Thread by @rustie5555

This is a stupid idea. But let's entertain it momentarily: is there any place in the country that could realistically warrant a new city?

https://twitter.com/1NewsNZ/status/1366438722418315266

Criteria something like:
- not within or adjacent to an urban (say 50k+ centre)
- near existing infrastructure (highways, rail, the grid)
- not on a major fault line or flood plain
- better than average climate
- reasonably flat topography
- some vague economic base

Start off with the easy bit: this is New Zealand (ex. the Rekohu and the minor outlying islands)...

First we need to ignore any existing urban areas. For arguments sake I've used Stats NZ's "major" and "large" urban areas...

That rules out the red bits...

We also need to take out the bits with existing high levels of access to existing urban areas, so let's remove them too...

Onto existing infra. Starting out with ROADS.

This didn't carve out as much as I'd expect (we have a lot of roads)

Looking at rail next, this further rules out the areas in red. A bigger narrowing down there. Some oddities like novelty rail in Queenstown being counted here but w/e.

This is within 20km of the existing network (roads was the same).

And lastly the national grid. As above, within 20km of the existing network (although I guess technically that should be 20km of an existing grid exit point but too late).

So to recap:

The red areas don't need a new city.

The green areas are where we could plausibly put one based on existing infrastructure.

Next question is "would you want to live there"?

Okay y'all wanna watch most of the country disappear?

Here's everything ruled out for being too close to an active faultline.

Okay gonna have to leave it there for tonight. The floods have defeated me for now. This is still profoundly stupid, but it's also fun.