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Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

2 minute official presentation of the project for anybody not familiar with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kz5vEqdaSc

When I first heard about it I thought it's going to be vaporware. I can make no sense of it. The deign and the location seem to indicate huge costs for no benefits in many areas. There's no fresh water over there. Complete glass facade in the desert requires a lot of cooling. The interior will require electrical illumination. And then there's the transportation issues caused by it being a line instead of a circle. Lack of streets compensated by flying taxis? Virtual on-line school for children I assume because you can't transport them to central schools? "AI" managed utilities? And I could go on and on and on.

What do you make of this, from a practical standpoint?

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A circle would have made more sense, I think, but having it in a line still makes a little sense: a long, narrow city usually works well with public transit because trains do well in moving along corridors. Still, a circle would have been better because you could have trains going both directions and the average time to get to any destination would be shorter. Anyway, your criticism of it being a line instead of a circle holds for Manhattan, for instance.

The location doesn't seem to make much sense though. And what exactly will be the industry that supports this place economically? Most cities have some kind of local industry.

> Still, a circle would have been better because you could have trains going both directions

In this case couldn't you just walk across the street and take the opposite direction train? I may be misinterpreting the idea in my mind, but it seems like it could be treated as an extremely long, skinny ellipses (this sentence begs for a math nerd to comment with the correct terms.)

You could even have multiple (or 60 each way, oil tycoon style) trains if utilizing tunnels and overhangs for people to 'walk through' the lines of running trains.

With a line, in the worst case you have to travel 170km.

With a circle, in the worst case you have to travel 85km.

That's it.

> And then there's the transportation issues caused by it being a line instead of a circle

Actually because of the line concept it makes it easier to reach any part of it using a single high-frequency and high-density transportation line. With a circle design you need a lot more transport lines to reach all areas, and not all of them can be high-frequency and/or high density.

If you just take the planned line and make it a circle, joining the opposite ends and leaving the area in the circle empty, at the very least you cut the maximum travel distance by half

Let it play out, we will find soon. The first phase is sort of a trial.

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