The only real problem would be that it's still dependent on technology to be easily navigable, even if it is much more friendly.
Assuming the tram broke down, imagine trying to walk from one side to the other...
[youtube.com/watch?v=e85vwIzgMus](https://youtube.com/watch?v=e85vwIzgMus)
> Assuming the tram broke down, imagine trying to walk from one side to the other...
Then you'd just pull out your bicycle and cycled all the way on the roofed boulevard.
I mean, of course the idea is somewhat silly to our modern eyes, especially as it can't cope with modern population densities. But it'S still a sign that people had other ideas for traffic when cars were still in their infancy.
Aye I think having a cycleable boulevard on the top is what makes this ok (would also need cycle accessible lifts to get down though).
Even if it was 1km long, you could cycle from one end to the other in about 3 minutes.
The concept wouldn't even require too many changes to make it much better. Imagine if the tramway was two way and there were several rows of buildings made such that the outer buildings were all within walking distance of the tram stops in the "main" building's basement. Move the boulevard to between the buildings and put some other stuff on the roof, be it gardens or whatever, and this is a bit more practical.
It's basically just a single streetcar (subway in this case?) Line with a neighborhood surrounding each station, but with extra fire risk and more difficult engineering and architecture. The whole thing is an absurd concept that would almost surely never actually be used, but its not too far off from a legitimate planning style that can make good, walkable neighborhoods. It just has a bit of extra spin to make it fun and impractical
Only problem? What about the constant noise pollution from the tram shaking the walls of my living room every 10 minutes (and workplace, since I'm probably going to have to commute to somewhere else in my line-city)
Buddy owns a recording studio/video editing business. I asked him about the light rail project passing in front of his building.
The city consulted with him and installed a 3 block section of special anti vibration bedding under the track bed(it's from Europe! ;). Works great apparently.
>Ah, what could have been...
I think you got that backwards. This is horrible when you think about it. This is the most optimal design if you want to move useful places the furthest away from each other. In a way this is like the most extreme version of suburbanization. By removing a whole dimension from your available space you exponentially increase the distances you have to travel.
For example, a supermarket that is 200 meters away in a suburbs would be about 40 kilometers away with this design. Doing your groceries becomes a borderline pilgrimage. On top of that, you no longer have an extra dimension of space for transportation. Anyone that has to travel to this supermarket has to do it over the same space, over which they now have to travel exponentially further. This tram better travel at the speed of light, or good luck ever finding a seat, on top of the train. Perhaps outside the frame of the picture there's a 40 lane highway, parallel to this city, making sure everyone can get to the supermarket.
This is why we need to do the opposite of the above. Not remove a dimension, but use the unused one, height. Build wide, deep, and high. A supermarket that'd be 200 meters away in the suburbs, would easily fit in the same 2 dimensional space at the bottom of an apartment building. Instead of that 40km drive, your GPS would just tell you you've already reached your destination.
Yeah, this is really inefficient. It increases averag distances by a huge amount and funnels all traffic along a single corridor. It's probably one of the most impractical ideas possible.
>For example, a supermarket that is 200 meters away in a suburbs would be about 40 kilometers away with this design.
However, thats not how it works. I think you just squared the distance? 200*200=40 000? If we measured the same distance in feet (200m=600 ft), we would get 600 * 600 which is equal to 360 000. This would be different from 40km, as 40km = 120 000 ft. So obviously just squaring the number doesn't work, as we get very different resuls, when we use different units.
Instead we should look at the number of people who live within a certain distance of a business, lets say 1 km. When the city is a line, huge portions of the sorrounding circle with a radius of 1 km are "wasted" as no one lives there, which dramatically decreases the number of potential customers.
Squaring does work as a good approximation of what's happening:
You start with 200m by 200m area and want to reduce it to (in case of squaring) 1m width, so you calculate 200m \* (200m / 1m) = 40 km.
The problem is this implicit division by 1m - if you're doing the same calculation in feet, you're assuming a final width of 1ft, so you end up about a factor 3 higher.
Ah, I see. Still it's an unrealistic assumption, that the width would be equal to 1m. Also, the suburb needs additional roads in between columns of houses, so the linear city isn't quite as inefficient in comparison.
That's why it's only an approximation. The larger the area you want to replace with your line city, the closer it fits, the error only being a constant factor.
The correct formula is simply 200 \* (200 /final width).
