To get the same area, you'd have to have slightly more center-line circumference on a ring city as linear distance on a line, but even so your transit distances are going to be shorter on the ring.
I guess I don’t really understand the criticism, most of which seems to be “you should just build something that isn’t the thing you want to build.” There is plenty of aesthetic merit to the linear city idea on its own.
To use an example of a place that already exists: the city Łódź in Poland is situated along a single linear 4-5km street. Other neighborhoods branch off from it, but essentially the main road is the city’s layout. I really like it and think it’s a lot more interesting than it would be as a circle, even if the transit is theoretically not as optimal. There is something very aesthetically appealing about it.
Then it's Goodhart law in action. A fast transit system is desirable because it's a proxy for low-friction travel. This has the speed and the friction.
Piotrkowska?
Are we just making things up? Just by a single glance at a map of Łódź you can see that this is not true. The city is clearly blob shaped.
> I guess I don’t really understand the criticism, most of which seems to be “you should just build something that isn’t the thing you want to build.”
The criticism is that there are reasons why cities are built the way they are built. "Looks good on a 3d render" is not a great reason to do something, and the reasons the proponents list don't hold up to scrutiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piotrkowska_Street
And yes, as I wrote, it is the main axis of the city, even if other neighborhoods branch off of it. This is a basic obvious fact about the city:
From the very beginning this street was the central axis, around which the city grew bigger, and its development spontaneously gave the present shape to its centre. At first the city was mainly the highway, but later it changed into the city's showcase, the leisure and shopping centre, where the life of growing industrial agglomeration could be observed.
What the sentence you are quoting claims is that this is the street the city grow out of. Which is a different statement than saying that the one you said. The "the city Łódź in Poland is situated along a single linear 4-5km street" describe the appearance and layout of the city today, the quote you are quoting describe the history of the city and in which order it was built out.
You can’t tell what it is on a map because you wouldn’t expect a pedestrianized street to be 100m wide. But I assure you, it is the busiest street and has the most foot traffic and commercial activity.
This argument is such a waste of time. I’ve been there, you’ve spent five minutes looking at Google maps. I brought it up as an example of a city designed around a straight line. Which it is.
Go waste someone else’s time.