Despite efforts to make a planned city in the Saudi Arabian desert sustainable, its layout could create problems
In October 2022 construction work began on a megaproject called “the Line,” a 106-mile-long city in the Saudi Arabian desert. The plan is for nine million people to live within a mere 13 square miles—an area comparable to Burlington, Vt., which is home to only about 45,000 inhabitants.
But in a paper published in June in npj Urban Sustainability, mathematician Rafael Prieto-Curiel and physicist Dániel Kondor, both at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna , argue that the Line is not particularly sustainable from a mathematical perspective. “A line is the least efficient possible shape of a city," Prieto-Curiel said in a press release about the research from CSH. He added that, instead, cities are typically round.
High-speed rail is intended to solve transport and mobility issues in the Line. But for this solution to work, the city will need around 86 stations so that every inhabitant has a stop within walking distance in this car-free metropolis. The many stops will increase the duration of each journey—and prevent trains from reaching the desired high speeds. In addition, a commuter will spend more than 60 minutes traveling to their destination on average, Prieto-Curiel and Kondor calculate.
The average distance between two people picked at random would then be just 1.8 miles. A high-speed train would not be necessary at all because theoretically everything would be within walking distance. A few additional bus lines and bicycle routes would suffice. The round city shape would be less sensational from a design perspective but more “desirable since it reduces commuting distances and the energy required for transport,” Prieto-Curiel and Kondor write in their paper.
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