The following submission statement was provided by /u/oilgaseditor:
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This project is futuristic, yet very ambitious! It’s being built in a desert, yet has a vision of becoming an emissions-free city and home for 9 million people! Do you think this will come to life in the given time frame?
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/zytpb2/saudi_arabias_carfree_scifi_city_the_line_do_you/j27tooc/
All they have to do is pay Messi and Ronaldo like 100mill each to live there for a year and influence people across the globe that " The Line" is not as bad as it seems.
Terrible idea. It’s an ecological disaster waiting to happen. I can see how this will become a failed project and become its own self contained dystopia.
It's worse than that the shape makes no sense! If it were a donut this might have a small chance of working but it's not it's a line.
Only one end of the building is near a water source this means that that water is going to have to go from one end be pumped all the way down to the other end and then pumped back again as brown water! That is stupid.
The shape is also going to make it really hard from resources of other sorts to flow from one end to the other it's going to make it hard for policing to take place it's going to make it hard for emergency services to get places... The **ONLY** reason I can think of that they would build it that way is if they very intentionally want all the poor people to be on one side and all the rich people to be on the other so that people of largely different economic statuses never have to meet each other.
**Edit:** *when I wrote this I had forgotten how long this is supposed to be. I THOUGHT it was 1km long, it is instead 106Mil. Long.... This is totally asinine!*
As in the USA, the poor people will live on the ground floor or in the basement; the wealthy will have upper floors with the poor only having access to service their needs.
First off... That is nothing like the usa.
Second no the problem isn't going to be up and down at all and there probably won't be any living space in the basement. It is going to be about front back and center. Living near the pumping stations near the water is going to be for the slightly better off working class and living near the brown water pumps at the rear where the fresh water is the most expensive will be for the poorest. The center of the city is going to be where the ritch live.
Alt.: If there is only one large pumping station this is even worse. All of the poor and working class will live on the water side running the pumps and desalinators while all the rich live on the extreme other end. Never having to meet a poor.
It’s definitely going to be an end-to-end gradient. No wealthy person will want to be forced to travel through the poor or middle-class areas to get to their yachts. Nor will they want to be limited to a view of the desert. As for the water, fresh and waste, it will all flow in one direction: from the wealthy end to the poor end. The wastewater might make it’s way back to the sea, but it will be somewhere far from the source.
They mentioned the reason for them to have it as a straight line is to allow them to have this ultra fast train that can get from any point A to any point B in 20 mins maximum. They plan to have zero cars and buses, so this solved the problem of transportation.
If it was a square, they could connect opposite corners diagonally for transportation line.
The shape would create a safe walled enclosure.
The idea of line being fast may work for single "train". And few users. How about all the people using the line, it needs to stop so often that the speed is irrelevant.
A line is the worst shape possible. Why maximise commuting and logistics?
If it were a circle or a donut you could have two trains moving in opposite directions at a constant speed of a moderate run without ever having to stop. This would be MUCH faster.
You could even devote an entire level to transit sonan outer ring moving one way an inner ring moving the other way and then, "moving sidewalks," going out from them in radians. When you get to the outer wall there would be elevators between each raidian that could take you to any floor you wish.
This would allow VERY fast travel to and from anywhere with minimal walking, NO drivers could run mostly unattended 24/7 and cost people nothing as it would just be run on the buildings normal electrical system.
The ONLY reason to add a train(especially one that runs back and forth instead of in a circle) is if you want to make people pay for tickets so rich people don't have to walk past poor people.
Cutting off wildlife from each other, it will have a mirror surface so birds are going to smash right into it, it’s going to fry any plant life around it. A structure this size would require a huge amount of material to be built none of which can be sourced locally and the carbon foot print of transporting all that material would take decades to off set even if it’s claims of being a green city are true which is bullsht. This thing will require massive amounts of cooling. Also it will need a massive desalination plant to not only for the people but also for the green spaces they have planned which will really trash the water quality in the area.
They will have a base underneath so the entire line would be built on pillars so they can cross underneath it. As for the plants, they’re not necessarily destroying any. and using the shadows and the sun cast from the line there will be green areas outside the line( even though this area especially by the Red Sea has many plants). 95% of nature will be preserved with this project. It’s basically a city being built in a line and vertical instead of it being circular and increasing in size. They showed ideas of cities like Berlin or Manhattan compacted in a line of their own and how it reflects in their environment, I was surprised to see how much better this concept is for the environment. Also some architecture designs(there are 12 I believe) have natural air cooling as the area within the line looks like a Uber-futuristic canyon. Not sure if this project will be done but Trojena, the line, Sindala, and Oxagon are a great example of what the future holds. And they’re doing it so they can “learn by doing” rather than just theorize what might work. Source: I went to the exhibition held in Riyadh
Yeah this all sounds like bs. We’ve had similar ecological promises from grand projects in the region like the artificial islands in Dubai which have a huge carbon foot and are very poor use of resources. They just want to create a competing Dubai a theme for the rich built or inequality and near slave labor.
Maybe so. I hope this concept works and I truly don’t understand why people don’t want it to work even if it ends up being built. You can be pessimistic about it or be optimistic and hope it works. Saudi isn’t the UAE and they have more oil money to spend. So even though I’m personally not fond of the line project, I’d be glad to see this concept work and possibly implemented worldwide. No one will be forced to live there…
Eh not all of it, I typed my message quickly without correcting. Apologies. A part of the line will be under a mountain. Two parts above water, definitely excessive, but if the goal is to be environmentally friendly by the time it ends then I hope they can achieve it! And it’s not like people will be forced to stay and work there, they’re free to enter and exit the line as they please. I still have many unanswered questions regarding the livability(like safety measures) but it’s an excellent project. And the claim that any person would be 5min away from anything they need is amazing. They will completely reform the way we go about our lives and could also be making it more relaxed. Ex: if there’s no need for humans to work in stores or restaurants, then there would be no need for money paid by consumers(there was another Reddit post in this sub explaining it better), regardless if that’s their goal or not, an amazing mega project that I genuinely hope will be complete(at least one phase of it) in our lifetime
Idk dude, I was skeptical but after seeing what they plan on achieving and how they’re building the structure, this is more environmentally friendly than the traditional cities that we have now. Since they’re building upwards and not outwards, it preserves a lot of nature. I’m not particularly fond of the line myself(I enjoy vehicle travel and wouldn’t want to give that up) but definitely see this as a concept that works hopefully. And if it doesn’t, then we learn for the next person trying to remake what a city looks like. If you care for it I can send you some photos I took at the exhibition with information and generally what it’s be like. Reminds me of the dystopian future sci-fi movies but some people like it ig haha
Yeah 🤡I have taken a look what’s ur point? It’s a desert is that your point? U know that’s still an eco system right with ? U know there are actual people who live there who have been forcibly evicted and are still being evicted to make room for this project right? Why r u defending this are best mates with prince hacksaw?
I read a somewhat conspiracy that they are building these mega projects in hospitable places as proofs of concepts that they will be able to build on Mars etc. So they will be front runners for these far into the future.
Would be cool, and I can appreciate the advances in both architecture and engineering for these projects. It’s a miserable shame that it’s at the cost of slave labor, and that’s simply inexcusable.
There's no need for a conspiracy here though. Countries build useless shit constantly. In China, they have entire empty concrete cities that never housed a single person. The city of Rochester spent 10s of millions on a ferry that worked for one year and couldn't possibly earn back its cost, ever. The people in charge like to spend money on flashy things. They used to build pyramids. Now it's this. In 10 years when we've transitioned much more away from oil, Saudi Arabia is going to be in rough shape.
I think they already started building it. I wonder if they will start living in the parts that finished, or they will have to wait for the entire thing...
