correct. The whining about livability (defined in a particular way) is very much an over-educated 20-something american issue, not a universal issue.
Would Columbia, MD count? Planned community (by the grandfather of Edward Norton, no less!) in 1967, intended to be more than just a bedroom community for some place else. Somewhere north of 100k people live there now (including me, for several years). They were thinking of holding the new Woodstock there.
In this case, it's probably interesting in terms of what people thought a city Ought to Look Like in 1967, versus how it looks today. (A whole bunch of townhomes / apartments sprung up around the Mall in just the last five years or so.)
Come on giant asteroid
Maybe Neom will be like Trantor, with strips of moving walkways of different speeds you can step between. #fictionalEvidence.
Also, what about earthquakes and the Arabian plate continental drift? Won't the thing crack?
I am starting to get a bit annoyed at all the moralizing coming from the West re: the Neom project. Yeah, it’s a crazy and impractical idea. So what? Perhaps that’s what the world needs right now.
It’s especially grating to read these complaints about the cost of its creation, especially when the West has spent an order of magnitude more money destroying things in the region.
I'm claiming that it's impossible. I'm claiming that if the King of Saudi Arabia said he was going to invest all the country's money in a perpetual motion machine, the people of Saudi Arabia might justly be unhappy about this.
I don’t intend to sound snarky here, just informative. I have interacted with a lot of Saudis and they don’t think they way you think they do. Pretty much every need is covered, including healthcare, education, housing, etc. It is very much a welfare state where the concept of scarcity basically doesn’t exist. This is of course why there are so many foreign workers there: because the citizens don’t want or need to work.
If anything, this project will be popular amongst Saudi citizens, as it aims to propel The Kingdom over regional competitors like Dubai. It’s futuristic, too expensive, and borderline delusional on purpose. That is what matters in post-scarcity politics. If they wanted a modest, realistic desert city, they could have done that. But it’s not sexy or cool and it certainly won’t propel Saudi over the UAE in “global attention points.”
The psychology can be hard to understand for middle class Westerners (myself included), but if you interact with the superrich class, especially the Gulf superrich class, you’ll start to understand it a bit better. The concepts of pragmatism or rationality are not particularly important to these people.
Then I should clarify what I mean by "might justly". I don't mean that, with a sufficiently good PR campaign, the prince couldn't get people to like him and make his perpetual motion investment popular. I'm saying that it would be unfair to the Saudi people, and that if they understood the situation, they would have the right to complain.
Again I don’t think you quite grasp that the citizens of a different country have different values and mentalities. I’m sure they understand the situation just fine. As I tried to explain above, literally no one there cares about wasting money. It does not exist in the minds of the citizens. Full stop.
Sorry, but the idea that “if only they saw the world the way we enlightened Westerners do, and weren’t being brainwashed with PR campaigns, they’d agree with us” is just pure Western hubris.
Saudis might start to care about wasting money when their oil revenues begin to fall.
Maybe?
But you'd think Westerners would have started to care about wasting money when real wages started to fall; yet politicians promising to spend billions on their own vanity projects get elected and re-elected every election cycle for positions from city councillor all the way up to head of government.
After all, you can't let that other city have a nicer sports stadium/modern art project than you, can you?
The amount of money being wasted is a relevant amount of money, even for Saudi Arabia, especially since $1 trillion is hilariously insufficient to complete this project as currently specified but MBS seems to be committing his prestige/credibility to making it work as specified
I've also interacted with a lot of Saudis. And that includes people who aren't wealthy or well connected enough to attend western colleges. Saudi Arabia has a higher poverty rate than the US and its biggest budget item is the military. The Saudi ARISTOCRACY has every need covered and significant money. But most Saudis are not aristocrats. Saudi Arabia is not a post-scarcity society by any stretch of the imagination. It has a GDP per capita of about $20k per person and most of that is oil.
This is a common mistake by westerners. They only meet the people who are elite enough to go to the west and speak English and assume those people are typical. But most Saudis are much poorer than the median American.
In terms of the stability of MBS's regime, the interesting question then becomes which groups in Saudi Arabia can threaten the monarchy. If the common people cannot topple the monarchy in the face of aristocratic cohesion, then their opinion doesn't matter.
Who staffs the army? Their opinion probably matters more than the aristocracy.
The army is staffed mostly by peasants.
All senior officers come from the King's extended family, partly to keep them busy. They have >500 princes after all they need to keep busy. More reliable princes get more powerful units.
"Peasants" isn't a complete answer. Roman Legions were always mosted staffed by non-aristocrats, but it mattered a lot when the non-aristocrats changed from being Roman peasants to German peasants.
Yes, though one thing MBS has proven adept at is internal games. He's managed to outmaneuver and sideline some pretty major factions. In fact, that seems to be his primary talent.
From what I've heard, Roman is semi-correct. The army is staffed mostly by lower ranks members of favored tribes. The officer corps, including senior posts, are staffed by aristocrats with units being effectively personal fiefs. Some of them are princelings but most are just the equivalent dukes or other nobles because these are less of a threat. A princeling, no matter how small, can aspire to the throne. The son of a high ranking noble can aspire to great wealth and power but never the throne itself. Or at least not as easily.
More interestingly, MBS has sidelined the Wahhabis who are traditionally a pillar of Saudi stability.
Yeah, I've been astonished that the Wahhabis got boxed out so quickly and *quietly*. I would have expected that to cause major problems, but either people were wrong about how important the Wahhabis were to the regime, or there's trouble bubbling under the surface.
The composition of those favored tribes will probably be key. As long as the Saudi royal family can keep control of the keys to the saved up oil wealth AND the loyalty of most of the army, they are probably untoppleable, since that oil wealth could feed the army with imports from the outside world for decades if it came down to a Royals vs People showdown.
The National Guard matters more than the army, and it is staffed specifically by members of tribes particularly loyal to the House of Saud.
Huh, TIL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian_Military_Forces
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian_National_Guard
Pretty smart to have 1/3 of your total military manpower be specifically devoted to preventing coups.
A project still in the works might be popular or unpopular; a project that has succeeded might be popular or unpopular; but surely a project that has failed can only be unpopular.
Are you saying the project will be popular among SA populace even after it has failed, or that you don't believe it will fail?
Depends on why the project failed. The Avro Arrow project is wildly popular in Canada, even though it never produced a fully functional fighter jet.
In which the author confuses the mean Saudi viewpoint with the views of the Saudis wealthy enough to know English and for him to have ever come into contact with in the first place.
But please, continue simping for a country so morally vacuous because they happen to be brown.
Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund is only $620 billion, and the market estimate of the value of Saudi Aramco is $2.3 trillion
Commit $1 trillion & your regime's prestige to a project, find out that the project costs more like $50 trillion, and post-scarcity politics turns back into scarcity politics pretty fast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Investment_Fund
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Aramco
The moralising should be about other aspects of Saudi society, for sure.
> Perhaps that’s what the world needs right now.
Why world needs more people murdered for doomed vanity projects?
That guy had guns and was shooting at police. Would the US police not have killed him?
Still, he died due to idiotic vanity project.
And when Saudi Arabia is evicting people to make space for palace-city for its royalty, I see little value in whether it was legal according to the local law.
Also, I would not treat US police as worth emulating (though maybe my view is heavily distorted - and Uvalde police hopefully is an outlier)
At least some of the complaints are not moralistic, they are based on eminently practical engineering issues - energy budgets, transport issues, air flow, and similar such concerns.
Those don't go away regardless of different moral codes or different views about the relationship between the individual and the state or different aesthetic preferences.
Saudi Arabia doesn't have a great reputation for human rights. But those shiny pictures look great. How plausible is it that they can actually build the line?:
The construction cost of WTC1 was $3.9 billion. It is 64 meters on each side and 360m tall not counting the antenna. That comes to $2644/m^3 including all the regulatory costs and high labor costs that the US has and Saudi Arabia doesn't have.
Saudi is proposing to construct 200m * 500m * 170km for $1 trillion. That comes to $58/m^3. I thought the combination of economies of scale, lower labor costs, and lower regulation could plausibly save them 1 OOM, but 2 OOMs is hard to believe.
I don't totally hate the line geometry. So long as it's wide enough and dense enough you can probably get most of what you need without even using transit. In the rural US linear strings of towns naturally develop along highways. The air temperature 500m above ground where it's exposed will be much lower than the surface temperature, and there will be indoor corridors too, so the walkability is totally plausible. Line geometry puts everyone within walking distance of wide open nature.
I think they got that 20 minute transit time number by just dividing 170km by the speed of the shanghai maglev and rounding down. In reality it's probably at least twice that. Perhaps a high speed train which only stops once every 40km, and lower speed trains to fill in the gaps.