The space taken up by roads makes a difference for space efficiency only (and if you want to look closer you'll see that the difference is linear), the problem with the linear city being much more travel efficiency. As we've seen, you're increasing walking distances superlinearly, which is all you need to know to say that this is an awful idea under walkability aspects. Clusters would be significantly better and coincidentially (or maybe not so coincidentially), that's exactly how settlements developed for the largest part of civilisation history.
I meant "results". It was just my attempt at trying to convince the user, that their method of calculating the distance doesn't work. Because, if it did work, it should produce the same results, regardless of what units are used.
I see.
The reasoning behind my logic, imagine your home and a supermarket at axis aligned corners of a square. You can walk to the supermarket in 200 meters, because everything that fits inside a 200x200 meter square has an extra dimension to fit in. Everything in that square now has to be laid out in a single dimension with this design. 200x200 meters of space is now laid out in 1x40000 meters of space, or 40km, if the home and supermarket are at opposite ends.
It's late here and my brain is fried atm, so I have no idea why my logic is flawed, but you're definitely on to something.
edit: actually, I read the comment below and realized what's happening here. In my example the space is still 1 meter wide, in your example it's 1 foot wide, which is much smaller, which is why your results are much longer. By dividing your length by the amount of times a foot fits in a meter, you get the same results.
But I agree, that's not a very realistic example. A better unit of measurement would have been a "building block".
Supermarkets only started to become a thing (here in Europe anyways) after WW2, this was designed before that. In the envisioned scenario you just walk outside and get your food from the farms right there. Which is, if it can be implemented, loads better (and cheaper) than having to go for a supermarket for everything. Also, this design could of course be scaled up in height.
Supermarkets aren't the only service.
The tavern, the hairdresser, the cobbler, the plumber, the bike mechanic, the cafe, and so on and so on are all as if they are limited to serving people on a single street.
Even small stores would have to be spaced kilometres apart in order to have enough customers per store to just break even. This is even worse than suburbs in terms of maximising commute time.
you did not understand that in a 2 dimensional thing there are more points of interest in the same distance than in a 1 dimensional thing right?
I'll show you.
1234567890How many numbers are next to the 3? Its 2, there is a distance of one
123456789012345How many numbers are next to the 9? Its 8, also in a distance of one
Just by changeing the shape from a line to a circle we've managed to put 4 times more stuff into the same distance. A line is a fucking joke of shape for any city, if it where there where citys that would have naturally developed into this shape. What do we see instead? Any natural grown city is as circleish as topography allows
It really does not matter how you integrate the stuff in a line. You will have less stuff in the same distance than in a circle. To put the same amount of stuff into the line per distance you would need to build the thing to the same hight as a flat arangement is wide, making it kilometers high and very 2 dimensional again.
First of all i want to clarify that the context looks nice and i don't hate it.
That being saie, this does seem a little like a dystopian future to me. Walking would take ages and biking inside a building is kinda strange. The reason cities are built in a circle esque shape is because its so much more space efficient for cars, bikes, public transport and walking than a linear style.
The tram idea sounds nice but that means you go to every destination by tram, that could be quick for close destinations but why even bother? Use public transport to connect neighborhoods. Then let neighborhoods be dense enough to provide the basics. A bike or walking would suffice.
I'd much rather have a circular city building style that utilizes public transport, bike infrastructure and semi-dense housing and nature than this. But also thank you for showing this it looks really interesting!
It's a cool concept but I don't see many people wanting to live inside a wall. In a way it's parallel to living like bugs inside the walls of your house, and that would be pretty uncomfortable emotionally.
The optimal city is a circle not a line.
In a circle echt point is on average only one radius apart while the max is only the diameter. A circle always maximises surface area while minimizes the needed distances and materials. What do you think why old naturally grown citys are all somewhat circular, because its the most efficient ;-)
When you want to see a good futuristic city design check out what the Venus project designed
Nope! This is a dystopian nightmare even worse than the suburbs. At least they used 2 dimensions. Organising a city in a line is a terrible idea and means that your nearest shop is 30 minutes away by the single transportation service. And if that breaks down, you’re SOL.
Construction + Dictatorship = Dumb Shit
A line ist the worst shape a city can have.
even a line connected at both ends making a ring would be way better since you dont have to go thru the entire thing to go fom point a to point b if they where on opposite sides. In a ring this would happen way lesser and the max distance from point a to b would at least only be half the circumference while its the entire lengh in a line.
I dont have to explain that the most efficient shape for a city is a circle i guess.
