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Surely that's a hexagon?

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author

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.

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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.

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(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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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You don't need a train that stops 85 times. You need log2(n) tracks and and at most log2(n) transfers.

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author

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.

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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.

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It's a car/pod with an EMPTY SEAT which is going to your destination.

Rodes.pub/LineLoop

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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.

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Aug 2, 2022·edited Aug 2, 2022

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.

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If you don't think about it long enough this is just how a highway works.

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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

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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?

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Aug 1, 2022·edited Aug 1, 2022

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

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Aug 2, 2022·edited Aug 2, 2022

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.

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Doesn't seem any worse than switching between the express 4 train and the local 6 train in Manhattan.

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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.

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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...)

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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.

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Maybe you could suck people through pneumatic tubes from one end to the other. Just spit-balling.

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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.

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The Roads Must Roll! but Saudi style, so if there's a labor dispute you just kill everyone.

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+1 for the Caves of Steel reference. I always wished I could try out their crazy conveyor belt highways.

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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.

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There's film of the two-speed moving walkway in Paris in the 1890s https://youtu.be/fo_eZuOTBNc?t=297

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LOL!

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Aug 2, 2022·edited Aug 2, 2022

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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founding

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!

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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!

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And if you trip you potentially kill hundreds of people in a massive ball of bone and gore

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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.

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Standing in 300mph wind would also be a bit of a challenge.

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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.

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Put it in a vacuum and make everyone wear spacesuits

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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...

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Could they put some solid "walls" periodically on the walkway to push the air, that people could shelter behind?

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Ah, "Neom" is the sound of a 300mph pedestrian whipping past your mid-desert cafe experience.

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not to mention the breeze in your face

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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.

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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.

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Made me laugh out loud, thank you

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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!

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good idea, but what if someone tries to cheat the system by just walking across the center of the circle instead?

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This is the content I love this community for

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Comedy gold!

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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).

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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...

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How many stops would it take to reach Mornington Crescent?

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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.

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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

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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...)

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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.

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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...

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Aug 1, 2022·edited Aug 1, 2022

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.

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In this case, the problems with absolute monarchites is that they are a form of command economy, and command economies don't work well.

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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.

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Was the US a command economy when it built Washington? It’s a common enough practice for many countries to do something like this.

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> 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.

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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?

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> 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)

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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Aug 3, 2022·edited Aug 3, 2022

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.

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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).

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You think there is a less than 25% chance that the NEOM venture completely disappears in a couple years?

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author

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.

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Aug 1, 2022·edited Aug 1, 2022

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?

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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.

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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.

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If self driving cars are ever a thing, then that’s the way.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Remember MBS has money. Maybe his optimal city is a (hemi-)sphere instead...

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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.)

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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"?).

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Don’t let people leave their homes.

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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.

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What sort of tradeoffs, given we're designing a city from scratch here?

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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.

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So vertical spacing is important then. Either dig down, or build high.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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If you're starting from scratch, you dig the trenches first, then you build the roads on top of them.

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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?

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If the trains are on the same level as the cars, theyll get held up at intersections.

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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?

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You need roads to bring equipment in, and get rid of excavated material.

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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.

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Heavily curved routes and high speed rail don't really mix.

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So... Paris? (Not exactly, but that's reasonably close!)

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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.

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What happens if someone else is using the same track?

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The robots program their routes to avoid collisions just as they do in the warehouses.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Rodes.pub/LineLoop

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Thank you, I'll take a look at this.

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Not trying to make you feel guilty...

The plan is much better now, and I would love to know your thoughts.

Rodes.pub/LineLoop

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Gotcha; thanks for clarifying.

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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/

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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.

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IIRC Berlin's central train station is built that way - it's literally two perpendicular train hubs stacked on top of each other.

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Note that in OpenTTD tunnels and bridges are almost free compared to reality

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On the other hand, parent comment asked for a solution given Mohammed bin Salman's money, which is in the trillions.

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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.

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Who ever thought that a grid layout was a good idea, other than shoe leather salesmen?

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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).

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(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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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> 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Haha. This is very true, the sketch’s project is far more doable than Neom.

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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.

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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.

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Perfect.

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you just need 7 dimensions.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And to paraphrase W.C Fields, the rest is wasted.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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> they claim it will be carbon free

so what?

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>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.

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> 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.

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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.

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Maybe, but it seems a lot less less wasteful than a US-Saudi Arabia war.

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"there has to be a bar on "burning natural resources" before we do something."

Good idea. Cut the power to FAANG when?

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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.

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"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.

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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 :)

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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?

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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.

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> a waste of resources with negative public good value, if there ever was one

No, that goes for Russian military.

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You seem to have a very much US-centric view.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Scott really angling to get Kashoggi'd, here

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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".

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I’d definitely visit Neon, when built.

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You can visit Naypyidaw today, if this sort of thing appeals to you...

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founding

…why is it a line??

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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.

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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.

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MBS is optimized for "consolidating and holding power in an hereditary monarchy", not any sane measure of utility.

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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.

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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?)

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If the location I've seen is right, part of it actually does face onto the Red Sea.

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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.

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Aug 2, 2022·edited Aug 2, 2022

Making it mirror the outside endorses that hypothesis. They're worried about the heat.

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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.

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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.

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Aug 2, 2022·edited Aug 2, 2022

Then why is it a single line instead of ten parallel lines connected by a subway system, which would be much more efficient?

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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.

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Aug 3, 2022·edited Aug 3, 2022

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.

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If you can go from one end to the other in 20 minutes, why do you care how long it is?

Rodes.pub/LineLoop

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Aug 20, 2022·edited Aug 20, 2022

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?

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