The construction cost of WTC1 is actually an unfair comparison because it cost at least twice other skyscrapers its size. The US worried it would be a good symbolic target for terrorists and so gave it expensive extra-double-terrorism-proofing features. It's still an order of magnitude off though.
Wait, are we talking about the one that actually did get destroyed by terrorists, or the rebuilt one after said terrorists destroyed it?
WTC1 is the new Freedom Tower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_World_Trade_Center
WTC1 was also one of the buildings in the one destroyed on 9/11, so I see the confusion.
The official designation of the North Tower of the Twin Towers was 1 World Trade Center; they re-used the name when they rebuilt it.
This is extremely confusing. What's the "1" about, if the second one is still numbered "1" instead of "2" as one would expect?
The "1" refers to it being the primary/first building of the seven-building World Trade Center complex. The South Tower was 2 World Trade Center, and there were a number of smaller buildings on the site as well. All seven buildings were destroyed or irrecoverably damaged on September 11, 2001; the Twin Towers themselves were the only ones directly rammed, but their collapse hit all the other buildings with debris and there was also fire spread.
The tower now called One World Trade Center is called that because it replaces the original 1 World Trade Center, although it is on the site of the original 6 World Trade Center. They are planning to eventually build another tower called Two World Trade Center on the site of the original 5 World Trade Center to restore the "Twin Towers".
It is kind of confusing, but only when talking about past events without a date reference - there has only been one 1WTC at any given time.
The better reference would be the Burj Khalifa, which cost $1.5 billion to build and has a volume of 1.6M cubic meters, for a cost of $937 / m^3
So yes I would expect that $58 / m^3 is still too low, but the gap between US construction costs and Middle Eastern "definitely not coerced" labor costs is already a factor of 3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-total-volume-of-the-Burj-Khalifa
Perhaps their plan is to build the first 5% of it and sell enough real estate in that to finance the next 5%, rinse and repeat.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Favorite read on Substack this week. Thank you ($250K is actually pretty cheap for a pad in Maldives. If the whole getting there and what happens in rough weather gets worked out might be worth going in for island 2, if island one survives that is).
I predict that the Catawba Digital Economic Zone will do well unless crypto collapses completely.
I'm reminded of the bit in Heinlein about how it wasn't the gold miners who got rich, it was the people who sold things to gold miners.
Why? In the US, securities registration is the main legal barrier, and being built on tribal land doesn't exempt people from federal law. This leaves the possibility that their new legal code involving digital assets is the draw. If that's the case, how does Catawba enforce that legal code against entities not in Catawba?
'You can do slightly better than this with a combination of express and local trains, but you’re never going to compensate for the fact that laying your city out in a line is shooting yourself in the foot'
I would be interested to see the math behind this statement.
Back of the envelope guesstimate: If the total journey time between one end of the city and the other is 40mins for 170 KM with no stops and making the assumption that each stop adds 2 minutes and every train leaves every 5 mins then:
If there is a main stop every 42.5 Km and trains that run between main stops stop every 10 and a bit KM, and local trains that run between these sub-mains stops stop every 2 km then even the longest journey would take a max of:
46 mins + 5 mins wait (one end of the line to the other plus 3 stops)
14 mins + 5 mins wait (2 sub-stations back)
10 mins + 5 mins wait (4 local stops)
15 mins for 1 KM walk time
I'm sure this could be optimized but even the longest trip using these simplistic assumptions would have a maximum journey time of less than 90mins which as a Los Angeles resident is not to be sneezed at.
Plus the build costs of straight railway lines parallel to the city would make a huge costs savings.
Don't like the Saudis but to my simple mind the idea isn't so crazy.
Does this include the time lost accelerating and decelerating?
Google tells me that a train trip from a random part of Tokyo to another random part of Tokyo such that the total area covered includes about 9 million people takes 80 minutes (or 40 minutes by car). I don't know how fair a comparison this is; I guess you would have to compare the total cost of the Tokyo subway to the total cost of Neom. But Neom is unbuildable, and I don't know if there's an option for a modern version of Tokyo to use 300 mph maglevs to bring the time down.
I had guessed that 2 mins would be the time lost in deceleration/acceleration and stopping at the station. No idea if that is realistic or not.
I can see other optimization that would reduce journey times (more frequent trains, more point-to-point trains - for example all the main station having non-stop links between them - reducing required stops , moving side walks that would increase walking speeds) but having seen Wasserschweinchen's comment (and assuming its accurate) its hard to see how Neom could reduce journey time to anything like that of those for a conventionally shaped city.
12 seconds to go from zero to 400 kph at 1 G latteral acceleration.
Energy recovered during braking.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Includes time lost.
20 minutes, 100 km
That still seems significantly worse than an equivalent in a circular city with a good transport network. Central London is about 28 km^2 versus Neom's proposed 34 km^2 and you can get from pretty much anywhere to anywhere else in central London in ten minutes to half an hour.
Heck, a circular 34 km^2 city is only 6.5 km across. That's a ninety minute walk or thereabouts. So the Neom's super maglev train system is only fractionally better than walking in a sensibly laid out city.
The size of the city is 34 square km. A disc of that area would have a diameter of 6.6 km. With a simple hub-and-spoke rail system with stations spaced 1km apart, no part of the city would be more than six stops away, so you could get anywhere within 1 km of walking and 12 minutes of riding. Or, if you're in a hurry, you could just ride a bike anywhere in 20 minutes.
yes, thats a good point that puts my calculations in perspective!
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
100 km
20 minutes end-to-end
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
The Line is what happens when you give Le Corbusier an unlimited budget and a potato sack full of meth.
LOL
Given some of the images and concepts, it seems more likely that Saudi-Arabia has developed Matrix compact living.
For evidence, note that the very name contains NEO. Update your priors.
There is really no chance at all of Neom, and especially The Line, ever being built. I do not now the exact mechanichs behind oil sheikhs and their megalomania but it seems in their world saying something (especially accompanied by nice pictures made by Western consulting firms) is almost as good as actually doing something.
A relevant parallel here is Masdar City (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City) in UAE. Declared in 2006 (with nice pictures made by Western consulting firms) it was supposed to be the next generation self-sustainable eco-friendly future city in the middle of the desert. In fact it was eerily similar to Neom. It was supposed to be finished in 2016. Needless to say, today there is nothing but some dusty concrete low-rises where the maps say that Masdar City is located.
It’s still ongoing though. Seems real enough to me.
Actual building work on the ground, or just architectural plans?
You read my mind. MBS could do a lot better hiring the people who worked on Masdar City and telling them, "OK, this is try #2. Build a Masdar City in Saudi Arabia this time... and don't worry, I definitely won't run out of funding."
I think Masdar occupies a better spot on the cool-vs-practical chart: cool enough for foreign investors to praise your futuristic forward-thinkingness, but practical in the sense that it's based on existing best practices instead of "what if Blade Runner, but in the desert?"
Oh, interesting -- I hadn't known that!
I find the overt sneering towards Neom specifically and Saudi Arabia in general, both here specifically, and from contemporary UMC American culture in general, somewhere between culturally insensitive (if I’m being generous) and extremely racist (if I’m not).
Once upon a time, what is now St Petersburg was a marshy swamp, Russia was a strange Asiatic country to the East of Europe. Peter the Great dragged Russia out of that state by devoting resources that might have gone somewhere else (conceivably to the Russian people, more likely to the hedonistic pleasure of himself, or possibly to pay off powerful individuals to further entrench his rule) into turning that marshy swamp into real estate that is as valuable today as any in Russia.
It was an inspired bit of statecraft.
Was Peter the Great a flawless guy, umm no, he wasn’t, so what, we have St Petersburg now.
As mentioned, the clock is ticking on oil wealth, Saudi Arabia probably has something on the order of 30-60 years to figure out how to sustain itself post oil.
How should it plan for that future?
Let’s be real, conceivably Saudi Arabia oil wealth could be spent on its people, but for most of the past 100 years or whatever it’s been directly towards hedonism and entrenching the royal family’s rule.
That’s the actual trade off.
If MBS has directed the Neom budget towards a fleet of super yachts for all his buddies, no one here would be mocking him for it, Bloomberg wouldn’t be writing snide articles about it. And the country MBS is responsible for would be that much closer towards their post oil abyss.
Is MBS a flawless guy, ha ha ha ha, it’s obviously dumb to even put it in those terms, when Peter the Great was less than a flawless guy that was just par for the course.
But for all his flaws, between yachts for all, and creating a new St Petersburg, Neom is an inspired attempt at statecraft, it’s putting real resources behind a vision for the future in a way we’ve proven beyond incapable of.