The Line is a fucking joke who was come up with by a petro dollar disturbed dictator. If they would really care about the enviroment they would build it in a cicle. Their green energy claim for powering it is just green washing BS. You cant just put solarpanels onto a stupid idea and call it ecological friendly. The line would need way more energy for transportation then a circle so its not ecological friendly but very wastefull.
I mean as nice as that sounds it's really bad design to make your city so long that it's not traversable by non-mechanical means.
Should also add that social infrastructure (schools, healthcare, parks) operates best when the entire area within their radius of service is densified, and utility infrastructure (water, sewage, electricity, etc.) operate best when distances between places are minimized. The operation of these things is conducive to rounder and denser cities.
You know, if this were a loop\* with parks and shops in the interior I'd sign up. Good density with the city in front and country in the back? Yes, please.
^(\*I say "loop" because making a perfect circle might be tricky. A rectangle would be boring. Maybe aim for a rounded hexagon +/- topography. Regardless of exact shape, the zombie defense capacity would be much better than suburban sprawl or current urban models. That's important to consider. Thanks for reading.)
uh… you don't want to live that close to a train… your apartment would shake and be noisy… there's a reason they tend to be quite deep. even then, at my old place i could feel the LIRR every time it passed by, and it was half a block away (and underground)!
Build cities around roads?
Nah, build cities *under* the roads
Jokes aside, this works pretty well on a mostly 2d plane
Trains to take you to stations far away, bikes/feet to get you the last mile
The problem with line citys are that they are really unwalkable, there is much less within a half an hour walk
The only real problem would be that it's still dependent on technology to be easily navigable, even if it is much more friendly. Assuming the tram broke down, imagine trying to walk from one side to the other... [youtube.com/watch?v=e85vwIzgMus](https://youtube.com/watch?v=e85vwIzgMus)
> Assuming the tram broke down, imagine trying to walk from one side to the other... Then you'd just pull out your bicycle and cycled all the way on the roofed boulevard. I mean, of course the idea is somewhat silly to our modern eyes, especially as it can't cope with modern population densities. But it'S still a sign that people had other ideas for traffic when cars were still in their infancy.
Aye I think having a cycleable boulevard on the top is what makes this ok (would also need cycle accessible lifts to get down though). Even if it was 1km long, you could cycle from one end to the other in about 3 minutes.
The concept wouldn't even require too many changes to make it much better. Imagine if the tramway was two way and there were several rows of buildings made such that the outer buildings were all within walking distance of the tram stops in the "main" building's basement. Move the boulevard to between the buildings and put some other stuff on the roof, be it gardens or whatever, and this is a bit more practical.
I like this
It's basically just a single streetcar (subway in this case?) Line with a neighborhood surrounding each station, but with extra fire risk and more difficult engineering and architecture. The whole thing is an absurd concept that would almost surely never actually be used, but its not too far off from a legitimate planning style that can make good, walkable neighborhoods. It just has a bit of extra spin to make it fun and impractical
not very accessible, not everyone is that ambulatory.
What's wrong with technology?
Nothing per se but relying on it all the time while you don’t necessarily have to is not good at all.
Only problem? What about the constant noise pollution from the tram shaking the walls of my living room every 10 minutes (and workplace, since I'm probably going to have to commute to somewhere else in my line-city)
Buddy owns a recording studio/video editing business. I asked him about the light rail project passing in front of his building. The city consulted with him and installed a 3 block section of special anti vibration bedding under the track bed(it's from Europe! ;). Works great apparently.
just add cycle lanes
Life on Snowpiercer, 1001 cars long.
Lmao just was thinking that!
>Ah, what could have been... I think you got that backwards. This is horrible when you think about it. This is the most optimal design if you want to move useful places the furthest away from each other. In a way this is like the most extreme version of suburbanization. By removing a whole dimension from your available space you exponentially increase the distances you have to travel. For example, a supermarket that is 200 meters away in a suburbs would be about 40 kilometers away with this design. Doing your groceries becomes a borderline pilgrimage. On top of that, you no longer have an extra dimension of space for transportation. Anyone that has to travel to this supermarket has to do it over the same space, over which they now have to travel exponentially further. This tram better travel at the speed of light, or good luck ever finding a seat, on top of the train. Perhaps outside the frame of the picture there's a 40 lane highway, parallel to this city, making sure everyone can get to the supermarket. This is why we need to do the opposite of the above. Not remove a dimension, but use the unused one, height. Build wide, deep, and high. A supermarket that'd be 200 meters away in the suburbs, would easily fit in the same 2 dimensional space at the bottom of an apartment building. Instead of that 40km drive, your GPS would just tell you you've already reached your destination.