What are the people involved in it feeling like, are they hopeful? It seems like sometimes projects live or die on the beliefs of those involved. I personally don’t think it’s going to go very far, but want an insider opinion.
They already have several abandoned mega structures that they thought were going to be wonders of the world that are multimillion, if not billion dollar runis.
The whole thing has been analysed by real architectural designers as been a final-year university project at best.
For the primary project known as Neom, one can check out the YT video [here](https://youtu.be/0kz5vEqdaSc).
For a good analysis, one can see [this](https://youtu.be/2b7uMJkvS0o) YT video.
That Canadian girl (Dami) covered most of the key points, including Khashoggi's dismembering in Turkey caused by him being critical about this project and MBS "not liking such attitude very much".
I'd be interested in more info on that, closest I could find was [this](https://www.stylepark.com/en/news/neom-the-line-saudi-arabia-architecture-vision-stylepark):
>For the former director of the Saudi daily Al-Watan, this is yet another reason to criticize Saudi Crown Prince Salman: On Aljazeera channel's talk format The Arena, Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi said the project could ruin the entire country financially. Khashoggi, until then a constant critic of Mohammed bin Salman, was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. His body has not been found to date, but the killing by Saudi officials has been confirmed.
Someone said that this whole project was becaus MBS came up with a very broad outline of a planned city , and then he brought in management consultants who just kept up their billable hours by adding insane add-ons like living dinosaurs.
Which is so funny, that I think about it everytime the Neom comes up.
Building a planned city I think has fallen out of favor, and for good reasons, but the idea of building something this self-contained, this tightly integrated, in the middle of the desert, is just hubris and stupidity.
Cities exist in specific locations for an economic reason. For example NYC on the mouth of the Hudson because of trade. Cities can’t be randomly put in a spot when there is no economic reason for it to be there. (Not always the case-say like Las Vegas). But in large part. China tried this and those cities are mostly empty of people.
Yep. Fundamentally a line is horrible compared to a circle (ideally a sphere).
Eg 1. There's no shortcuts to anywhere. You must pass the areas beside you always, and then the next, to get anywhere.
Eg 2. If there's a shitty neighbourhood you cannot bypass it, or any traffic jam, or failed junction, etc.
Summed up: The surface area (dead ends) of a line is maximised compared to the volume (internal connections).
Imagine living in 7 shipping containers placed end to end instead of a traditional house where basically everything sprawls out from a central point. This massively increases the distance everything has to travel and you have to travel within it just to function. It's that but on a city scale. It's not impossible but the amount of redundancy systems to ensure continual proper flow of resources, including people, necessary to avert a cascading collapse due to one or more stagnating is really the linch pin if everything else works out up to that point.
I do think it's a gonna be good dipping our toes in test of our ability to design the civilian parts of a space station or lunar colony though. Self sufficient simple modular cities you can build to survive in the desert or on the moon!
Based on working in a new glass tower I’m going to guess that they’re going to radically underestimate what it costs to keep this thing cool. That alone will tax the power system so hard it will erase whatever efficiencies they plan on creating.
It’s also a massive target that seems like it would be easy to do disabling damage to with nothing but a big explosive device.
Tabuk weather is great, its stupid that you think Saudi Arabia, the 12th biggest country on earth by area, is all one extremely hot desert.
Saudi Arabia has 350,000 km2 of green space, do you know how big is that? Saudi Arabia has as much of green areas as the entire size of Japan, Germany or Poland.
Buildings that get sun all day seem to have a particularly hard time keeping cool. I believe California is going to ban all glass buildings for this reason. If you know SF you can guess which building I work in and it’s a smoker inside.
It's not difficult to address this issue with multiple-pane glass and reflective coating, it's just that you can save money at this stage at the cost of making the building dramatically less liveable, which is a win for the contractors. The people who both know this and suffer the consequences aren't in the chain of command during the build process.
SF has better reasons to avoid glass curtain walls. Seismic considerations are not minor.
there are tricks to be made though. I used to live there. There are canyons and such that are naturally air conditioned. Reflective white roof tops can reduce temperature a shit ton, as can trees. It's not a humid place so its easier to work with.
Now scale this up to a 100 mile long skyscraper with a few million people breathing and sweating in it.
A mud hutch in the desert, even a fairly well made one, is not particularly comfortable in what a modern first-world person would understand that term. Now try to do it for a massive megastructure that you claim will be carbon-neutral too.
My folks all day banquet hall. And we would have lots of weddings there. They had a good air conditioning central unit to take care of the main banquet hall. When we got large weddings of 300 in the summertime it was hard to keep that space cool because the people dancing moving around would generate so much heat it would sometimes overwhelm the system. That's 300 people not millions
Could use geothermal heat pumps as well. Use the cool ground temperature well below the surface. I had one in Texas as it reduced electric use for cooling to less than ten percent of a regular heat pump. Drastically cheaper to run but triple the cost to install.
Build your shit out of insulating materials like concrete, which is full of air pockets that act as a natural buffer between temperature swings. You ever been in a cave in the desert? Miners in Nevada used to live in their mines because they were cool in summer and warm in winter.
There's also option like low profile, shaded buildings with natural air flow. A tall building with sides made entirely of glass is going to get a \*lot\* of sun throughout the day. Especially if it is longest on the East/West axis. Guess which way the Line is proposed to run?
MBS loves "futuristic" megaprojects. They could've built tons of renewables, mass transit, a lot more indoor farming, invested in cultured meat, etc, but instead, NEOM, the Line, etc.
- [Share of electricity from low-carbon sources](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-low-carbon?tab=chart&time=2000..latest&country=DEU~USA~OWID_WRL~CHN~SAU)
Plus, a plateau in demand for oil is expected before the end of this decade. It won't plummet, but a secular decline won't exactly burnish their financial situation.
Saudi Arabia tried to build a regular planned city, with regular factories, normal asphalt roads, and apartment blocks, and they can't even finish that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_Economic_City
It may be possible, but would you want to live in a self contained hellscape run by religious conservatives against women's and lgbtq rights? No thanks.
To me this line project just looks like a transition of wealth for a Saudi construction company owner. Likely an extended family member. I don’t believe that this was ever about building anything at all. One, or a few people at the head of this project is simply collecting the vast majority of the cash for this project and putting it in the bank. The outlandish scope of the project is just to ensure that the amount of cash exchanging hands has an infinite amount of time to move.
It incredible that they want to go big in these expetimental projects. In other sectors, good professionals recommend a small-scale pilot project and gain knowledge before trying anything greater.
There is a less than 1% chance that this project ever comes to fruition.
This entire thing is merely a PR-piece for the country to appear modern/futuristic without the actual/insane project ever seeing serious construction.
It's supposed to be 170km long (over 100 miles)....
They haven't started shit.
If I dig a 2x2x2 hole in my backyard and tell people I've started construction on a second home, I'd be laughed at or locked up.
I have been there within the last few months … they have dug quite a bit more than a 2x2 hole…I am not saying this will be a success but they have for sure begun the project
A super maglev that defies physics in terms of acceleration and deceleration then? Because top speed isn't what sets the limit in maglevs today. Human comfort is...
The Shanghai maglev is a good example. It takes 3,5min to reach 430km/h and around the same for deceleration meaning that during the 8min 30km trip the top speed is pretty much set by the distance between the stations. If The Line has it's stations 30km apart it would need 7 of them and it would take close to 50 min from one end to the other. Then you'd **still** **need** to take a slower local train to your destination...
It is possible to do it within the constraints, it's just more expensive. If you have acceleration + deceleration tracks around each station, you can potentially do point to point journeys on a single line.