It’s become obvious that the Western response to this is to sneer down their nose, plenty of people would have sneered at the development of Dubai, or the development of any number of Chinese cities, let’s check back in 100 years.
There’s definitely something in that. Now that west has stopped grand projects we are just sneering at those cultures that continue to do so. I heard about the new Egyptian capital on this thread. It was sneered at here, but a city that can house another 6.5 million people is something that would clearly benefit some European or western countries with housing issues. Maybe not so large, but a new city of some size.
The western country that I live in can barely build a subway system, or a hospital.
>Now that west has stopped grand projects we are just sneering at those cultures that continue to do so.
So when you said "continue to do so". you are referring to hyper speculative visions of projects that by all accounts have no chance of succeeding?
And why are you praising the new egyptian capital? It exists solely to solidify the power of the government and the military. Wow, much progressive.
>The western country that I live in can barely build a subway system, or a hospital.
Do you imagine that Dubai has good public transport? Because it doesn't.
By continue to do so I mean grand projects on general. Doomed or not.
I doubt if the new Egyptian capital is just built for that reason. Why would one city be less likely to protest than another? And of course the west doesn’t have to have that criteria if we were to build a new city. Something that was common enough.
Not sure why we moved on to Dubai but a google of their transport and it seems ok to me. But what matters is recency, London has had a 150 years start.
Well, one could probably make a city of loyalists quite easily if one restricts who can live there to say; government employees and direct family members. (You step out of line, you lose your job and your house. You'll probably quit and move out of town before stepping out of line.)
> Doomed or not.
In that case you'll be happy to hear about my new project to build a space elevator to the moon right here in the good ol' US of A! My budget is 20 bucks and a shoestring, but I think if we stretch the shoestring long enough it'll probably turn into carbon nanotubes.
Not sure if you've been to Dubai, but I've used its public transport during the three weeks I spent there and found it easy to use and way better than median public transport in 'advanced' countries. While I will reserve my doubts about the viability of Neom, I do second the pushback against habitual sneering just because it's 'them' pursuing grand visions
Neom might be in violation of Gall's law [1].
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
I'm not sure if St Petersburg required new transportation technology to be created and scaled up to city size within only 8 years. The technology in this case is the HyperLoop.
[1] - http://principles-wiki.net/principles:gall_s_law
Someone should point out to Gall that the ‘inverse’ of his proposition is the same as his proposition.
It’s impossible for it to be the case that a complex system that works invariably evolves from a simple system that works, without it also being the case that complex systems that didn’t evolve from simpler systems never work.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
> If MBS has directed the Neom budget towards a fleet of super yachts for all his buddies, no one here would be mocking him for it
I would.
> But for all his flaws, between yachts for all, and creating a new St Petersburg, Neom is an inspired attempt at statecraft, it’s putting real resources behind a vision for the future in a way we’ve proven beyond incapable of.
If it will actually sort of succeed at being city (rather ruin or palace) then you can make fun of me.
As it stands - it is strictly worse than making several ton pile of dollar banknotes and burning it.
Because of the locals forced out/killed?
Or because of the wasted time?
Both. Also, wasted resources.
>somewhere between culturally insensitive (if I’m being generous)
We should be sensitive to such a vile culture?
>and extremely racist (if I’m not).
Oh, so you're just going to use meaningless slurs to slander people you disagree with?
Oh, and tell me, how many white countries in 2022 could get away with executing homosexuals and treating women like property without people like you losing your minds?
The issue here isn't cultural insensitivity, its cultural relativism in which leftists perform mental gymnastics to justify being more upset over the mockery of an incredibly stupid saudi pipe dream than they ever are over the oppression of millions of sexual, ethnic and religious minorities by said Saudis.
>As mentioned, the clock is ticking on oil wealth, Saudi Arabia probably has something on the order of 30-60 years to figure out how to sustain itself post oil.
How should it plan for that future?
Not with projects that literally CANNOT possibly work and will piss away vast swathes of the oil nest egg they've managed to be saved. Though these people bankrupting themselves would be entirely welcome to me.
>If MBS has directed the Neom budget towards a fleet of super yachts for all his buddies, no one here would be mocking him for it,
If they had somehow managed to spend a TRILLION dollars on yachts while their country was staring down a future in which most of their existing economy is wiped out, then no, they wouldn't be mocking him. They would be calling him the most disgustingly wasteful man in history. But hell, a fleet of floating yacht-based communities is literally a more practical option than the line.
But would you listen to yourself? We're meant to NOT point out that an insane, grossly wasteful project is insane and wasteful because....at least they didn't blow a trillion dollars on wasteful hedonism? THAT'S your standard? Something something tyranny of low expectations.
>But for all his flaws, between yachts for all, and creating a new St Petersburg, Neom is an inspired attempt at statecraft, it’s putting real resources behind a vision for the future in a way we’ve proven beyond incapable of.
The median American has a standard of living far in excess of what most Saudis could imagine. And we do this without stupid, wasteful megaprojects spearheaded by arrogant know-nothings who cannot be told why they're abjectly wrong.
>It’s become obvious that the Western response to this is to sneer down their nose, plenty of people would have sneered at the development of Dubai
Why are you acting like Dubai is anything but soulless and truly revolting place? Because they have big shiny buildings (where the shit and piss literally needs to be collected by trucks each day and taken away)?
The city built on slavery of foreigners?
The city that spent $12 billion dollars on pointless islands that are sinking into the ocean?
A city that cannot survive rising sea levels and which is doing nothing to mitigate this existential risk?
THAT'S what you think Americans should be aiming for? Keep it, please, keep this hellish place for yourself. Here in the west we'll continue to enjoy high standards of middle class living instead of creating glistening turds in the desert for evil oligarchs to play in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJuqe6sre2I&ab_channel=AdamSomething
>or the development of any number of Chinese cities,
You mean the *dozens* of ghost cities that were created to inflate GDP growth numbers? The cities that wasted untold billions of dollars that could have been instead used for almost anything else which would have helped china face a number of looming catastrophes? The almost unheard of levels of malinvestment that has perversely been used by countless resentful anti-western leftists to tell us all about how much better China is and how they'll be overtaking America any minute now.
Again, please, please PLEASE keep this. We don't want it. It has no value to anyone with half a brain.
>let’s check back in 100 years.
Yes, let's!
Let's check back in when China's economy is in shambles because the population has absolutely collapsed and there's nobody to look after the hundreds of millions of old people.
Let's check back when the oil money
There is nothing admirable about any of this. MSB doesn't get points for boldness. The Saudis are facing ruin and they should have put in place sensible long-term programs to mitigate this. Instead, they've waited until it is almost too late, and in their foolishness and vanity they've chosen a project that cannot possibly succeed, which will waste ungodly amounts of money and will prevent projects that may well succeed from doing so. I could come up with a dozen better uses for this money in literally five minutes. He deserves scorn and ridicule for choosing something so absurd.
But like I said, I think Saudi Arabia is a terrible country and I am happy that MSB is playing his part to bury the country.
My god. Rant of the year. I’ll take you up on one point there - the Chinese ghost cities were pre-planned cities that were eventually occupied.
You are right about the utter depravity of the Saudi regime - and you might want to talk to your representative about that since the US is a major ally.
As you say, we do in fact have St. Petersburg now. We're not going to have NEOM, or anything half as grand as NEOM, sprouting from the Saudi desert any time in this century. *That's* why we're laughing. Those of us who have done the math, at least.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
This recent SMBC cartoon reminded me of the Model City Mondays series generally, and the Catawba Digital Economic Zone is even more relevant to it than most: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/enginomics
As for Neom, if it's actually going to be a *building* 500m x 200 m x 170 km, then they can solve the "too hot to walk everywhere" problem with air conditioning.
So the whole Line thing sounds completely absurd... but.
Coastal cities are sometimes spread along a shoreline. If you run a subway, or an above-ground train line coursing every few minutes - some of them do - you create perhaps the only form of public transport that doesn't suck and can reliably service a large portion of the population. I live in a city with this kind of solution, and proximity to the train line is a huge deal when it comes to logistics of getting places, the viability of commuting, etc.
On the other hand linemaxxing into a 170km monstrosity is pointless - crossing the whole thing in 20 minutes means you have two terminals of high-speed rail and the train doesn't stop between them at all. So if you want to go from 10% to 90% that'll require combining low speed rail + high speed rail + low speed rail, effectively over an hour of travel time at best.
The really funny part is that they are proposing to build the line-city directly away from the coast, giving it the minimum possible shoreline area.