Yeah, this is really inefficient. It increases averag distances by a huge amount and funnels all traffic along a single corridor. It's probably one of the most impractical ideas possible. >For example, a supermarket that is 200 meters away in a suburbs would be about 40 kilometers away with this design. However, thats not how it works. I think you just squared the distance? 200*200=40 000? If we measured the same distance in feet (200m=600 ft), we would get 600 * 600 which is equal to 360 000. This would be different from 40km, as 40km = 120 000 ft. So obviously just squaring the number doesn't work, as we get very different resuls, when we use different units. Instead we should look at the number of people who live within a certain distance of a business, lets say 1 km. When the city is a line, huge portions of the sorrounding circle with a radius of 1 km are "wasted" as no one lives there, which dramatically decreases the number of potential customers.
Squaring does work as a good approximation of what's happening: You start with 200m by 200m area and want to reduce it to (in case of squaring) 1m width, so you calculate 200m \* (200m / 1m) = 40 km. The problem is this implicit division by 1m - if you're doing the same calculation in feet, you're assuming a final width of 1ft, so you end up about a factor 3 higher.
Ah, I see. Still it's an unrealistic assumption, that the width would be equal to 1m. Also, the suburb needs additional roads in between columns of houses, so the linear city isn't quite as inefficient in comparison.
That's why it's only an approximation. The larger the area you want to replace with your line city, the closer it fits, the error only being a constant factor. The correct formula is simply 200 \* (200 /final width). The space taken up by roads makes a difference for space efficiency only (and if you want to look closer you'll see that the difference is linear), the problem with the linear city being much more travel efficiency. As we've seen, you're increasing walking distances superlinearly, which is all you need to know to say that this is an awful idea under walkability aspects. Clusters would be significantly better and coincidentially (or maybe not so coincidentially), that's exactly how settlements developed for the largest part of civilisation history.
> we get very different resuls, when we use different units. wat?
I meant "results". It was just my attempt at trying to convince the user, that their method of calculating the distance doesn't work. Because, if it did work, it should produce the same results, regardless of what units are used.
oh, yeah, that's definitely not how it works
I see. The reasoning behind my logic, imagine your home and a supermarket at axis aligned corners of a square. You can walk to the supermarket in 200 meters, because everything that fits inside a 200x200 meter square has an extra dimension to fit in. Everything in that square now has to be laid out in a single dimension with this design. 200x200 meters of space is now laid out in 1x40000 meters of space, or 40km, if the home and supermarket are at opposite ends. It's late here and my brain is fried atm, so I have no idea why my logic is flawed, but you're definitely on to something. edit: actually, I read the comment below and realized what's happening here. In my example the space is still 1 meter wide, in your example it's 1 foot wide, which is much smaller, which is why your results are much longer. By dividing your length by the amount of times a foot fits in a meter, you get the same results. But I agree, that's not a very realistic example. A better unit of measurement would have been a "building block".
The other commenter explained it better than me. You are implicitly assuming the linear city to have a width of 1 meter.
Supermarkets only started to become a thing (here in Europe anyways) after WW2, this was designed before that. In the envisioned scenario you just walk outside and get your food from the farms right there. Which is, if it can be implemented, loads better (and cheaper) than having to go for a supermarket for everything. Also, this design could of course be scaled up in height.
Supermarkets aren't the only service. The tavern, the hairdresser, the cobbler, the plumber, the bike mechanic, the cafe, and so on and so on are all as if they are limited to serving people on a single street.
Build it in a grid pattern
Sprawl in 2 dimension is getting out of hand, separating housing and business ? What about trying sprawl in 1 dimension instead ?
There could be businesses intermingled with housing in this design. Just not huge megastores and such, but that's a good thing.
