^ That's because I've lived in a major city with viable mass transit.Simon_Jester wrote:Broomstick is right: these kinds of city plans need a LOT of wiggle room for failures and complications. Otherwise, a relatively minor accident makes the city uninhabitable, and even routine things that cause service to stop at a particular site will cause huge annoying problems for people all over the city.
One reason Chicago's mass transit works (despite many, many complaints) is that it is very rare that passengers can't take an alternate, or traffic can't be routed around problems. You MUST have a certain level of redundancy. When Chicago's entire downtown subway network flooded in 1992 temporary bus terminals were set up at train stations prior to the tunnels, and more busses were routed through the city center (they might even have borrowed buses from surronding suburbs, it's been long enough I don't remember all the details). This enabled people to get where they needed to go for the weeks it took to get the subways drained, dried, and restored to safe operation.
Or, for an earlier accident, the 1977 Loop derailment where a train fell off the elevated tracks. This screwed up the train lines AND traffic on the street below. Again, traffic could be re-routed around the accident site until it was cleared up.
That just one city's experience. I'm sure every city using mass transit will have similar tales to tell.
Purple, your cities will not be immune to such catastrophes, hence the need for rerouting. Accidents happen because machines break, people make mistakes, and no one controls the weather (or earthquakes or volcanoes or meteor strikes...)
And you will need vehicles and machinery that can operate independently of tracks and rails to get to such sites and do clean up and repairs.
Again, from Chicago - it's an axiom that if the mayor can't keep traffic moving, even in the face of natural disaster, he will not be re-elected. Last time that actually happened was mayor Bilandic in 1979, but it's a real issue in big cities. Granted, Purple's society probably doesn't have elections, but as we recently saw in Egypt if people are unhappy enough they may spontaneously "vote" by showing up in a crowd of a million or so and demanding change.That kind of thing undermines your ability to run a stable society: either you're constantly having to make everything work near-perfectly just to get it to work at all, or you're accepting frequent breakdowns and nuisances for the public, which encourages them to support your overthrow in favor of someone who will make the trains run on time.
And usually post-disaster, such as Chicago re-drawing the street grid after most of the city burned to the ground. I suppose you could raze every existing city... but the populace will NOT be happy if you start your reign in that manner.Historically, planned economies rarely build whole cities "from the ground up." To do that, you'd have to build a whole new city in the middle of nowhere (i.e., in a place no one ever thought urgently needed a new city before). There are exceptions, but not many and they're usually one-off achievements.Well I guess but since I get to plan each city from the ground up I can make a separate number of freight only lines to the places I know that I will put stuff that needs them. After all, we do have the whole state planed economy thing going.
And that's another point - societies are never truly static. Needs change. Ore will be used up in one place and a new mine will open elsewhere. Some widget will no longer be needed, and another will be invented, so you'll have to shift factories and workers around. Your society may do this more slowly than ours, but it will happen. Over time you'll need to move ports as waterways silt up or erode. Time does not stand still.Moreover, you have to allow yourself some freedom to change things around after the fact- if a steel mill is closed and razed to make room for more housing, and if thirty years later the housing is converted to an office block while a new factory is built on the edge of town, you need a transportation network that can adapt.
Which gets back to my point about people earning the privilege to move or do certain things. It gives the ambitious an outlet for their energy. It makes people feel less trapped. It gives them sufficient power over their lives they are less likely to rebel, which means your society spends less time and effort on repression. Indeed, done right it might lead to most of the social control operating through peer pressure.Your society will be a lot less dysfunctional if people can move around it without a bureaucrat deciding they need to. Any paperwork they fill out should be more of a routine matter (like, say, filing a change of address in a real society) and less like a "begging permission you're not likely to get" situation.