> crossing the whole thing in 20 minutes means you have two terminals of high-speed rail and the train doesn't stop between them at all. So if you want to go from 10% to 90% that'll require combining low speed rail + high speed rail + low speed rail, effectively over an hour of travel time at best.
I'm getting a weird vibe from the post and the comments that says "if there's a high-speed express, it should have stations at 0% and 100%". But that doesn't appear to make any sense; if you're going to have a two-stop express, surely the correct locations are 25% and 75%?
That doesn't change the conclusion that going from 10% to 90% requires a low-speed -- high-speed -- low-speed sandwich, but it has a lot of implications for how long it takes to go from 0% to 100%, or for how fast the high-speed train needs to be in order to cut the travel time for 0-100% down to 20 minutes.
Since they are specifically claiming end-to-end times of 20 minutes, I think people are assuming they only have 2 stations at 0% and 100% to achieve that, since 170*3 = 510 km/h is possible with current train tech
Yeah, that. If the constraint is end-to-end in 20 minutes you have absolutely no time to change trains in the meantime, and you'll barely make it in a cutting edge maglev that AFAIK doesn't exist anywhere in the world.
A Japanese Maglev train set a speed record of 603 km/h in April 2015
https://www.jrailpass.com/blog/maglev-bullet-train
If that's a speed that can be sustained, then you could do 170km end to end in 20 minutes even with acceleration and deceleration time.
That optimizes the end-to-end time, but it does so at the cost of making travel time between any two other points worse. It's not a sane design choice. Virtually all trips are not attempts to cross the entire thing.
I agree that it's not a sane design choice, but most of design choices for the Line are not sane design choices, which means it might still be a reasonable assumption.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
From the video, it sounds like pretty much everything that a Neom inhabitant would need will be within 1 km of his home.
Perhaps we are thinking too much of the American model of suburban homes and long commutes. It may be that only a small percentage of the inhabitants would actually need to regularly travel along the city.
What if you want to meet with friends? What if you change your jobs - do you move 40 km away along the line? What if THEN you want to meet with friends who stayed behind?
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Neom, the Line city seems reasonable.
1) I don't like life in cities, I prefer countryside but most people prefer cities because they provide more connections to other people, therefore big cities is the way to go.
2) Neom doesn't make sense as a project to protect the nature when there is very little nature around. I know that the deserts can have their own ecosystem but it really is insignificant compared to luscious Amazon rainforests.
3) It makes sense to make a city like a big building for economic reasons. Less air conditioning costs, less road infrastructure, economics of scale works quite well etc.
4) I don't understand how they plan to build a train in the city if the width is only 200 meters. But probably they mean to build it adjacent to the city. The transportation can easily work. You make, let's say 5 stops (each 2 minutes) on the way, that would make the total trip (the worst case scenario) 30 minutes long (20 min + 10 min). On the other side build a local train line with stops every 2 km (14 additional stops, each stop 1 minute stopping time, travel time between stops 2 minutes, on average 20 minutes travel). On average you would spend 35 min to travel where you need. Comparable to travel times in other big cities, probably even less considering constant trafic jams in many places, like San Francisco.
5) The long building is preferable to square or round one because it allows more sunlight.
6) The project will most likely fail because 500 billion is nowhere near the amount that would be needed for such a grandiose project. They should have started with something smaller, to show that it can be done and create more investor interest.
You're ignoring the part where the stops not only consume time themselves, but greatly diminish the maximum attainable speed the train can travel.
Does it really? 500 km/h = 138 m/s. If you accelerate at 5 m/s, you achieve that speed in 30 s. 5 stops means extra 5 minutes.
Probably about double that (you have to account for dwell time as well).
That was already accounted for.
That 5 m/s is way too high. High speed rail operates at about 0.3 m/s^2 acceleration and 0.5 m/s^2 declaration. That means you need around five minutes to get up to 500 km/h, or 32 km of distance. If you stations are 35 km apart then you can't even get up to full speed before you have to start breaking.
Is there any reason it cannot be 5 m/s^2? The current trains are not optimised for that for sure but why not?
It might be expensive and not practical due to increased energy use. But we are talking about people who are ready to throw a lot of money to boast their vanity. We have plenty of cars with double acceleration speeds.
Well, for one thing that's a lot of acceleration to put on random members of the public. It would be the equivalent of holding half your bodyweight while standing on a 30 degree incline, an incline that may or may not shift unpredictably between +30 and -30 as the train accelerates and decelerates. You would definitely want the passengers seated and belted in under such conditions, standing would be unwise for most and impossible for anyone elderly or infirm. Airline seats would probably be sufficient, but that significantly reduces carrying capacity and increases dwell time.
I definitely imagine seating passengers. When I travel by coach in the UK, the requirement is to be seated with a seatbelt fastened. It could be easily the same with train. If the total travel time is about 30 minutes, it seems perfectly doable. The compliance would not be the problem.
Well, I am sure that it will never be built. Or if it was, it wouldn't have the same specifications as in the ad. 20 minutes from one end to another was clearly too optimistic. But if they can make it 40-50 minutes, it would be still something that people find acceptable. Scott even quoted Tokyo with average random travel time from one point to another 80 minutes.
The thing is that we have never tried to optimise for the Line scenario. But if we could, who knows how that would work.
In my childhood I never dreamt that one day I will be able travel around Europe using cheap airlines (Ryanair, Easy jet) for the price that's not higher than 100 mile-long train journey. And yet here we are. It's probably very inefficient from carbon emission point of view but it works and probably one of the reasons why we haven't optimised trains.
Well your train would need a lot of big motors, which would add a lot of weight, which would require more motors, et cetera.
You also can't (I'm guessing) accelerate like that using the traction of metal wheels on metal rails, your wheels will just spin and then melt.
You could perhaps do it with some form of electromagnetic acceleration though, as used on some newer rollercoasters. In that case you could build all the power into the tunnels and leave the train car light weight. Then your main limitation is the limitations on the desire of squishy humans to be repeatedly accelerated and decelerated. Plus you'd need extra time spent at each station for everyone to get seated and buckled in, then to get unbuckled after deceleration and before alighting.
Because most people prefer not to be subjected to half a g of acceleration to get to work?
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
> 5) The long building is preferable to square or round one because it allows more sunlight.
I don't think they're worried about a shortage. Most aspects of Arabia are designed around minimizing your exposure to sunlight, not maximizing it.
> On average you would spend 35 min to travel where you need.
This claim is incoherent without knowing the distribution of travel demand. It's not going to be anything close to uniform.
It's generally more important to be able to conveniently travel to significant locations than to be able to travel to arbitrary locations.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
The train doesn't stop. Only the 20-person pods.
The more money Saudis waste on vain garbage like this, the less money they'll have available to promote Wahhabism . It's a good thing they're squandering their future.
Precisely.
That is a good point. Still, a pity about waste but now I see the benefit.
Completely agree. In fact, if it crashes and robs the Saudis of economic, political and religious clout, Neom might have delivered a much larger net social benefit than if it sort of succeeds
According to this, MSB is secretly a good guy and smarter than a lot of people think. Interesting idea.
not really, just that combination of "enemy" and "incompetent" nicely negates each other.
> Saudi Arabia builds a structure at least 100m x 100m x 1000m before 2040 or the Singularity, whichever comes first: <1%
Can I bet against this somehow? I think that for example 1:300 odds would be a good bet that I would take.
That seems consistent with "<1%", so it's betting against something stronger than what he said.
This has been my favourite Model City Monday post so far.
Maldives Floating City: ah, now we know what FFXIV's next housing expansion will look like, neat! (I know developer plan pictures always have a fictive slant to them, but those photos look particularly...video-gamey.)
>This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-used urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities.
Could we possibly solve land use forever by just setting up a bunch of pseudo-Neoms everywhere, hiring any potential resident as a "construction worker", but there'd be no actual Neom to build. (Like whenever local governments decide to waste money on a sportsball convention center. Those are American Neoms.) Or maybe the Negative Externality Oppositional Mandate (NEOM) Act would authorize such "temporary development" (auto-renewed with no sunset clause) for a permanent series of ongoing infrastructure projects that never quite seem to turn into Ecclesiastes vanity cities. It'd even create government jobs too, under the reinstated Works In Progress Administration.
Apart from the public transit nightmare, the line city also seems like a security nightmare.
A line section in the middle in the desert is probably dependent on water being pumped in from the sides.
So you have a single big pipeline which provides water to millions of people. Our section in the middle is just two terrorist attacks away from being without a water supply.
Of course, this can be worked around. So have ten cubic meters of local water storage plus a year of emergency rations for each citizen. Have every section have its own sat uplink in case someone cuts the fiber cables.