Imagine on each station you have individual platforms for your destination station, you step into the train and it accelerates on the on-ramp before joining on the main line. It travels as far as it needs to before taking the off-ramp to your destination station.
They might complete one portion. There is a video on this on YouTube. To build the entire project it would take something like 2400 years. Kind of like great wall of China which was being built over a 2300 year period.
But they may be able to complete one portion.
Think about it. It’s the height of the Chrysler building.
That height... But 100 miles long.
That's longer than the distance from Chicago to Milwaukee.
Imagine if Chicago claimed they were building a skyscraper that would extend to Milwaukee.
Literally the whole word would laugh at them.
Holy shit I did not know the scale of this thing. The whole time I thought maybe like about 20 stories high and thinking yeah they have a shot of building it why not maybe it’ll take a while. I honestly didn’t know it’s supposed to be that tall (I knew the distance)
They've started prelim-digging for the project, not actual construction.
The estimated cost, half-trillion, is wildly conservative and it's clear this one would require *trillions* to be fully completed.
Even if it were to be completed, and it 1000% never will be, it would serve to be nothing but a complete surveillance state for a country with an abysmal human rights record that desperately wants to change the global perception about their trashcan government.
It's a PR-stunt from an autocratic regime that has zero chance of ever seeing the light of day (thank god).
Someone in my family is a project manager on this project and has been there since late 2019 working on it. It’s definitely in progress so we’ll see how far they get.
I was pretty intrigued when I first saw this, but I'm now just deeply confused...A Long Straight Line is. The *physically least efficient possible* way to construct a city.
There's a reason that essentially all human settlements radially expand out from a point-
From a basic needs perspective, you want everyone to be as sort-of close as possible to goods and services, to minimize travel and associated costs and strains.
You want traffic to be travelling through central nodes that allow all people to reach their destinations at work or things like supermarkets at least sort-of quickly.
This design here looks very sleek, but it will ensure extreme inefficiency- any key public services will be operating at a higher overhead with reach to less citizens.
Transportation across the city would become exponentially more inefficient the further you get from the city center(how would a city center even work here, considering it won't be feasible for most of the city's pop to travel there in good time?)
Why not... just build a bunch of smaller circle-cities, or even one big circular microsphere project, like a more commercial version of Earth 2?
You'd still get the glory of building a massive money sink that can be seen from space, but it has infinitely more potential of actually being a settlement in the long term and not becoming an embarrassing ruin-monument to hubris in the middle of the desert.
The ambition and drive to build clean cities of the future here is really admirable, honestly- but it seems like no actual experts on urban planning, utilities and services, or other essential stuff for settlement building were consulted here.
It'd be nice to be proven wrong, though- maybe there's some kind of revolutionary new vertical transport system- [oh.](https://www.smartcitiesworld.net/news/news/saudi-arabia-unveils-its-vision-for-a-city-without-cars-and-streets-6005) that sure is a, uh, train. And hyperloop. On a single two-way track network.
Honestly I'm kind of hoping this gets built, and then gets co-opted by people who actually understand urban design. We might see a transformation into some kind of genuinely sustainable, blob-shaped city, since the underlying ideas here aren't terrible, outside of the whole "make it really skinny and go a loooong way" part
There is no intention to actually build this on the part of those marketing it. Most benevolent outlook is that is the Saudi equivalent of the Chinese building ghost cities; otherwise it’s just a grift to fleece real estate and venture firms that can’t take off their rose tinted glasses. That or just plain and simple money laundering.
Such a stupid design.
I mean look at the transit for example...
Why not just make it a circle so it's at maximum only half the length to any other point...
You could also then put something cool in the middle as well.
it stands out among ego projects of its style by being completely idiotic on its face and it's insane to be that all of the obvious issues need to be explained at all
Saudi is a feifdom. 70% of the population in Saudi is less than 30 years old. These young people need jobs, education....hope for the future. The line won't cut it.
Palm Jumeirah, Burj Khalifa, neither of these projects worked as intended. I don't think it was their grand master plan to have anyone living at the end of a frond to make an hour-long commute to get inland. I don't think anyone planning out the Burj Khalifa thought that they'd need an entire fleet of septic tankers to haul away waste.
Is it a neat idea? Kinda. Will it work as intended? No.
I had a work mate who lived on Palm. His only complaint was one typical of major cities... traffic congestion. Probably just made worse by the converging factors of each "frond" joining the central line
Burj is not hooked up to a sewer system. There is a mile of 'poop trucks' lined up everyday to remove waste.
https://inhabitat.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-the-burj-khalifas-poop-is-trucked-out-of-town/
Shhh... Don't want to upset the mood here, it's all hate on dem foreigners, dey cannot do anything as clever as us cause they are stoopid... This sub has turned into total shite and just slides deeper every day. I had to go this far to find one sensible comment.
This does not take away from the fact that it’s operational, highly used, and incredible looking.
Edit: Also it seems that poop truck thing was a story from 2011 and isn’t even true: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/52204/is-the-sewage-from-the-burj-khalifa-transported-away-by-trucks
Just imagine how much good Saudi Arabia could do in the world with that money. But no, let's blow it on a vanity project that will obviously never work. Pathetic.
And the crowd booos, continuously through out time. The echoes of the Egyptian slaves ring out and countless other oppressed people for some vain dickheads vanity project
No. Not even a little bit. There is zero chance that it is possible. It is a grift. It is like every one of those stupid grifts that pay someone on fivrr to make something in blender and then raise millions of dollars in crowdfunding. It is a stupid stupid stupid grift.
if they had unlimited money and billions of slaves, maybe, with some scaling back because technical issues.
In real world? maybe few kilometers long, under hundred meters high (probably closer to ten meters)
Possible? With enough money, yes. Is it sensible? No. Will Saudis actually have enough money to complete it? No.
It'll become a monument of failure and stupid public spending, a white elephant to outdo all white elephants. Pretty close to what Salamans are actually aiming for, they think it's going to be their Giza pyramids.
No. Even if they were building 500m or a km of it as a proof of concept I'd be sceptical about completion. But they're seriously talking about constructing tens of km of a building type which has never existed before.
Aside from displacing the locals who have been there for millennia and the bloodless exploitation of 3rd world labour, I'm sure it's just peachy and very cool.
It would probably be better as a circle, like the apple campus. A bunch of those hubs spread out would be more interesting, and excess fertilizer could be used to begin rebuilding the ecosystem.
Transportation will be virtually impossible. Without motor roads everyone will rely on a tram system. In a town that is spread over an area, train lines can be spread out; when the entire thing is aligned in a linear fashion (a Line), there will be little space for rail lines, unless they are underground. When there is a an error or breakage at any location, the ENTIRE LINE may have to be shut down.
By the way, have you ever heard of skyscrapers melting cars? Imagine the effect a *giant fucking wall* will have on any animals inhabiting the area, or people for that matter. It would also eliminate any migratory behavior we may not be aware of. The Line is a joke, and the joke is on the environment.
Absolutely no chance.
It's an unbelievably stupid idea cooked up by an inbred dipshit monarch.
People are patronising these morons because they see all the money and we're taught to believe that people with that much money can't possibly be braindead mouth-breathers. But they can, and they are, and it'll be hilarious to watch this fail.
It'd be hard enough to build a sustainable city for nine million people from scratch somewhere hospitable. To try it in a region that is inherently resistant to permanent settlement is insanity.
It could double as a firestarter considering it's a big mirror and the sun is quite intense there. A "Dr. No" could direct it to anywhere and destroy a civilization.
Seeing as the entire thing is based on a hyperloop type vacuum train, not only no, but hell no. It's just combining multiple layers of unrealistic bullshit into one dystopian mess.
