End of The Line? Why Saudi Arabia's Linear City Isn't Working

The Line was supposed to be Saudi Arabia's shining new eco-city concept. Over 100 miles of tech-powered living on a green energy base.

But now its ambitions have been radically curtailed. And questions have arisen over the engineering at its core, including the transport system, distance between residence, as well as the massively underestimated scale of the project and build time.

Can The Line survive and grow - or is it little more than an expensive 21st century folly?

00:00 Intro
00:45 How the line differs from traditional cities
01:20 Mohammed bin Salman and Investment for the Line Project
02:00 What is the Line
04:16 What's going wrong with the line
06:13 Problems with the engineering and design
06:40 The distance between two people
08:35 Reimagine the Line as the Circle

[tryscience]

with continuous 1G acceleration / 1G negative acceleration between 82 stops, and an optimistically short 15 seconds motionless per stop, it should take 2.4 hours to traverse the full 170km line.

[Youraveragebag]

On the plus side, they could turn it into an abandoned site for those weirdos who like to explore abandoned places

[blurglide]

The line will revolutionize making any two parts of the city as far apart as possible!
How are we going to get to our sci-fi dystopian future without building things like this?

[One.Zero.One]

How gullible are these people to believe this sales pitch? When they said the travel time was 20 minutes, my very first thought was what about all the stops? You don’t need to be a rocket scientist, you just need to have common sense.

[dan]

I’d love to see the floorplans and elevations for this project along with all the plumbing and electrical plans and air-conditioning and saltwater desalinization

[laskey]

When your concept cannot survive napkin math, it's doomed.

[annag]

A high class version of 20 minute cities - it won't take off except for a tourist destination

[moreGoodFlaouwckxes]

Thing is, the video mentions the potential fudge factor of turning it into a circle(which sounds like the dumbest idea as that is already basically just a city - except with a wall!) But surely ditching the full circle potential fudge factor, and instead combining that with the line idea itself so that you have tram lines built atop eachother in the hollow middle -best of both worlds!
That way there is a better organisation of the projected 86 stations required 🤔

[snnwstt]

About the trains: A possible solution is to make small autonomously driven capsules. Scenario: You enter a station, take a capsule (4 to 6 peoples max let say, in a capsule) which departs each minute or so once there is one passenger aboard. Assign the few destinations, and have the capsule taking the express way (like the bus ... of a computer) and drop the passenger(s) exactly where they are expected. No need to stop to each and every intermediate stations. Note that getting in or out a station is in a "parallel" path to the "bus" and thus, does not "jam" the high speed capsules on the said buss. Add yes, there is no need to visit each intermediate station to "take waiting passengers", these passengers in waiting ... just take their own capsule, as they walk in the station. And voila, high speed trains, or capsules, not needing a driver per capsule since they are autonomously driven with the appropriate electronic.

[jameslyddall]

I remember when the Fyre festival came out and a shit load of advertisement blitz came out on facebook and social media. This was before it all went tits up but the advertisement with the models and the footage was amazing and grabbed your attention. Ultimately it came to nothing. I feel that this project in Saudi is going the same way but with money and funds Fyre only wish they had. The amount of steel needed to create even the scaled down version will keep a lot of steel mills in peak production for several years on that one project alone. Forget about any other construction or back orders around the world. The amount of floor space taken up by the elevators alone will be utterly impractical. Even those two challenges feels like this will ultimately not get built. Good luck if they can but they've bit of more then can chew on this project.

[Imr-rr]

This is what happens when those greedy investors trust incompetent people which just happens to have a ton of money & absolute power over a country.

[JJ-C-bw]

At this point, it's easier to live on a moving train

[igvtec]

More people packed, closely tight together means higher chance and risk of spreading diseases.

[antony]

It's not working because it';s a stupid techbro fantasy project.

[Eurotool]

Why didn't they make it modular. Build 100m long blocks at a time

[tl]

Nimrod Syndrome. Human being trying to pack and cement people in one place….

[swilhelm]

I thought they said they proposed 9 million people.

[jacoblahr]

I dont think The Saudi prince is a engineer or a construction developer soooo... ya good luck bro lol

[GreggRobinson-rbxy]

Who would or could live in such an environment? Ahh, someone from Portland or Seattle. Not that personal space would be a problem and what if you wanted out? SOL

[RamizAhmed-kysw]

😱
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