That’s interesting, and this is an interesting community.

Link to podcast?

There a huge difference between cut and cover in a green field, vs cut and cover in an existing downtown. Huge. That’s if you can even do it in an existing downtown because of the road alignment and existing underground utilities. It’s really unlikely you can do cut and cover in an existing city and that’s the whole problem. Greenfield you can do with side slope instead of shoring, one story deep instead of two because you can plan out exits to not interfere with an existing road, and no conflicts with traffic/utilities/buildings/noise mitigation to snarl everything up. And when you get out of the planned core you can run it on the surface and still grade separate crossing, which is cheap.

the last 70 years do not suggest huge roads, huge offices, and huge house lead to a utopia.

I’m sorry but this is really twisting what I said. I didn’t say huge roads, I simply said roads (although I can see how that can be misread).

Huge (tall) offices are the whole point, you relocate big offices and lots of jobs. With easy access to subways. That does not mean car dependency. It’s actually the other way around, a bunch of short rise offices quickly become too far away from a subway line.

Nor did I say huge houses, I simply said houses. I could include apartments in there too.

Car dependency depends on the city design, it’s not inherent to the existence of offices and roads. And the whole point of a designed city is you can get the space for cheap subways and space for bike paths without having to cram them into an existing road system. The existing road system is the thorn in the way of subway, transit, trains, and bike paths. Trying to cram all this into existing road system usually doesn’t work, and if you can it gets to be extremely expensive for a subpar system.

a rare case in America where post-WW2 greenfield housing or commercial developments

This is not simply housing or a business park on the edge of an existing city which is usually done in car dependency sprawl style. I’m suggesting a new city.

constant sprawling expansion

Yeah you really seem to think I’m demanding sprawl when I’m not. I don’t know if your twisting is intentional or not but it’s at the point that I think I’m going to end this conversation. It’s really far from my original question anyway.

Ohh that makes sense.

I got a YouTube link to a 30 minute mumbler.

A new downtown would make a subway very easy and cheap to build, you could cut and cover instead of tunnelling. Cheeeaaap land for huge offices, roads, and even houses. Whenever you try to scale up an existing town/city you run into all the old problems of land and layout problems. Cities bidding against each other would be short term appealing but more expensive when it comes to building everything. Green field is just so cheap.

Oh I missed that I’m thinking this would be for federal offices. Not sure about political capital like congress just because, but we have a ton of federal workers that really don’t need to be located in a high cost of living area.

It’s like the game you play with a baby where you put your hands over your face to hide.

If that’s his first carbonated beverage, I can understand.

Engineering and planning will probably take 2 years. Then years more for eminent domain and actual construction.