Or perhaps this dependence is a feature? If the citizens in the line city ever get ideas above their station, their wise king can just turn off their water supply and interweb tubes?
Is the typical city really any harder to destroy the water connection to?
My thoughts exactly. Besides water pipe is trivially easy to fix.
Besides where are they going to get water from? I now (temporarily) live in a city that produces half of its water from desalination plant. If you blow up the plant, it would probably take much longer time to restore full water supply than just one water pipe.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
There are benefits and downsides to both the Norwegian state model and the Saudi state model. You're just not happy with details of the Saudi model. Not every state can save and save and save. At some point you have to implement something. Norway has lost it's ship building industry to Singapore because they utilized capital. Saudi is building. Some of it work, some of it will most certainly fail -- that is called risk -- and investors can deal with risk.
Actually yes every state can save and save and save because the world contains non-state actors called 'companies'.
Singapore's shipbuilding industry generated revenue of S$15 billion in 2012 with a workforce of 106,500, or about S$140,000 revenue per worker
http://www.asmi.com/index.cfm?GPID=329
Norway had a GDP per capita of $101,000 USD in 2012, or ~S$125,000 per person
Norway is too high-wage a country to be competitive in ship-building. I suspect Singapore's ship-building industry relies on commuting Malaysian labor for the lower-value jobs, which Norway can't compete with because it doesn't have a sufficiently low-wage neighbour. It could choose to burn a portion of its nest egg to retain a ship-building industry, but that sort of resource-destroying action is usually only worth it if the industry in question is important to national defense, and Norway is part of NATO.
Norway still manages to build warships significantly cheaper than some countries though.
They sold Canada designs for a arctic patrol ship that they built for $75 Million Canadian, it cost Canadian taxpayers $716 million per ship to build them here.
Warships are much higher value-per-ton-of-displacement than most ships though, and Singapore's shipbuilding sector is 60% "offshore rig building" by value. So it's possible that Norway is good at building high-tech small ships cost-effectively since those work well with its very-high-wage labor force.
Good points. Thanks for the numbers.
Someone must produce, take chances, create new products, and have failures. Saudi will have failures. If they have enough of them, they might have some good outcomes too. Let's hope.
Yes, the city in a long block is nutty. That rather than building bombs or financing terror against Israel. Even attempting to build it will train thousands of people in skills they can take anywhere in the world.
"Someone must produce, take chances, create new products, and have failures."
Agreed, but it's usually better for these things to be private-market-led not state-led. States are most useful funding basic R&D.
"That rather than building bombs or financing terror against Israel."
Doubtful that the Saudis were going to spend $1 trillion on that, but agreed.
"Even attempting to build it will train thousands of people in skills they can take anywhere in the world."
Hopefully yes, although skills building normal-scale housing not mega-scale housing would be more transferable.
"'The city that delivers new wonders for the world'." James Bond looked up from the screen. "What delivery are we expecting, exactly?"
"A linear particle accelerator. The investors were told it was a high-speed rail line."
"Got a higher speed than they bargained for, eh?" Bond sipped his martini. "I think I'd prefer to walk."
I see some comments here really trying to spread the “good news” about the creation of Neom, as it were. I guess you’d call that Neom Genesis Evangelion.
halfknown is not the commenter Astral Codex needs, but the commenter we deserve.
Hahah.
Good one!
I’m a bit disappointed they aren’t trying to build a proper arcology. I’ve always been curious whether they’d actually work.
So, I live in Dubai and work in logistics technology. Neom is supposed to be a port city and so I was recently contacted by a recruiter for Neom and I declined to do an interview. There is no way my wife will move to Saudi, especially not to an empty city. Plus it all sounds like nonsense.
I wish I had done the interview so I could give more insight here - sorry guys!
This is the only other thing I experienced related to Neom: During the Dubai Expo, Saudi Arabia was spending massively on advertising along the main highway here, initially for Neom, and then that was scrapped after a few months and replaced with Saudi tourism. Now all of it is gone. I remember seeing that massive billboard every day that didn't even explain it was a city or that it was in Saudi, and then looking up the website and thinking it looked like a crypto scam.
These days we just have regular crypto scams advertised all along that highway.
MBS has a bunch of abondoned projects.
Three Gorges Dam, was the world’s largest ever construction project. It took 10 years to build and used 16 million tonnes of concrete.
A single wall that is 1 meter thick, 500 meters tall and 170km long, would require 204 million tonnes of concrete.
So just a single wall that is the height and length of Neom would require 12-13 times more concrete than the Three Gorges Dam project.
The plan isn’t really possible. I doubt it will ever be more than a port.
If they are building it like a long skyscraper, then it will be mostly steel and glass with maybe a series of concrete cores.
Yes, but do you think at least 1 meter of the 170 meter width will be concrete?
The Twin Towers of WTC were 63 meters x 63 meters x 420 meters and weighed 450,000 tonnes each.
So about 30 such buildings per km, or ~ 5,000 WTC towers over the 170km.
The plan is about 2.2 billion tonnes of construction.
Neom IS a billionaire passion project. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, meaning it literally belongs to the monarch, meaning it's a glorified piece of private property with an UN seat.
If your intuition is that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is squandering resources that should be going to the Saudi people, then the same intuition should apply to any resources squandered by any billionaire. If your intuition is that is that a billionaire's wealth is his to spend, then this intuition should extend to the wealth of the Saud family.
Absolute monarchy does not mean that the monarch is just a billionaire landowner. The monarch is supposed to have moral duties towards its people and the common good.
Most people in democracies already view absolute monarchy as immoral in itself. Equating it to private ownership without moral obligations whatsoever on the part of the owner/ruler would make it even more immoral and deserving of criticism.
It seems relevant that the prince is rich because of extracting resources (oil) that anyone else with the land could and would have done. Other billionaires have plausibly created huge amounts of value that would not have been created otherwise.
Would Amazon (and its undeniably impressive logistics and distribution chain) have existed without Jeff Bezos? The answer doesn't seem obvious to me.
Also, yeah, spending a trillion dollars frivolously seems bad to me regardless of who did it. I'm sad when Elon Musk buys a giant yacht instead of funding new vaccines, but it seems relevant that the most expensive yacht in the world costs ~4 billion. That's about 1/200 the scale of this project.
> Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, meaning it literally belongs to the monarch (...) then the same intuition should apply to any resources squandered by any billionaire
If someone takes entire country as a property I am fine with requiring significantly higher standards.
Also "any resources squandered"? Noone sane would be complaining that they wasted say 100$.
Your reasoning is quite flawed. Billionaires who get their wealth via markets imply that people have rewarded them for creating value. This calls for a very different intuition regarding what they can/should do with that wealth. Especially if you're comparing them to a head of state whose wealth depends on ruling a country with oil.
what *should* the Saudis build?
Asteroid processors in low-earth orbit.
A model city with four sectors based on the most promising concepts which can increase their share of the city through market and/or voting mechanisms. The Saudi secret sauce will be X years of no taxes funded by oil wealth
Make it eight sectors and call it "Midgar" and I might be persuadable.
Well, not really, but what are you thinking for "most promising concepts"?
I like the sound of Prospera in Honduras, other than that I just assume there are about 3 other potentially good systems. I think Prospera already had an allowance for some expansion
RE: Neom's dimensions - "500 meters tall, 200 meters wide, and (wait for it) 170 km long"
This reminds me of the scene in "This is Spinal Tap" where the Stonehenge prop was 18 inches high rather than the 18 feet height that Nigel had intended - because he labelled it with a double quote rather than a single quote. Is there any reason not to believe that a similar mistake has been made here? Perhaps the translator (from Arabic to English) misunderstood or isn't fully competent in English? That's all I've got.
You saw the video, it pretty clearly shows that the scale is 500m x 200m x 170km. It's definitely pretty wack tho.
>> But in fact, this is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, squandering public money.
On some level I agree, but on a different level this is a very strange take. Saudi Arabia has more than enough money. It also has more than enough problems. In a very real sense, Saudi Arabia - and the Middle East - would be better off if Saudi Arabia had less money. The Saudi prince MBS seems to be setting it onto a course of having less money. It will thereby have less money to do thing like bomb Yemen. As an additional upside, it will certainly build something cool in the process. As silly as this project is, I can't help but have a soft spot for it.
>But the problem isn’t just that Neom is too big. Everything about it is doomed. There are reasons most cities aren’t designed as 200 meter wide, 170 km long lines; this maximizes the distance between any two points!
You're neglecting one dimension. What this design does, essentially, is trade a horizontal dimension for the vertical one. At 500m high, even if a single level is 10m high this gives you 50 levels to work with. So the cross-section of this "city" is 50 levels by 200m = 10 level*km, which is comparable to the cross-section of a 2 km city of 5 levels.
