Yeah, I'm really struggling to understand why a linear city is appealing. I suppose if you set a hard limit of one train line in your city, then building it along that train line might make sense.
You'd spend a lot of time on that one train line though - and I imagine in the central bits it would get really really busy as people are trying to get to the other end. And what happens if that train line breaks?
Making a city circular takes advantage of geometry - even at the cost of having to build more than one train line. It also opens up the possibility of other forms of travel - buses, bikes, cars.
It doesn't surprise me that this is starting to fall apart. When it was announced it seemed completely unhinged.
If you have a requirement to build a city where everyone is within 1 mile of virgin forest, say, then you end up with something much like a line. You could circle it, but that's just another form of line.
A linear city gives you more opportunities for expansion. A disc one needs to be planned well from the start, but it's difficult to account for future needs.
I don’t understand how this can possibly be true. You have one only degree of freedom in a straight line. Most cities develop a natural disc pattern because it allows for expansion at every degree.
The line is the initial city design. But then in 20, 100, 500 years you have two empty sides (equally accessible from any place in the line city) which you can use for more infrastructure (e.g. airports), industry, recreation, agriculture etc.
Meanwhile if you design a disc city, you can keep expanding outwards, but that's going to be increasingly far from the center. It's going to be very difficult to build a new airport into a middle of the city (if such needs arises), meanwhile it's much easier to do that for the middle segment of a linear city.
I think your argumentation rests on this, but you should explain why it's daft and how it makes people's lives miserable. I would personally enjoy having 20 minute access to any place in the city I live (which is far from having 9 million people) and still have a vast open space nearby.
I don’t know if this applies so much to Neom, but I can think of many scenarios in which a linear city is more appealing than a circular one.
For example - if there is a natural element like a river, lake, canyon, etc. that you want to maximize city exposure to. A linear city roughly following the Grand Canyon would be infinitely more interesting than a circular one situated at one end of it.
in the end it'll still be 'disk like'. You build along the river, distances are getting big and suddenly you realize there's a lot of unused space where you can expand the building of the city while maintaining short commute time(building perpendicular to the river/expanding the width of the city), meaning even more money, more people, more economic activity. In fact most of big cities built on rivers started as small communes that gradually expanded in each direction
You'd spend a lot of time on that one train line though - and I imagine in the central bits it would get really really busy as people are trying to get to the other end. And what happens if that train line breaks?
Making a city circular takes advantage of geometry - even at the cost of having to build more than one train line. It also opens up the possibility of other forms of travel - buses, bikes, cars.
It doesn't surprise me that this is starting to fall apart. When it was announced it seemed completely unhinged.