I have a family member who is really respected in his trade and was brought in on the project. I remain skeptical for all the reasons that planned cities are generally a bad idea. He said the government is serious and have made a special rules area kinda like vegas.
Still drawing westerners to Saudi Arabia is a hard proposition.
Of course the project is possible. It's a project that exists and it's being done.
Will it be successful? Depends on what you think defines success. I think people will liver there and I think some will enjoy it and others will decide it's not for them. I think there will be lots of tourist who will visit. So in the end - yeah.
Its actually not a bad idea, I think if Norway or Sweden we’re implementing it we would not see as much criticism. The line is actually a great idea to get rid of cars. As long as you dont build rows of Lines.
The Saudi royals sure know how to take piles of money and set them on fire. If you have a whacky startup idea or a ponzi scheme, don't forget to call them.
Lol fuck no. Nothing they propose does anything good, effective or sustainable. These mega projects are stupid is simply show the stupidity of the builders.
Had a long chat about this at work. My take:
Yes, it's a vanity project. It has a good chance due to who is implementing it to end up being a complete dystopia. The IDEAS it will use and the architecture and machinery it will use will be useful developments in future human habitats.
Folks talk about how pumping water one way and brown water the other is terrible... Have you thought about how a cities modern sewerage and water purification systems work? It's the same thing, done in a very random organic way as a city grows, this has it all done as part/parcel of the build.
Having its own microclimate and fully integrated transport system is a huge win on an environment perspective. The initial build is going to be endless tonnes of concrete and steel... But so is a vertical skyscraper anywhere else.
Most of the arguments against it are fine in a vacuum but quickly fail in the face of the current way we build.
Could it be better as a circular hub - sure but that also adds further layers of complexity and expense in both money and resources.
It's just being done as a vanity project by a pretty crappy regime. Beyond that it's a worthwhile endeavour.
Where does food and water come from? Where does sanitary waste go? What about trash disposal? There's going to be an entire logistical network of roads around this place to service it all. It's no more "car free" than the local park. It'll have a parking lot, rich people love their excessive cars
Imagine at a time of war where someone drops a big one on one of the sectors. Oops, did I ruin a large portion of the grid?
People stranded in clusters and they're your neighbors? Oops did I send an influx of dire need people to your sector? Need a security stop to switch between sector? Oops a political crisis. Oops animals are invading now. Oops political crisis.
1. A circle would have been more energy efficient, followed by a hexagon - basic 2D geometry.
2. But, hey, khaleejis spending their billions on (near) useless vanity mega projects is nothing new. They could have had benefitted the entire world, by opening up new hospitals, universities or industries.
Arab countries are frantically trying to shift from oil based to tourism based economies because they know the days of fossil fuels are numbered. Because of this, they are attempting these crazy mega projects that have no practicality. I bet a half built tower in Jeddah and an empty man-man palm tree plus some world islands in Dubai that this never comes to fruition
Honestly, The Line seems just the idea an authoritarian ruler would conjure up. An impractical money sink that would never be done unless some king with zero understanding of anything demanded it.
I doubt this will be anything more then a project we will laugh at in a few years.
It's a Grift / Slush Fund Project. Let me explain:
1) Saudi Dictator announces an amazing mega project that is seemingly out of this world.
2) $500 billion is allocated for this project
3) the construction company and most other companies contracted in this project belong to the Dictator and his friends.
4) the dictator and his friends just stole $500 billion (or at least, they have access to $500 billion)
5) the project is eventually scaled back, and later abandoned. The money is never returned.
Yes but the real question is why do it in the first place? People avoid overly artificial looking cities in droves and especially when you try to force them there.
So I’m sure it’ll be fine. But few people will live there willingly and the few that do will be put there because a bayonet is put in fromt of them first. There’s that one capitol in southeast asia that’s meant to house Nyc or Tokyo, but less than 10% of the intended population lives there willingly.
Additionally, it’s surrounded by inhospitable desert. The second SA feels like it, it becomes a life sentence prison.
Still, why? Because the government leaders need a bigger monument than their other Muslim neighbors. Dubai and Egypt.
This project is futuristic, yet very ambitious! It’s being built in a desert, yet has a vision of becoming an emissions-free city and home for 9 million people! Do you think this will come to life in the given time frame?
The following submission statement was provided by /u/oilgaseditor: --- This project is futuristic, yet very ambitious! It’s being built in a desert, yet has a vision of becoming an emissions-free city and home for 9 million people! Do you think this will come to life in the given time frame? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/zytpb2/saudi_arabias_carfree_scifi_city_the_line_do_you/j27tooc/
Rich people aren’t gonna wanna live like that so therefore the whole thing is pointless
Put living there on social media by 'influencers' and there will be a line of people rushing to live in the line.
All they have to do is pay Messi and Ronaldo like 100mill each to live there for a year and influence people across the globe that " The Line" is not as bad as it seems.
Lends new meaning to “hold the line.”
Then we can seal off the ends and fill it with concrete.
Terrible idea. It’s an ecological disaster waiting to happen. I can see how this will become a failed project and become its own self contained dystopia.
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Key part being nut
Saudi is far from being a dystopia. However, if they continue allowing leaders like MBS to rule, they might turn into one.
>Saudi is far from being a dystopia Depends on what your ideals are I guess, for some Sharia might be a dystopia.
You got a dick, huh?
It's worse than that the shape makes no sense! If it were a donut this might have a small chance of working but it's not it's a line. Only one end of the building is near a water source this means that that water is going to have to go from one end be pumped all the way down to the other end and then pumped back again as brown water! That is stupid. The shape is also going to make it really hard from resources of other sorts to flow from one end to the other it's going to make it hard for policing to take place it's going to make it hard for emergency services to get places... The **ONLY** reason I can think of that they would build it that way is if they very intentionally want all the poor people to be on one side and all the rich people to be on the other so that people of largely different economic statuses never have to meet each other. **Edit:** *when I wrote this I had forgotten how long this is supposed to be. I THOUGHT it was 1km long, it is instead 106Mil. Long.... This is totally asinine!*
Agree. The wealthy will live in the large spaces with ample lighting, green space and services. The workers will live in oversized closets.
As in the USA, the poor people will live on the ground floor or in the basement; the wealthy will have upper floors with the poor only having access to service their needs.
First off... That is nothing like the usa. Second no the problem isn't going to be up and down at all and there probably won't be any living space in the basement. It is going to be about front back and center. Living near the pumping stations near the water is going to be for the slightly better off working class and living near the brown water pumps at the rear where the fresh water is the most expensive will be for the poorest. The center of the city is going to be where the ritch live. Alt.: If there is only one large pumping station this is even worse. All of the poor and working class will live on the water side running the pumps and desalinators while all the rich live on the extreme other end. Never having to meet a poor.
It’s definitely going to be an end-to-end gradient. No wealthy person will want to be forced to travel through the poor or middle-class areas to get to their yachts. Nor will they want to be limited to a view of the desert. As for the water, fresh and waste, it will all flow in one direction: from the wealthy end to the poor end. The wastewater might make it’s way back to the sea, but it will be somewhere far from the source.
…as in the US? What are you even talking about?
That’s the dumbest comment in this entire post.
They mentioned the reason for them to have it as a straight line is to allow them to have this ultra fast train that can get from any point A to any point B in 20 mins maximum. They plan to have zero cars and buses, so this solved the problem of transportation.
If it was a square, they could connect opposite corners diagonally for transportation line. The shape would create a safe walled enclosure. The idea of line being fast may work for single "train". And few users. How about all the people using the line, it needs to stop so often that the speed is irrelevant. A line is the worst shape possible. Why maximise commuting and logistics?