Note that the Saudis are currently also building the world's tallest tower : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeddah_Tower . Unlike the west, the Saudis are able to build things relatively quickly, I'd put the odds of a 100m x 100m x 1000m structure by 2040 at around 90% conditional on MBS staying in power for the next 10 years.
Maybe not the best example as that tower seems to have been proposed in 2008, construction began in 2013, and has been nearly completely stalled since 2017. One of the reasons for the stall has been political infighting (MBS imprisoned the financial backers for a time and then fined them heavily). Another, COVID.
My source: https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/civil/jeddah-tower.htm
Getting from "construction proposed in 2008" to "300m of tower in 2018" is not that slow....
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
That Neom concept sort of reminds me of the continent spanning cities of David Wingrove's Chung Kuo sci-fi novels. Only thinner.
"The Line" seems like High Modernism as the farce to the 20th century version's tragedy.
Lol I’m an ML engineer in Tesla Autopilot and trust me he means it when he says FSD next year. In his timeline we’re already 5 years late. He sure knows how to bring some energy into the team to put it mildly
https://medium.com/dose/welcome-to-nauru-the-most-corrupt-country-youve-never-heard-of-7679ea863399
Saudi Arabia is just a big Nauru. These incompetent societies can't retain wealth, they always find a way to blow it on some stupid shit.
The reflections fron the mirrorred walls will be blinding hot.
With all the focus on travel time, I see the video claims a 5 minute walk to key amenities in a modular type of mixed zone configuration. Presumably there would be larger commercial sectors that might require a train but not from one end to the other of course
This sounds like a high probability white elephant but I'm not sure it's conceptually impossible. I imagine the novel construction challenge will be the key problem. I have to wonder what the comparable expected cost of the same city built as a core/suburb layout would be. No potholes!
Depends what you mean by 'key amenities' but a dense enough city can support a decent corner shop every 400m.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Any doubts that Neom's design involved no real engineers should be dispelled by the picture of a giant dam that /slopes outwards/.
Re. "Neom Neom Neom":
Oh, now I get it.
If you have the unlimited resources and budget something like the line would require, you could try something like this for transportation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p9Ig19gYP9o
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
OMG! I want ALL these places to be real. I'm sure you're right and it's mostly BS, but this is the sci-fi future we were promised. I WANT IT!! WAAAAAH!!!
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Unlike most of the folks here, I take this proposal seriously.
Re: Neom
1. I'm not even certain why extremely rich people would want to live there. They like avoiding inconveniences as much as the next person. Given the choice of all the places to live in the world, I have a hard time seeing how Saudi Arabia managed to compete.
2. I'm not certain it is fair to refer to it as "public money" being spent. Saudi Arabia isn't a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary supremacy. It's a personal fiefdom with the external trappings of a government.
Maybe the Neom people are playing the video game Endless Legend? It has some quirky rules that make it advantageous to build your city as a line.
A long thin city isn't a bad idea, provided that you use it as a spine and then grow thicker along it. So you might start off with a city 100km x 500m and then widen it in stages to 100kmx10km.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
Counterpoint - we're trying to get back to villages which were already open-air arcology 'projects'.
They were self-sustaining in terms of work, energy, food, water, and waste processing. Any homestead was a micro version of that. Simply surrounding the whole thing in concrete and electrical wires and plumbing is...a trivial difference which people seem oddly obsessed with.
This is like that Mexican fisherman story, where he relaxes a lot and plays guitar on the beach and some westerner gets him to start a fishing boat operation which over decades grows to a huge size, and this makes him wealthy enough through an eventual IPO so he can...spend time doing some pole fishing and playing guitar on the beach. Which he already had.
The obsession with cities and how to turn them into connected villages is something we already had and lost. We are trying to engineer our way back towards them in a seemingly blind way. In the end the 'amenities' of cities are just stupid crap for rich people which no/very few commoners need or really want. Just about anywhere people want to work close to where they live, go to a local grocery store, etc. and not have to ride a train or hyperloop or drive or walk or ride a horse very far to get there. I not only see the appeal, I'm already much happier not going more than 5km from where I live 99% of the time.
The city I'm in does next to nothing for the vast majority of people living in it, other than make everything harder and take longer. With remote working almost everything cities offer in terms of density benefits can be done remotely. Not to mention...most of the 'benefits' are just bigger profits for the already wealthy to be even wealthier and have no impact or meaning for the average person.
I think the trend will be to decentralise populations into many smaller towns and villages where life is more pleasant. It is already what most people choose to do when they have a choice - cities are a place of last resort as people fled dying small towns where big businesses rolled through with illegal and aggressive land grabs, like what we are seeing in Denmark and Sri Lanka right now under the false guise of 'organic ag' with purposefully impossible sudden death bans on nitrogen fertilisers.
There is simply no way or reason to find a way to make some megacity feel homey and small and human scale. If we want smaller, then build smaller. Going over 100,000 or 200,000 population where you can support a small university and many high schools and primary schools and such is pointless for the average person. This isn't some Buckminster Fuller fantasy, it was simply the reality for the vast majority of human history and it turns out we want to go back to that way of living, but with a few goodies from industrialisation.
After all we've done, the answers were what we already had, except we went on a journey to make it all workable with technology.
A few automated farming operations and delivery services, vertical or not, and a series of interconnected villages and towns with greenbelts around them will work much better. Despite the weird and idiotically fervent push by many employers to go 'back to work' even though everyone was already working from home just fine, with technology and just a little bit more automation than we have today, we could really improve quality of life for the vast majority of people and the answer is not going to be cities of any kind.
Apart from every other "livability" aspect to Neom, I call bullshit on the energy aspects.
There's going to be a LOT of energy generated in that dense line – how is it supposed to be removed? Simply drawing a picture with "cool air arrows" flowing into it (the famously cool desert air of Saudi Arabia?) is not a solution.
You couldn't make this scheme work with standard US energy per capita levels (and, BTW, there's no way local solar has the required energy density), and yet nowhere do you see chillers, massive AC blowers, and nuclear power stations...
LineLoop: Hyperloop for The Line
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
>>The minimum safe interval between two vehicles is the reaction time for the emergency brake to be applied from an incident involving the vehicle above, plus the time required for that brake to bring the vehicle to a full stop.<<
Let's focus on my imagined "train" of pods.
I instinctively arranged the pods in a train because it greatly increases the space to the next train.
Pod Dimensions:
5 rows of 4 abreast seats with seat belts.
20 passengers max.
One row per meter. No aisle.
Seats load from the side.
All rows are accessible simultaneously.
Pod is 5 meters long plus rubber bumper bag.
Linear motor?
Minimal weight.
I imagined a train of ten pods which is approximately 50 meters long. The pods in the train are touching each other with a rubber bumper at the front of esch pod. One foot thick?
There is a space of 450 meters before the next train at peak capacity.
The reaction time is essentially zero. All of the pods in the train are controlled simultaneously.
For example, CentCom commands all trains to stop. Each pod has an onboard computer. The ten computers in the train communicate to bring the train to a stop.
Example: One of the pods asks CentCom for permission to exit the train and stop at a station. CentCom commands the ten computers to perform the exit maneuver.
Problems?
So, let's assume 0.5G emergency braking, as that's a typical number for public transit; we have S (450m), V (0), A (-5m/s^2), we want U (maximum initial velocity): V^2 = U^2 + 2AS, rearrange to U = SQRT(V^2 -2AS) = SQRT(4500)=67 m/s, or 241 km/h.
So that's not compatible with 400 km/h running even with an instantaneous reaction time. And that's fast enough braking that disembarking passengers are doing to get noticeable marks from the seat belts digging into their skin, and items loose in the pod (laptops, mobile phones, people's lunch, drinks) will get thrown forward (so you need headrests just to protect the people in the front seats from being hit in the back of the head). That's all OK for an emergency, of course.
The key reaction time question is how long from an incident that causes the pod to need to stop to the emergency brake being applied to the pod. That depends on a lot of factors:
How quick are our sensors? - photovoltaics have a reaction time, so do piezoelectrics, then we need to account for speed of sound and speed of light delays, then for processing time, then for how fast we can deploy the magnetic brake. Even a fully-automated system is going to take tens of milliseconds, and may well take hundreds. Put a neural network in there, and you could be looking at significant fractions of a second.
Bear in mind that at 400 km/h, 100 ms is 11m, one second is 111m.
Thank you. I'm going to think about how to get more distance between trains.
But I'm curious about why one train needs to stop suddenly. What are you imagining? In fact you can't stop just one train. The train behind would run into it.
