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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • The Line is very stupid.

    At 200 meters across and 170 km long it has a surface area of 34 square kilometers.

    Let’s assume that instead of building a giant line, we build a bunch of highrises next to each other with the same height and same combined building footprint (so, same internal area). To account for the fact that we would need streets between the buildings we’ll just double the required area to 68 sq km (the line’s design already has internal streets, so this is a high ball estimate).

    The resulting city, if it were a circle, would have a diameter of 9.3 km. Which means it would take you about 23 minutes to get from one edge to the other (worst case trip) by riding a bike, or ~12 minutes to get from the center to the edge.

    As you can see stretching a city out into a giant ribbon makes things very far away from each other for little benefit. Water pipes are lines too, and while building your city like that would mean that you’d only need one big pipe it certainly wouldn’t make it easier to distribute water if you had to pump it a hundred km.



  • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldJust LOOK at the GODDAMNED ROAD!
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    29 days ago

    Its terrible because it is geometrically impossible for a form of transit to simultaneously have high capacity and to carry people directly to their destination.

    Cars average an occupancy of about 1.5, while trains routinely carry hundreds of people. A bit of thought about the implications of everyone arriving directly at their destination should reveal why the average occupancy of such a transit mode can never be much higher than 1.5. This is something that many many advocates of PRT (personal rapid transit) systems fail to understand.

    By the way, a pedestrian oriented space can be made to accommodate people that have difficulty walking, but it is virtually impossible to make a city safe and accessible for people with difficulty seeing if the expectation is that everyone is driving a car to their destination.


  • Its possible for every urban area everywhere across the globe, because the laws of geometry are the same across the entire globe.

    In many cities in many countries the conscious choice was made to destroy transit infrastructure and radically alter the urban fabric to accommodate cars (and in so doing hamper every other form of transportation). But nothing about this has anything at all to do with the city’s location, and its not an accident that public transportation just ‘happens’ to be better in some places than in others.











  • Since you have expertise in this maybe you can answer this question for me.

    Do brick or stone roads last longer than asphalt or concrete roads?

    It seems to me like they should, given the higher hardness of the material and the presumably greater resistance to freeze/thaw cycles. I have also seen a few brick roads near me that I can only imagine have gone a very long time with no maintaince (as I think the government here would rather cover it in asphalt than try to work with the bricks). The ground underneath the bricks has shifted over time forming depressions in the path that car tires take, but it is still fine to drive over at low speeds, as the slopes are smooth unlike the holes that form in asphalt.

    I’ve tried googling this before but haven’t been able to find a straightforward answer as to how long a road like that can go between rounds of maintenance.


  • This is an idea from the 1960s back when they thought solar panels would be like computer chips and remain super expensive in terms of area but become exponentially better at the amount of sunlight they could convert into electricity.

    It makes absolutely zero sense to spend billions of dollars putting solar panels in space and beaming the power back to earth now that they are so cheap per unit area. The one thing you could argue a space based solar array could do would be to stretch out the day length so you need less storage, but that’s easier to accomplish using long electrical cables.