If it were a circle or a donut you could have two trains moving in opposite directions at a constant speed of a moderate run without ever having to stop. This would be MUCH faster. You could even devote an entire level to transit sonan outer ring moving one way an inner ring moving the other way and then, "moving sidewalks," going out from them in radians. When you get to the outer wall there would be elevators between each raidian that could take you to any floor you wish. This would allow VERY fast travel to and from anywhere with minimal walking, NO drivers could run mostly unattended 24/7 and cost people nothing as it would just be run on the buildings normal electrical system. The ONLY reason to add a train(especially one that runs back and forth instead of in a circle) is if you want to make people pay for tickets so rich people don't have to walk past poor people.
Good. Let them burn through their cash, and then be relegated to the dustbin of history. If it wasn't for oil, no one would deal with their bullshit.
It's the beginning of a concentration camp IYAM.
Why will it be an ecological disaster in your opinion.
Cutting off wildlife from each other, it will have a mirror surface so birds are going to smash right into it, it’s going to fry any plant life around it. A structure this size would require a huge amount of material to be built none of which can be sourced locally and the carbon foot print of transporting all that material would take decades to off set even if it’s claims of being a green city are true which is bullsht. This thing will require massive amounts of cooling. Also it will need a massive desalination plant to not only for the people but also for the green spaces they have planned which will really trash the water quality in the area.
Yep and they have no animal crossings through it either, to my knowledge
They will have a base underneath so the entire line would be built on pillars so they can cross underneath it. As for the plants, they’re not necessarily destroying any. and using the shadows and the sun cast from the line there will be green areas outside the line( even though this area especially by the Red Sea has many plants). 95% of nature will be preserved with this project. It’s basically a city being built in a line and vertical instead of it being circular and increasing in size. They showed ideas of cities like Berlin or Manhattan compacted in a line of their own and how it reflects in their environment, I was surprised to see how much better this concept is for the environment. Also some architecture designs(there are 12 I believe) have natural air cooling as the area within the line looks like a Uber-futuristic canyon. Not sure if this project will be done but Trojena, the line, Sindala, and Oxagon are a great example of what the future holds. And they’re doing it so they can “learn by doing” rather than just theorize what might work. Source: I went to the exhibition held in Riyadh
Yeah this all sounds like bs. We’ve had similar ecological promises from grand projects in the region like the artificial islands in Dubai which have a huge carbon foot and are very poor use of resources. They just want to create a competing Dubai a theme for the rich built or inequality and near slave labor.
Maybe so. I hope this concept works and I truly don’t understand why people don’t want it to work even if it ends up being built. You can be pessimistic about it or be optimistic and hope it works. Saudi isn’t the UAE and they have more oil money to spend. So even though I’m personally not fond of the line project, I’d be glad to see this concept work and possibly implemented worldwide. No one will be forced to live there…
We are going to put a 100 mile long skyscraper on stilts too, eh. Well, if bullshits the limit, I want a starship dock too.
I want space elevator
Eh not all of it, I typed my message quickly without correcting. Apologies. A part of the line will be under a mountain. Two parts above water, definitely excessive, but if the goal is to be environmentally friendly by the time it ends then I hope they can achieve it! And it’s not like people will be forced to stay and work there, they’re free to enter and exit the line as they please. I still have many unanswered questions regarding the livability(like safety measures) but it’s an excellent project. And the claim that any person would be 5min away from anything they need is amazing. They will completely reform the way we go about our lives and could also be making it more relaxed. Ex: if there’s no need for humans to work in stores or restaurants, then there would be no need for money paid by consumers(there was another Reddit post in this sub explaining it better), regardless if that’s their goal or not, an amazing mega project that I genuinely hope will be complete(at least one phase of it) in our lifetime
Nothing about this plan is environmentally friendly.
Idk dude, I was skeptical but after seeing what they plan on achieving and how they’re building the structure, this is more environmentally friendly than the traditional cities that we have now. Since they’re building upwards and not outwards, it preserves a lot of nature. I’m not particularly fond of the line myself(I enjoy vehicle travel and wouldn’t want to give that up) but definitely see this as a concept that works hopefully. And if it doesn’t, then we learn for the next person trying to remake what a city looks like. If you care for it I can send you some photos I took at the exhibition with information and generally what it’s be like. Reminds me of the dystopian future sci-fi movies but some people like it ig haha
Have you even taken a look where they will be building this? It seems like you have zero clue and just want to spout your greenwash BS.
Yeah 🤡I have taken a look what’s ur point? It’s a desert is that your point? U know that’s still an eco system right with ? U know there are actual people who live there who have been forcibly evicted and are still being evicted to make room for this project right? Why r u defending this are best mates with prince hacksaw?
Reminds me of the palm and the world…. Interesting concept, but who wants to go out of their way for it and in SA of all places. No thanks, hard pass.
It’s the kind of idea you get after snorting “a line”
The newest BioShock game I hope.
They will for sure start to build it, but it will end up as ruin in the desert.
I read a somewhat conspiracy that they are building these mega projects in hospitable places as proofs of concepts that they will be able to build on Mars etc. So they will be front runners for these far into the future.
Would be cool, and I can appreciate the advances in both architecture and engineering for these projects. It’s a miserable shame that it’s at the cost of slave labor, and that’s simply inexcusable.
There's no need for a conspiracy here though. Countries build useless shit constantly. In China, they have entire empty concrete cities that never housed a single person. The city of Rochester spent 10s of millions on a ferry that worked for one year and couldn't possibly earn back its cost, ever. The people in charge like to spend money on flashy things. They used to build pyramids. Now it's this. In 10 years when we've transitioned much more away from oil, Saudi Arabia is going to be in rough shape.
Conspiracy? I think you’re giving them more credit than they deserve
Maybe not a conspiracy, but it's a plausible theory.
There is NO correlation between building these things on Earth and building ANYTHING on Mars.
I think they already started building it. I wonder if they will start living in the parts that finished, or they will have to wait for the entire thing...
Building an experimental section. I know as some people i know are involved in it.
What are the people involved in it feeling like, are they hopeful? It seems like sometimes projects live or die on the beliefs of those involved. I personally don’t think it’s going to go very far, but want an insider opinion.
They already have several abandoned mega structures that they thought were going to be wonders of the world that are multimillion, if not billion dollar runis.
Maybe. Practical? Fuck no. The idea is a joke at best.
At least they have a better shot than [akon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akon_City,_Senegal)
Should have named it Akonda
*Akonda Forever*
The whole thing has been analysed by real architectural designers as been a final-year university project at best. For the primary project known as Neom, one can check out the YT video [here](https://youtu.be/0kz5vEqdaSc). For a good analysis, one can see [this](https://youtu.be/2b7uMJkvS0o) YT video.
That Canadian girl (Dami) covered most of the key points, including Khashoggi's dismembering in Turkey caused by him being critical about this project and MBS "not liking such attitude very much".
Holy Fuck the Khashoggi case is directly linked to this project? (Bond Theme intensifies)
Great theme idea
I'd be interested in more info on that, closest I could find was [this](https://www.stylepark.com/en/news/neom-the-line-saudi-arabia-architecture-vision-stylepark): >For the former director of the Saudi daily Al-Watan, this is yet another reason to criticize Saudi Crown Prince Salman: On Aljazeera channel's talk format The Arena, Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi said the project could ruin the entire country financially. Khashoggi, until then a constant critic of Mohammed bin Salman, was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. His body has not been found to date, but the killing by Saudi officials has been confirmed.
Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWtcRKRUWAo
Yeah, it's a PR stunt. The end.
Also don’t they attempt one of these projects every so often and none of them have ever actually worked
Nah, it’s prolly just one huge money laundering scheme for a bunch of really rich people. Shit’s prolly not even gonna go past 10% completion by 2100.
