Saudi Arabia is building a giant car-free region beside the Red Sea, but its futuristic city plans have changed | World News

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.

What is NEOM and how big is the region

NEOM is the name for the entire development zone, spanning roughly 26,500 square kilometres in the northwestern Tabuk province, stretching along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. According to NEOM’s official newsroom, the project sits at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan to reduce the country’s dependence on oil by building new industries and tourism destinations. Within this larger zone sit several distinct developments, including The Line, the floating industrial port city Oxagon, the mountain resort Trojena, the luxury island Sindalah, and a coastal tourism cluster called Magna.

The original plan for a car free eco city

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 Line was scaled back so dramatically

That original vision has run into serious trouble. According to reporting from AGBI, a business publication covering the Gulf region, NEOM has been quietly overhauling its public messaging around The Line, replacing earlier promises of housing nine million people and running entirely without roads or cars with far more cautious language about a phased, demand led approach.Construction on The Line has slowed significantly as Saudi Arabia reassesses the project’s scale and timeline. after only around 2.4 kilometres of foundation work had been completed, and the population target for this initial phase has reportedly been cut from an original 1.5 million residents down to under 300,000.

What is actually being built at NEOM right now

Despite the setbacks around The Line, other parts of NEOM are still moving forward. Sindalah, a luxury island resort in the Red Sea, has already opened to guests, though it faced operational problems after wind and wave conditions were not properly accounted for during planning. Work is also continuing on Oxagon, an industrial port zone that has become more strategically important given regional shipping disruptions, along with a green hydrogen plant that is reportedly nearing completion. NEOM has additionally signed agreements to build large scale data centres within the zone, redirecting some of its ambition toward digital infrastructure rather than futuristic urban housing.

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.

What comes next for Saudi Arabia’s eco region

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which owns and funds NEOM, has indicated the wider Vision 2030 program remains intact even as its most futuristic showpiece gets rebuilt around more modest expectations. 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. Whether NEOM eventually delivers on its founding promise of a car free, carbon free region beside the Red Sea, or settles into a smaller cluster of ports, resorts and data centres, its story so far stands as a striking example of how ambitious a modern eco city can sound on paper, and how difficult it can be to actually build one from nothing.