Back in 2017, Saudi Arabia announced something that sounded almost too big to be real, an entire new region along the Red Sea coast, bigger than Belgium, built from scratch around clean energy, zero cars and a completely new way of living. Called NEOM, the project's most famous piece was THE LINE, a car free city meant to stretch 170 kilometres through the desert inside two mirrored towers, housing up to nine million people who would never need a road, a car or a single tailpipe.
Nearly a decade later, the story has taken a very different turn. Costs spiralled, timelines slipped, and by late 2025 construction on THE LINE had actually been suspended, forcing Saudi Arabia to rethink just how much of this eco region can realistically be built. NEOM's unfinished mirrors now reflect something more instructive than the future they promised, a candid lesson in how ambition meets the slower, stubborn arithmetic of reality.
THE LINE was designed as the project's boldest experiment, a linear city built inside two parallel mirrored buildings, each around 500 metres tall and 200 metres wide, running 170 kilometres from the Red Sea coast toward the inland mountains. The idea was to eliminate roads and cars entirely, running the city purely on renewable energy while keeping every basic service within a five minute walk for residents. A high speed rail line was meant to connect one end of the city to the other in just 20 minutes, letting people move through the entire settlement without ever needing a private vehicle.
Why the project ran into financial and engineering trouble
A mix of factors has driven this scaling back, including falling oil prices squeezing government revenue, the sheer engineering complexity of building a mirrored structure of this scale across desert and mountain terrain, and the practical challenge of attracting large numbers of residents to live inside a single linear building far from any existing city. Saudi officials have publicly framed these changes as strategic flexibility rather than failure, with the country's finance minister arguing there is no issue with slowing down certain projects so the broader economy can grow alongside them.
Completion of even a small initial section of THE LINE is now expected sometime in the 2030s, with the full 170 kilometre vision pushed much further out or possibly abandoned altogether in its original form.
Read the full story at Times of India