Out of this world: quick diversion
Dubai proposal from globalart.pl
What would become of our horizontal transport systems if vertical cities like this one ever took off.
A city of a couple of a hundred thousand people concentrated on say a sqkm block would obviously overwhelm any road based transport system, and even a heavy rail metro hauling 50,000 people an hour would struggle (and that’s assuming the ENTIRE capacity of the trains is devoted to this station alone, rather than for several stations).
Is some sort of airborne mass transit system required in this case?
Burj Khalifa is fortunate that besides the tourist gimmick, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of people coming and going from the building. And that’s a fraction of the height of this proposal.
On the same note was this: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2010/05/26/roadtown/
What percentage of people would need to leave at any one time, outside of an emergency?
Thanks Notch
Begs the question. The proponents like to spin “no one need ever leave” type rubbish but the reality is, at the end of the day it is just another tall building. Assuming, as usual, a morning and evening peak, and assuming 50% residential and 50% commercial and that only 20% are able to both live and work in the building, then that at least gives us 30% who need to leave. It doesn’t tell us the number who need to arrive because commercial and resi densities of course not the same.
Assuming 60,000 need to leave and 100,000 need to arrive, tells me you will need 2 stations on 2 different lines to cope. I would also seriously investigate double deck (full length, both decks loading simultaneousnly) rolling stock.
There’s no point worrying what bus capacity is available – even 10,000 people coming or going by bus isn’t going to make more than marginal difference.
Something Star Warsy, levitating monorails and flying cars probably would be required if these buildings became common. Assuming, as much sci-fi does, that you would create virtual highways in the sky, and have people come and go across multiple levels of the buildings. For example, you plot a journey of (1,1,200) to (10,10,200) ie you travel from grid reference (1,1 and 200 floors up) to (10,10 and 200 levels up) and if your actual journey is from floor 215 of one building to floor 170 of the other, you use lifts at the each end.
I s’pose. Not really sure but if you go building lots of buildings 2 kilometres high I think you really need to think about this stuff as there is a limit to the amount of traffic the surface can handle when people are packed in this close.
Also got me to thinking, if I was running full length double deck underground rollingstock and I really was pressed for capacity, and I didn’t want people ‘choosing their favourite’ deck, but chose them randomly, how would I do it.
One way would be to have the 2 decks completely isolated from each other, and fitted out identically, so the passenger is unaware which deck they are on, and becomes indifferent to the choice.
You couldn’t afford a Sydney style “Upstairs or Down” choice when you’re packing them in.
Riccardo, you need to go well above a couple of hundred thousand per sq.km. That is only at the level of the lower-east side of Manhattan (and probably lots of other places) at the start of the 20thC. Four or five underground lines would handle the traffic easily (and still be spaced 200m apart), while the pedestrian spaces would survive.
Looking at a smaller area (1 block – 200m x 200m) at 25sq.m per person (office space), 1600 per floor, 250 floors = 400,000 people. Hard to see how you’d reach a higher density than that (and you’d need a larger base area to go much higher. The equivalent residential is about 100,000 people (2.5 million per sq.km). A single use development (or development area) that required transport out would be pretty strained, but as notch said, how many people would actually leave at one time? If you can solve the internal transport problem, I suspect the external one is easy.
Thanks Russ, and it might be one for ‘travel demand management’. A constant stream of people coming and going would be fine, it would be pronounced peaks that I would imagine the greatest problems.
Manhattan has, as you said a dense subway network, and a city with these sort of buildings would definitely require one. Assuming in fact four lines, say at the periphery of the development and a station for each at the base, again, as you said, would manage.
I suppose I’m jaded by how hard it is to get a single railway line built here; but cities that wanted these sorts of buildings would presumably also build the mass transit to go with them.