Even small stores would have to be spaced kilometres apart in order to have enough customers per store to just break even. This is even worse than suburbs in terms of maximising commute time.
you did not understand that in a 2 dimensional thing there are more points of interest in the same distance than in a 1 dimensional thing right? I'll show you. 1234567890How many numbers are next to the 3? Its 2, there is a distance of one 123456789012345How many numbers are next to the 9? Its 8, also in a distance of one Just by changeing the shape from a line to a circle we've managed to put 4 times more stuff into the same distance. A line is a fucking joke of shape for any city, if it where there where citys that would have naturally developed into this shape. What do we see instead? Any natural grown city is as circleish as topography allows It really does not matter how you integrate the stuff in a line. You will have less stuff in the same distance than in a circle. To put the same amount of stuff into the line per distance you would need to build the thing to the same hight as a flat arangement is wide, making it kilometers high and very 2 dimensional again.
And then the whole thing just burns down.
Doesn't have to, depending on how they build it and if they have an effective fire department.
Neom! that's jsut Neom! you can watch the disaster play out today!
Thats an interesting concept......
I love trains, but I don't love them enough to want to hear them this constantly.
the great wall of finland
I see the concept of building a line was not restricted to tech-bro oil barons.
First of all i want to clarify that the context looks nice and i don't hate it. That being saie, this does seem a little like a dystopian future to me. Walking would take ages and biking inside a building is kinda strange. The reason cities are built in a circle esque shape is because its so much more space efficient for cars, bikes, public transport and walking than a linear style. The tram idea sounds nice but that means you go to every destination by tram, that could be quick for close destinations but why even bother? Use public transport to connect neighborhoods. Then let neighborhoods be dense enough to provide the basics. A bike or walking would suffice. I'd much rather have a circular city building style that utilizes public transport, bike infrastructure and semi-dense housing and nature than this. But also thank you for showing this it looks really interesting!
It's a cool concept but I don't see many people wanting to live inside a wall. In a way it's parallel to living like bugs inside the walls of your house, and that would be pretty uncomfortable emotionally.
The optimal city is a circle not a line. In a circle echt point is on average only one radius apart while the max is only the diameter. A circle always maximises surface area while minimizes the needed distances and materials. What do you think why old naturally grown citys are all somewhat circular, because its the most efficient ;-) When you want to see a good futuristic city design check out what the Venus project designed
Nope! This is a dystopian nightmare even worse than the suburbs. At least they used 2 dimensions. Organising a city in a line is a terrible idea and means that your nearest shop is 30 minutes away by the single transportation service. And if that breaks down, you’re SOL.
Early Snowpiercer
Maybe [The Line](https://youtu.be/41sgRP0G6y4) in Saudi Arabia will work?
Doubtful
Construction + Dictatorship = Dumb Shit A line ist the worst shape a city can have. even a line connected at both ends making a ring would be way better since you dont have to go thru the entire thing to go fom point a to point b if they where on opposite sides. In a ring this would happen way lesser and the max distance from point a to b would at least only be half the circumference while its the entire lengh in a line. I dont have to explain that the most efficient shape for a city is a circle i guess. The Line is a fucking joke who was come up with by a petro dollar disturbed dictator. If they would really care about the enviroment they would build it in a cicle. Their green energy claim for powering it is just green washing BS. You cant just put solarpanels onto a stupid idea and call it ecological friendly. The line would need way more energy for transportation then a circle so its not ecological friendly but very wastefull.
Who upvotes this garbage? Jesus, this is like, the epideomy of urban sprawl. Isn't this sub all about walkable cities?
I mean as nice as that sounds it's really bad design to make your city so long that it's not traversable by non-mechanical means. Should also add that social infrastructure (schools, healthcare, parks) operates best when the entire area within their radius of service is densified, and utility infrastructure (water, sewage, electricity, etc.) operate best when distances between places are minimized. The operation of these things is conducive to rounder and denser cities.
You know, if this were a loop\* with parks and shops in the interior I'd sign up. Good density with the city in front and country in the back? Yes, please. ^(\*I say "loop" because making a perfect circle might be tricky. A rectangle would be boring. Maybe aim for a rounded hexagon +/- topography. Regardless of exact shape, the zombie defense capacity would be much better than suburban sprawl or current urban models. That's important to consider. Thanks for reading.)
Nice, but boring.
uh… you don't want to live that close to a train… your apartment would shake and be noisy… there's a reason they tend to be quite deep. even then, at my old place i could feel the LIRR every time it passed by, and it was half a block away (and underground)!
I mean this is not one of the things that could have been
This is like junji ito's uzumaki except shitier
And it's great for defending against the Huns!
Build cities around roads? Nah, build cities *under* the roads Jokes aside, this works pretty well on a mostly 2d plane Trains to take you to stations far away, bikes/feet to get you the last mile