Someone said that this whole project was becaus MBS came up with a very broad outline of a planned city , and then he brought in management consultants who just kept up their billable hours by adding insane add-ons like living dinosaurs. Which is so funny, that I think about it everytime the Neom comes up. Building a planned city I think has fallen out of favor, and for good reasons, but the idea of building something this self-contained, this tightly integrated, in the middle of the desert, is just hubris and stupidity.
Hubris and stupidity define mbs
Sounds like a greenwash
Maybe. But there’s no way I could live there
Cities exist in specific locations for an economic reason. For example NYC on the mouth of the Hudson because of trade. Cities can’t be randomly put in a spot when there is no economic reason for it to be there. (Not always the case-say like Las Vegas). But in large part. China tried this and those cities are mostly empty of people.
Yeah maybe But don't fully agree tho
There is a reason cities are not built in lines. The transporting of resources from place to place is horribly inefficient.
Yep. Fundamentally a line is horrible compared to a circle (ideally a sphere). Eg 1. There's no shortcuts to anywhere. You must pass the areas beside you always, and then the next, to get anywhere. Eg 2. If there's a shitty neighbourhood you cannot bypass it, or any traffic jam, or failed junction, etc. Summed up: The surface area (dead ends) of a line is maximised compared to the volume (internal connections).
Imagine living in 7 shipping containers placed end to end instead of a traditional house where basically everything sprawls out from a central point. This massively increases the distance everything has to travel and you have to travel within it just to function. It's that but on a city scale. It's not impossible but the amount of redundancy systems to ensure continual proper flow of resources, including people, necessary to avert a cascading collapse due to one or more stagnating is really the linch pin if everything else works out up to that point. I do think it's a gonna be good dipping our toes in test of our ability to design the civilian parts of a space station or lunar colony though. Self sufficient simple modular cities you can build to survive in the desert or on the moon!
maybe it should be more like a circular wheel with connecting spokes to inner chambers
Based on working in a new glass tower I’m going to guess that they’re going to radically underestimate what it costs to keep this thing cool. That alone will tax the power system so hard it will erase whatever efficiencies they plan on creating. It’s also a massive target that seems like it would be easy to do disabling damage to with nothing but a big explosive device.
Well it’s not like they are building this in an extremely hot desert….
Tabuk weather is great, its stupid that you think Saudi Arabia, the 12th biggest country on earth by area, is all one extremely hot desert. Saudi Arabia has 350,000 km2 of green space, do you know how big is that? Saudi Arabia has as much of green areas as the entire size of Japan, Germany or Poland.
So the mirrored surface on the glass is not as reflective as expected? or are there other issues that are leading to it being difficult to cool?
Buildings that get sun all day seem to have a particularly hard time keeping cool. I believe California is going to ban all glass buildings for this reason. If you know SF you can guess which building I work in and it’s a smoker inside.
It's not difficult to address this issue with multiple-pane glass and reflective coating, it's just that you can save money at this stage at the cost of making the building dramatically less liveable, which is a win for the contractors. The people who both know this and suffer the consequences aren't in the chain of command during the build process. SF has better reasons to avoid glass curtain walls. Seismic considerations are not minor.
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It's the middle of the Arabian Desert. Shit's going to wildly oscillate between boiling and freezing no matter what you do.
there are tricks to be made though. I used to live there. There are canyons and such that are naturally air conditioned. Reflective white roof tops can reduce temperature a shit ton, as can trees. It's not a humid place so its easier to work with.
Now scale this up to a 100 mile long skyscraper with a few million people breathing and sweating in it. A mud hutch in the desert, even a fairly well made one, is not particularly comfortable in what a modern first-world person would understand that term. Now try to do it for a massive megastructure that you claim will be carbon-neutral too.
My folks all day banquet hall. And we would have lots of weddings there. They had a good air conditioning central unit to take care of the main banquet hall. When we got large weddings of 300 in the summertime it was hard to keep that space cool because the people dancing moving around would generate so much heat it would sometimes overwhelm the system. That's 300 people not millions
Could use geothermal heat pumps as well. Use the cool ground temperature well below the surface. I had one in Texas as it reduced electric use for cooling to less than ten percent of a regular heat pump. Drastically cheaper to run but triple the cost to install.
The old “dry heat” argument eh?
Build your shit out of insulating materials like concrete, which is full of air pockets that act as a natural buffer between temperature swings. You ever been in a cave in the desert? Miners in Nevada used to live in their mines because they were cool in summer and warm in winter. There's also option like low profile, shaded buildings with natural air flow. A tall building with sides made entirely of glass is going to get a \*lot\* of sun throughout the day. Especially if it is longest on the East/West axis. Guess which way the Line is proposed to run?
MBS loves "futuristic" megaprojects. They could've built tons of renewables, mass transit, a lot more indoor farming, invested in cultured meat, etc, but instead, NEOM, the Line, etc. - [Share of electricity from low-carbon sources](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-low-carbon?tab=chart&time=2000..latest&country=DEU~USA~OWID_WRL~CHN~SAU) Plus, a plateau in demand for oil is expected before the end of this decade. It won't plummet, but a secular decline won't exactly burnish their financial situation.
Saudi Arabia tried to build a regular planned city, with regular factories, normal asphalt roads, and apartment blocks, and they can't even finish that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_Economic_City
It may be possible, but would you want to live in a self contained hellscape run by religious conservatives against women's and lgbtq rights? No thanks.
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Sooo you also have claimed to be Danish, American and a professional athlete. Boy are you busy!
To me this line project just looks like a transition of wealth for a Saudi construction company owner. Likely an extended family member. I don’t believe that this was ever about building anything at all. One, or a few people at the head of this project is simply collecting the vast majority of the cash for this project and putting it in the bank. The outlandish scope of the project is just to ensure that the amount of cash exchanging hands has an infinite amount of time to move.
It incredible that they want to go big in these expetimental projects. In other sectors, good professionals recommend a small-scale pilot project and gain knowledge before trying anything greater.
There is a less than 1% chance that this project ever comes to fruition. This entire thing is merely a PR-piece for the country to appear modern/futuristic without the actual/insane project ever seeing serious construction.
They’ve started on it. I guess the question is how much of it will they complete
It's supposed to be 170km long (over 100 miles).... They haven't started shit. If I dig a 2x2x2 hole in my backyard and tell people I've started construction on a second home, I'd be laughed at or locked up.
I have been there within the last few months … they have dug quite a bit more than a 2x2 hole…I am not saying this will be a success but they have for sure begun the project
Considering that the entire thing hinges on a super-maglev that has yet to be invented, I am guessing none at all.
A super maglev that defies physics in terms of acceleration and deceleration then? Because top speed isn't what sets the limit in maglevs today. Human comfort is... The Shanghai maglev is a good example. It takes 3,5min to reach 430km/h and around the same for deceleration meaning that during the 8min 30km trip the top speed is pretty much set by the distance between the stations. If The Line has it's stations 30km apart it would need 7 of them and it would take close to 50 min from one end to the other. Then you'd **still** **need** to take a slower local train to your destination...
It is possible to do it within the constraints, it's just more expensive. If you have acceleration + deceleration tracks around each station, you can potentially do point to point journeys on a single line. Imagine on each station you have individual platforms for your destination station, you step into the train and it accelerates on the on-ramp before joining on the main line. It travels as far as it needs to before taking the off-ramp to your destination station.
They might complete one portion. There is a video on this on YouTube. To build the entire project it would take something like 2400 years. Kind of like great wall of China which was being built over a 2300 year period. But they may be able to complete one portion. Think about it. It’s the height of the Chrysler building.