ALL OF THE TRAINS STOPPING I understand. Earthquake. Power problem. Tube break. When ALL of the trains stop, the distance between them doesn't change.
BTW the seats should definitely have head rests.
"I'm curious about why one train needs to stop suddenly."
Some examples:
It breaks down.
Someone is on the piste (ie a suicide).
Some*thing* is on the piste - a rock, a bit that fell off the previous train, a bit that fell off the roof of the tube.
The piste fails (e.g. a section of magnets pack in), and the train hits the piste.
Localised tube break.
"In fact you can't stop just one train. The train behind would run into it."
In any train system I'm aware of, yes you can. The signalling system is operated such that trains are far enough apart that you can. If someone standing on a bridge drops a block of concrete on the track, stopping the train dead, then the next train will not run into the first one.
The same should theoretically apply on the road - the recommended or required separation distance in almost all jurisdictions is that if the vehicle in front stops suddenly, then you should be able to stop. Almost no-one ever actually does: the standard stopping distances in the UK Highway Code are about twice the separation found on actual British roads.
You can tell this by looking at the official stopping distances: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/559afb11ed915d1595000017/the-highway-code-typical-stopping-distances.pdf
"I'm going to think about how to get more distance between trains."
The easy way is bigger trains. That means timetables and regular service, rather than pods being routed on the fly - just catch the train that's going where you want to.
CentCom will not stop one train. It understands that that would be disastrous.
All or none.
Thanks for the reminder that I can make the trains longer: 20 pods & 900 meters between trains.
That was easy.
What happens when a train collides with a foreign object? Or when CentCom loses control of a train? Or the maglev system fails and the train collides with the piste? Or the lateral station-keeping fails and the trains turns sideways, or slides into the other lane? That train will stop without instruction from CentCom.
A vehicle has just stopped catastrophically. We're talking going from 400kph to zero in a second or less, which is going to be 12G or more. Many of the passengers are dead. How do you stop the next train from hitting it and making things worse?
Answer: the next train has to be far enough away that when CentCom realises that one of the trains is no longer responding, it then automatically signals the emergency brake, at which point you need to brake hard. You need to look at what acceleration and deceleration is actually possible for maglev; there's no friction to help.
At that point, presumably CentCom sends the emergency brake signal to the train(s) approaching that one, and sends the non-emergency brake signal to other trains that are not in immediate danger of a collision. I mean, that's what an ROC would do, and CentCom is basically a ROC.
ROC: Rail Operations Centre, ie a giant signalling facility with a massive board showing where all the trains are and all the tracks.
Thank you for this input. This is exactly what I need.
One train hits an unexpected obstacle. The rubber bumpers are a meter thick and compressible to 50 cm. In a train of 20 pods that is 55 m of additional stopping distance (plus the crumpling of the first few pods). CentCom orders all trains to stop. However today due to a software bug, CentCom goes out to lunch and can't broadcast the ALL-STOP signal. But that means it stops broadcasting the ALL-IS-WELL signal which normally goes out ten times per second. In the absence of this all of the onboard computers know that all trains must stop.
A modern train signalling system (CBTC - communications-based train control) works by continuously transmitting the equivalent of an ALL-IS-WELL signal - actually transmitting to each train the authorisation to move up to a certain point (e.g "you may advance to position 2350" - to a train at position 2300, so if they get 50m before getting a new authorisation to go further, then they emergency stop).
ERTMS/ETCS (European Railway Traffic Management System/European Train Control System) level 2 is a fixed block system working like that (ie there are certain fixed authorisation points, rather than continuously authorising every metre). Level 3, which is a moving block system is still being worked on. The point of ERTMS is that it's a standard, so a train can have equipment from one supplier and the trackside equipment can be from another and they will be intercompatible.
At the moment, all moving block systems are proprietary, e.g. Siemens Trainguard, or Thales SelTrac or Bombardier CITYFLO. You would want a moving block system for what you need.
They aren't exactly off-the-shelf systems; there is an enormous amount of work needed to ensure that the radio signal gets through to the trains, as rail tunnels are awful environments for radio signals (OHLE spews out masses of radio interference, as does a maglev piste). They will install trackside beacons, then run hundreds of tests, then move beacons and probably install a few to fill gaps in the coverage, then run more tests, and probably do several more cycles.
You make a lot of comparisons to existing train ststems (which may reflect your expertise,).
However the proposed system is a one-dimensional evacuated-tube-transport system which has little to do with existing systems. For example no one is going to drop a concrete block from a bridge inside a vacuum tube.
A system under millisecond control by a central computer.
I think the difference between us is not our safety margins but the fact that I am working theoretically (a priori) and you are working from existing knowledge. Rather than being a problem, this allows for excellent synergy.
On-board (pod) computers are constantly communicating, both within the train and to the fore and aft trains. In the case of an emergency and in the absence of direction from CentCom, the ALl-STOP command is propogated within the entire tube.
Using an online calculator, I calculated that it requires 12 seconds to accelerate from 0 to 400 kph at 1 G. Same for braking.
I guestimated 200 kph average speed during acceleration which equates to 667 meters
Can you verify this or contradict it?
Your maths is solid; I just don't think that passengers will be OK with 12 seconds at the acceleration of a supercar.
>>First, 1km intervals is reasonable for a public transit system. You'll get a few complaints from mobility impaired people, but they'll cope; people who can't walk 500m generally have mobility aids (e.g. a wheelchair). <<
Practically I like the 1 km spacing. One source says an average person can walk 500 M in 6 minutes. So by expanding the 5-minute walk in Neon to 6 minutes, everything jives.
In a carfree city, most wheelchair users should have no trouble at all going 500 M. They get a special pod also.
And conceptually I love the 1 km spacing. 100 kilometer city, 100 stations. Perfect.
>>Second, you're not running a fixed schedule. That means you're relying on passengers providing correct information before boarding as to which station they want. <<
Busses in the Dominican Republic (where I live) don't have a fixed schedule, they just come every few minutes. Work's just fine.
The ID card stores the rider's common destinations. When they enter the station, a touchscreen displays their top ten destinations. They touch one. Terminal confirms choice (visually and audibly) and asks the rider to press the OK button. Microscopic error rate.
>>If a passenger changes their destination while on-board (e.g. they get a phone call causing them to reroute), then can you reroute the vehicle without causing a problem?<<
Change your mind? Tell CentCom with your smartphone. Unless your new destination has already been passed, CentCom can probably accommodate you.
>> How are you going to ensure that the system the passenger uses to select their destination works for everyone? I'm mostly thinking about language barriers, but there's also people with various disabilities (blind being the most obvious choice).<<
I'll add preferred language to the ID card. CentCom is multilingual!
Thanks to NFC technology a blind person doesn't need to insert their ID card (no one does), just wave it around close to the card slot. (The card slot has a tactile border around it.)
https://www.nedapsecurity.com/nl/insight/near-field-communication-nfc-for-access-control-the-benefits-challenges/
Now the door knows they are blind and interacts verbally. Also note that blind persons get a special pod with a sighted attendant!
>>Next, your boarding time is reasonable for small pods, provided they have internal circulation spaces, or they are fully open (ie the platform has direct access to all the seating, rather than there just being doors), <<
An entire wall of the pod rotates upward exposing all five rows of seats. No aisle so no wasted space.
>>and provided you don't need seat belts.<<
Of course we need seat belts. Folks can fasten their seatbelt while the airlock is cycling (about 30 seconds). The onboard computer knows exactly which seatbelts are not fastened.
Computer voice: "Passengers in seats B3 and D2, please fasten your seatbelts."
You can be sure that won't be me!
>>You'll need additional parking space at the stations for the occasional pod that is delayed by a disabled passenger (like me), or someone who can't or won't follow instructions. >>
Parking space for pods? They line up close to the station in the slow lane.
>>I'd push that to 60 seconds if people need to wear seat belts, and increase the allowance for delays;
Now allowing 60 seconds for everone to get seated plus 30 seconds for the airlock to do its thing. If someone doesn't have their seatbelt clasped the pod will still exit the airlock and move 20 meters down the slow lane, but it won't accelerate until all seatbelts are fastened.
>> Acceleration; 1G is excessive even in a car - it's equivalent to a 0-60 time of 2.74 seconds. Passengers are not going to accept the acceleration of a supercar at its performance limit as a routine part of travel. 1G deceleration (which means pushing the passenger into the belt) is emergency braking, not routine operation; there is no way that will get widespread passenger acceptance.<<
New specs:
Standard acceleration: .5G
Standard deceleration: .5G
ID card can specify slower A/D.
Emergency acceleration: 1G ?