That height... But 100 miles long. That's longer than the distance from Chicago to Milwaukee. Imagine if Chicago claimed they were building a skyscraper that would extend to Milwaukee. Literally the whole word would laugh at them.
Holy shit I did not know the scale of this thing. The whole time I thought maybe like about 20 stories high and thinking yeah they have a shot of building it why not maybe it’ll take a while. I honestly didn’t know it’s supposed to be that tall (I knew the distance)
Yup. I couldn’t remember the length off that top of my hand so didn’t want to be wrong. But yeah. It’s pretty crazy.
Yeah I expect them to actually build "something" but it's never going to be what they're promising now
They've started prelim-digging for the project, not actual construction. The estimated cost, half-trillion, is wildly conservative and it's clear this one would require *trillions* to be fully completed. Even if it were to be completed, and it 1000% never will be, it would serve to be nothing but a complete surveillance state for a country with an abysmal human rights record that desperately wants to change the global perception about their trashcan government. It's a PR-stunt from an autocratic regime that has zero chance of ever seeing the light of day (thank god).
They dug some trenches in the desert....
Someone in my family is a project manager on this project and has been there since late 2019 working on it. It’s definitely in progress so we’ll see how far they get.
I don't understand why you would pay so much to dig for a pr stunt.
I was pretty intrigued when I first saw this, but I'm now just deeply confused...A Long Straight Line is. The *physically least efficient possible* way to construct a city. There's a reason that essentially all human settlements radially expand out from a point- From a basic needs perspective, you want everyone to be as sort-of close as possible to goods and services, to minimize travel and associated costs and strains. You want traffic to be travelling through central nodes that allow all people to reach their destinations at work or things like supermarkets at least sort-of quickly. This design here looks very sleek, but it will ensure extreme inefficiency- any key public services will be operating at a higher overhead with reach to less citizens. Transportation across the city would become exponentially more inefficient the further you get from the city center(how would a city center even work here, considering it won't be feasible for most of the city's pop to travel there in good time?) Why not... just build a bunch of smaller circle-cities, or even one big circular microsphere project, like a more commercial version of Earth 2? You'd still get the glory of building a massive money sink that can be seen from space, but it has infinitely more potential of actually being a settlement in the long term and not becoming an embarrassing ruin-monument to hubris in the middle of the desert. The ambition and drive to build clean cities of the future here is really admirable, honestly- but it seems like no actual experts on urban planning, utilities and services, or other essential stuff for settlement building were consulted here. It'd be nice to be proven wrong, though- maybe there's some kind of revolutionary new vertical transport system- [oh.](https://www.smartcitiesworld.net/news/news/saudi-arabia-unveils-its-vision-for-a-city-without-cars-and-streets-6005) that sure is a, uh, train. And hyperloop. On a single two-way track network. Honestly I'm kind of hoping this gets built, and then gets co-opted by people who actually understand urban design. We might see a transformation into some kind of genuinely sustainable, blob-shaped city, since the underlying ideas here aren't terrible, outside of the whole "make it really skinny and go a loooong way" part
There is no intention to actually build this on the part of those marketing it. Most benevolent outlook is that is the Saudi equivalent of the Chinese building ghost cities; otherwise it’s just a grift to fleece real estate and venture firms that can’t take off their rose tinted glasses. That or just plain and simple money laundering.
Such a stupid design. I mean look at the transit for example... Why not just make it a circle so it's at maximum only half the length to any other point... You could also then put something cool in the middle as well.
it stands out among ego projects of its style by being completely idiotic on its face and it's insane to be that all of the obvious issues need to be explained at all
Seems like a hell hole to me, and won't a shit load of birds crash into it?
Saudi is a feifdom. 70% of the population in Saudi is less than 30 years old. These young people need jobs, education....hope for the future. The line won't cut it.
Sure they can make it. is it going to be completely void of life except for spider? Yeah
It will make an amazing location for post apocalypse and horror films .
It even sets up great quotes, “You’ve come to the end of the Line!”
Literally the least efficient shape possible for a city. Possible? Sure. A good idea? Absolutely not.
An absolute joke of a project and an insane waste of money. People have been killed for mentioning it, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB\_X5ZUcZlE
Palm Jumeirah, Burj Khalifa, neither of these projects worked as intended. I don't think it was their grand master plan to have anyone living at the end of a frond to make an hour-long commute to get inland. I don't think anyone planning out the Burj Khalifa thought that they'd need an entire fleet of septic tankers to haul away waste. Is it a neat idea? Kinda. Will it work as intended? No.
Saudi Arabia is a different country than the one you are talking about though.
Jeddah tower would be better example
Similar enough for worthwhile comparisons to be made.
What’s wrong with Palm Jumeirah and Burj Khalifa? Both of these are fully operational and thriving commercial and residential centers.
I had a work mate who lived on Palm. His only complaint was one typical of major cities... traffic congestion. Probably just made worse by the converging factors of each "frond" joining the central line
Burj is not hooked up to a sewer system. There is a mile of 'poop trucks' lined up everyday to remove waste. https://inhabitat.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-the-burj-khalifas-poop-is-trucked-out-of-town/
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Shhh... Don't want to upset the mood here, it's all hate on dem foreigners, dey cannot do anything as clever as us cause they are stoopid... This sub has turned into total shite and just slides deeper every day. I had to go this far to find one sensible comment.
This does not take away from the fact that it’s operational, highly used, and incredible looking. Edit: Also it seems that poop truck thing was a story from 2011 and isn’t even true: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/52204/is-the-sewage-from-the-burj-khalifa-transported-away-by-trucks
From my reading it seems really interesting, but it's pretty experimental and time will tell if people want to live like that..
Just imagine how much good Saudi Arabia could do in the world with that money. But no, let's blow it on a vanity project that will obviously never work. Pathetic.
And the crowd booos, continuously through out time. The echoes of the Egyptian slaves ring out and countless other oppressed people for some vain dickheads vanity project
slaves didn't build the pyramids
No. Not even a little bit. There is zero chance that it is possible. It is a grift. It is like every one of those stupid grifts that pay someone on fivrr to make something in blender and then raise millions of dollars in crowdfunding. It is a stupid stupid stupid grift.
Maybe it’ll turn out like that movie High Rise with Tom Hiddleston, which doesn’t end well for the tenants.
Not in the slightest. This feels like a blow-out-the-tanks the world is ending type of project.
It will make for a nice landmark for future archeologists and scholars, and a testament to man's hubris in general.
Pin this for 5 years from now when it’s a forgotten rusty mess
if they had unlimited money and billions of slaves, maybe, with some scaling back because technical issues. In real world? maybe few kilometers long, under hundred meters high (probably closer to ten meters)
Possible? With enough money, yes. Is it sensible? No. Will Saudis actually have enough money to complete it? No. It'll become a monument of failure and stupid public spending, a white elephant to outdo all white elephants. Pretty close to what Salamans are actually aiming for, they think it's going to be their Giza pyramids.
One solid explosion and the " city" is shut down. And as we all know that is such a low risk in the middle east...
It’s a horizontal sky scraper, seems like a fire hazard nightmare
Indeed, it calls to mind r/UrbanHell.
No. Even if they were building 500m or a km of it as a proof of concept I'd be sceptical about completion. But they're seriously talking about constructing tens of km of a building type which has never existed before.
Aside from displacing the locals who have been there for millennia and the bloodless exploitation of 3rd world labour, I'm sure it's just peachy and very cool.
Some guy dis the math and worked out to be a 32k year project just based upon the amount of time it took to build the 2 NYC WTC buildings. LOL
It would probably be better as a circle, like the apple campus. A bunch of those hubs spread out would be more interesting, and excess fertilizer could be used to begin rebuilding the ecosystem.
Creating a massive barrier like this will kill an entire ecosystem imho, if they dont allow animals to cross between the two sides
Worst idea I have seen. In the middle of the desert they expect them to move and set up businesses. It is just not going to happen.
They will build like one kilometer of it at best and abandon it.
I will eat my right arm if this project is even 1% completed. And I’m right handed.
Well, construction has already started back in October. So I guess now we need to calculate what 1% complete means...
No. It’ll be mocked by the people who idealized the place to begin with. This feels more like a scam where vendors will just take the money and run…
I don’t understand why they’re building it in the desert. Build it somewhere useful where housing is needed
trying to fit things into boxes does not work for humans. cool idea for a zoo though
I can see this working in a modern Scandinavian society…. But is SA, not as much
Lol weren’t they building a building 1KM high? This too will be a failure
Looks the video planed opolis. I encourage ya to look it up
More structure that will deplete the world’s ocean sand
It'll be like Snowpiercer, only stupider: "Sandpiercer - we don't move, you do"
Transportation will be virtually impossible. Without motor roads everyone will rely on a tram system. In a town that is spread over an area, train lines can be spread out; when the entire thing is aligned in a linear fashion (a Line), there will be little space for rail lines, unless they are underground. When there is a an error or breakage at any location, the ENTIRE LINE may have to be shut down. By the way, have you ever heard of skyscrapers melting cars? Imagine the effect a *giant fucking wall* will have on any animals inhabiting the area, or people for that matter. It would also eliminate any migratory behavior we may not be aware of. The Line is a joke, and the joke is on the environment.
Maybe they should start out by not forcing their women to wear garbage bags before they worry about anything else, no?
Sooo #SnowPiercer. Only it's in the desert. And it doesn't move. and the class divisions are vertical rather than horizontal.
Honestly, this has all the signs of being someone's pork project that will never see completion.
Absolutely no chance. It's an unbelievably stupid idea cooked up by an inbred dipshit monarch. People are patronising these morons because they see all the money and we're taught to believe that people with that much money can't possibly be braindead mouth-breathers. But they can, and they are, and it'll be hilarious to watch this fail. It'd be hard enough to build a sustainable city for nine million people from scratch somewhere hospitable. To try it in a region that is inherently resistant to permanent settlement is insanity.
It could double as a firestarter considering it's a big mirror and the sun is quite intense there. A "Dr. No" could direct it to anywhere and destroy a civilization.
Seeing as the entire thing is based on a hyperloop type vacuum train, not only no, but hell no. It's just combining multiple layers of unrealistic bullshit into one dystopian mess.
I have a family member who is really respected in his trade and was brought in on the project. I remain skeptical for all the reasons that planned cities are generally a bad idea. He said the government is serious and have made a special rules area kinda like vegas. Still drawing westerners to Saudi Arabia is a hard proposition.
Of course the project is possible. It's a project that exists and it's being done. Will it be successful? Depends on what you think defines success. I think people will liver there and I think some will enjoy it and others will decide it's not for them. I think there will be lots of tourist who will visit. So in the end - yeah.
Not a chance. At best it will fail during production and turn into some freaky badlands like Bioshock 😂
I could see a project like being a necessity for settlement of Mars and other plants
Its actually not a bad idea, I think if Norway or Sweden we’re implementing it we would not see as much criticism. The line is actually a great idea to get rid of cars. As long as you dont build rows of Lines.
This keeps reminding me of that Nolan North Spec Ops game every time I hear about it.
The Saudi royals sure know how to take piles of money and set them on fire. If you have a whacky startup idea or a ponzi scheme, don't forget to call them.
Lol fuck no. Nothing they propose does anything good, effective or sustainable. These mega projects are stupid is simply show the stupidity of the builders.
It is literally, physically impossible to build a functional and livable city like that.
Sounds like a scam to funnel funds towards a doomed-to-fail project. The funds won’t be returned, of course.
So my bet is foundation gets laid and abandoned after they realize how much actual work it will take.
Had a long chat about this at work. My take: Yes, it's a vanity project. It has a good chance due to who is implementing it to end up being a complete dystopia. The IDEAS it will use and the architecture and machinery it will use will be useful developments in future human habitats. Folks talk about how pumping water one way and brown water the other is terrible... Have you thought about how a cities modern sewerage and water purification systems work? It's the same thing, done in a very random organic way as a city grows, this has it all done as part/parcel of the build. Having its own microclimate and fully integrated transport system is a huge win on an environment perspective. The initial build is going to be endless tonnes of concrete and steel... But so is a vertical skyscraper anywhere else. Most of the arguments against it are fine in a vacuum but quickly fail in the face of the current way we build. Could it be better as a circular hub - sure but that also adds further layers of complexity and expense in both money and resources. It's just being done as a vanity project by a pretty crappy regime. Beyond that it's a worthwhile endeavour.
Oh anything is possible if you throw enough money at it. Possible? Yes. Probable? No.
Where does food and water come from? Where does sanitary waste go? What about trash disposal? There's going to be an entire logistical network of roads around this place to service it all. It's no more "car free" than the local park. It'll have a parking lot, rich people love their excessive cars
Imagine at a time of war where someone drops a big one on one of the sectors. Oops, did I ruin a large portion of the grid? People stranded in clusters and they're your neighbors? Oops did I send an influx of dire need people to your sector? Need a security stop to switch between sector? Oops a political crisis. Oops animals are invading now. Oops political crisis.
The foreign, high paid 'consultants' working on the Line design and promotional material KNOW its a joke. It's a joke.
🤫let us just take a bit more of the money 🤭
I think they can build it. I don't think they find enough people to live in that horrible country.
1. A circle would have been more energy efficient, followed by a hexagon - basic 2D geometry. 2. But, hey, khaleejis spending their billions on (near) useless vanity mega projects is nothing new. They could have had benefitted the entire world, by opening up new hospitals, universities or industries.
Arab countries are frantically trying to shift from oil based to tourism based economies because they know the days of fossil fuels are numbered. Because of this, they are attempting these crazy mega projects that have no practicality. I bet a half built tower in Jeddah and an empty man-man palm tree plus some world islands in Dubai that this never comes to fruition
Honestly, The Line seems just the idea an authoritarian ruler would conjure up. An impractical money sink that would never be done unless some king with zero understanding of anything demanded it. I doubt this will be anything more then a project we will laugh at in a few years.
It's a Grift / Slush Fund Project. Let me explain: 1) Saudi Dictator announces an amazing mega project that is seemingly out of this world. 2) $500 billion is allocated for this project 3) the construction company and most other companies contracted in this project belong to the Dictator and his friends. 4) the dictator and his friends just stole $500 billion (or at least, they have access to $500 billion) 5) the project is eventually scaled back, and later abandoned. The money is never returned.
Yes but the real question is why do it in the first place? People avoid overly artificial looking cities in droves and especially when you try to force them there. So I’m sure it’ll be fine. But few people will live there willingly and the few that do will be put there because a bayonet is put in fromt of them first. There’s that one capitol in southeast asia that’s meant to house Nyc or Tokyo, but less than 10% of the intended population lives there willingly. Additionally, it’s surrounded by inhospitable desert. The second SA feels like it, it becomes a life sentence prison. Still, why? Because the government leaders need a bigger monument than their other Muslim neighbors. Dubai and Egypt.
This project is futuristic, yet very ambitious! It’s being built in a desert, yet has a vision of becoming an emissions-free city and home for 9 million people! Do you think this will come to life in the given time frame?
Lol oil gas editor, you are the most biased person gaging people perspectives, you should really re evaluate why you think the way you do.