Emergency deceleration: 1G ?
>>Trains, which admittedly have to deal with standing passengers, tend to find that 0.15G is considered pretty quick acceleration; they usually have an emergency brake, that will achieve about 0.45G (using a magnetic track brake entirely possible for a maglev system).
Emergency braking is reserved for emergencies, as it will knock standing passengers off their feet, and result in any loose items (e.g. laptops, phones, etc) flying around and being turned into projectiles. It's only used in an emergency; normal braking is at 0.10-0.15G. <<
I want to use .5G braking to clear the A/D lane faster. Many production cars brake faster than this.
>>Sideways acceleration limits are normally even lower;<<
Moving over 12 feet should not be a big deal.
Update.
Pods are 6 meters long including a 1 meter rubber bumper.
Trains are usually 20 pods long (120 meters) with a 1880 meter gap to the next train.
Cruising speed is 300 kph.
City is 100 km long, end-to-end in 30 minutes.
I suspect the true purpose of Neom is to transfer money out of the national treasury, or the royal coffers, and into the hands of select people, in a way that's more-legal or less-offensive than direct payments.
Why should public transportation be safer than driving?
Of course I'm not opposed to making the public system as safe as possible. Say 2X safer than driving.
Driving: 1000 deaths per year
Public: 500 deaths per year
So you would not implement the public system? And continue to have 1000 deaths per year?
Actually every pod has three on-board computers. They execute in parallel and compare results: if one cpu disagrees, it is ignored, the malfunction signal is sent, and that pod is taken out of service ASAP.
We can do .5G. Originally I was thinking that 400 kph must be reached before the next station is reached, but with a continuous A/D lane, that is not necessary.
There are actually three lanes:
Cruising lane
A/D lane
Airlock lane
Pods move to the short airlock lane before reaching a station. There can be more than one pod waiting to enter the airlock.
To Erusian:
Did you ever take a look? The design is getting better.
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
>>I think you're going to have too many conflicts between accelerating and decelerating pods; the better option would be to have separate acceleration and deceleration lanes either side of the fast lane, a grade-separated bypass route for pods that can't reach full speed (that probably means an exit on the opposite side that goes to an overpass that delivers the pod to the deceleration lane).<<
Peter's latest brilliant idea: A/D lane switches between accelerating and decelerating every 15 seconds. 12 seconds to clear the lane.
>>CentCom is just your signalling operations centre, right?<<
CentCom directly controls the entire system. Well, it tells the onboard computers what to do.
>>Your calculations of the numbers of trips per hours assume that the service is not peaky; typical public transport is peaky enough that they get 50% of their weekly trips in two 90-minute peak periods on just the five weekdays, one before work and one after. Obviously, in NEOM or something, you could maybe manipulate work hours to be more evenly spread out, but people will still prefer to all have their leisure at the same time, so there will be some peakiness whatever you do. <<
I'm working on peakiness.
>>"The stopping pod sidles to the right into the A/D lane and decelerates." Annoyingly, this has never actually been demonstrated on any maglev system; normally, maglev vehicles are maintained in the centre of their piste by the magnetic fields being shaped to do so, rather than by controls in the vehicles themselves. Points are achieved by dynamically reshaping the fields, or by mechanically moving a swinging section of piste. Neither of which would really work for what you are trying to do. <<
From the internet:
>>The hyperloop itself is completely levitated, stabilised and propelled by magnetic forces, so there is no physical contact with the infrastructure; therefore the operation expenses are extremely low, as the loop is near to maintenance free. The lane switch technology is also based on magnetic fields – without any mechanical context or moving components we can chose to go left or right just by controlling the magnetic field of the vehicle. It is very convenient to have vehicles that can switch lanes at a very high frequency. It is the combination of frictionless movement and magnetic propulsion that allows it to be very fast.<<
https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/hyperloop-a-step-closer/723/
It's a lot of fun to imagine something and then go find it!
>>I like the buttons system (like a lift), but you probably want to add on a mobile phone app so passengers don't have to queue to push the button. <<
I abandoned the button idea because I want to know the identity of riders. (So they can be called to the platform by name, so we know health requirements, so we know typical destinations, etc.) Mobile app -- definitely.
>>You'd need to do a simulation to make sure you actually have enough acceleration/deceleration space, there are going to be big speed differentials on that A/D lane.<<
I'm thinking about making the airlock lane continuous.
Fast Lane: 300 kph
A/D Lane: 100-300 kph
Slow Lane: 0-100 kph (airlock lane)
The slow lane is actually 100 lanes of a kilometer each separated by an airlock.
CentCom would have a rule: only two moving pods in a slow segment at a time. It has about a minute to get a pod out of an airlock segment after acceleration begins. That gives CentCom some flexibility as to when a pod enters the A/D lane.
Note that a departing pod can sit outside of the airlock indefinitely. CentCom can easily wait 15 seconds for the accel phase before accelerating the pod.
It takes less than 12 secs to accelerate from 100 kph to 300 kph at .5 G. Same time for deceleration at .5G. Note that the less time a pod spends in the A/D lane the better.
Average speed in the A/D lane is 200 kph. At that speed pods are moving 55 m per second. In 12 seconds they will move 660 meters. If every pod has 660 meters for itself, there will be no collisions. There could be 150 pods in the 100 km A/D lane.
The maximum rate of turnover at a station is one pod every two minutes. 100 pods arriving and 100 departing every 2 minutes. Pods pass through the A/D lane in 12 seconds. Imagine that every 15 seconds the A/D lane switches from accelerating to decelerating.
100 pods accelerate: 15 seconds
100 pods decelerate: 15 seconds
90 seconds: no pods in A/D lane.
More realistically pods leave and arrive at random times. So 200 pods distributed randomly over 120 seconds (according to the Poisson distribution I believe)
Wild-ass guess for typical max per 15 second interval: 40 pods. Note the max figure is not actually random, but is under the control of CentCom.
So we have 40 pods in the A/D lane rather than 150. PLUS they are ALL accelerating or ALL decelerating. That's bound to help.
>>If it doesn't work, then you can still solve most of the issues with a more conventional approach: three lines, one ("slow" or "local") that stops at all 100 stations, one ("semi-fast" or "local express") that stops at 20-25 stations, and one ("fast" or "express") that stops at 4-5 stations. The fast line would likely need to be maglev, the semi-fast and slow are probably better done as regular trains (you don't need airlocks then); you arrange for cross-platform transfers (ie you step off one train and the same platform has the other line on the other side). I expect that most passengers would stay on the slow until they reached the fast station rather than switching to the semi-fast, even though they would actually save them time (people hate transferring)<<
No pod swutching!
"But in fact, this is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, squandering public money."
Not really. Saudi Arabia does not have a public thing, a res publica. It is not a republic. It is something much more medieval.
This does not mean that he is going to get away with. It is not his money. his father is still alive and is still the King. If it's anybody's money it is the King's. Or, it is the family's money. The family being the descendants of MBS's grandfather Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who number in the thousands.
And here is MBS's real problem. He needs the approval of the family to be crowned as his father's successor. In Europe kingship is inherited by very specific rules of legitimate inheritance. We know the names and faces of the next three kings of England. Islamic lands never adopted those types of rules.
It is the same problem that the Roman's had. If you want a model of the bad possibilities read Shakespeare's plays about the War of the Roses.
Hello Scott,
Just discovered your Model City Monday posts - refreshing, thanks so much. I find the NEOM project to be not very sustainable but I am glad interest in model cities is growing and I hope to see more in North America.
Have you discovered any model communities focused on sustainabiilty and smart communities in the U.S.? Given the housing shortages on the West Coast and growing interest in sustainability, net zero and ecocommunities, there is likely almost unlimited demand if a network can build the right communities.
I ask because this is a topic of great personal interest and because we fabricate wooden buildings in our factory in Oregon and we are very interested as acting as suppliers and partners to develop these kinds of communities. We see scaling sustainable building systems by developing communiites as opposed to only custom buildings as the best way forward. We have experience on over 1,000 buildings already and are investing in a new factory, CNC machines and industrial robots and are creating a housing innovation cluster in Oregon. Here are some examples of our buildings
https://www.canva.com/design/DAE9tGsNyHs/OA2n-EsnhYJ8tkokLET5rg/view?utm_content=DAE9tGsNyHs&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=homepage_design_menu
Let me know. We are connected to many other innovators working in the building industry that share our interest - here are a 37 innovators on my Youtube channel as an example of people working at the literal cutting edge of timber, technology, robotics, digital fabrication and helping software eat construction https://www.youtube.com/c/MassTimberCity/videos
and we would like to connect to a larger community like the one you have created.