Too steep!

Let's start with the dimensions to get a taste of how big it all really is, at least the arm.

That's 1,573.4 meters at it's widest point and 2,237.7 meters long (0.97 miles by 1.39 miles)

Or 3.5 km² / 1.34 mi²

Big. Definitely big, but compared to Manhattan's 59.1 km² it's not too big. I mean, it is one third of part of a city on a bridge suspended hundreds of feet over water. How big can you really get without being ridiculous?

Probably more than 3.5 km².

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Doing this project and the research involved with city planning, I learned a lot about all the standardization involved in such a process. For instance, the speed limit is usually dictated by the width of a lane, which is why highways generally have much wider lanes then a back road or even a state route. Another being tunnel height and the width of the safety walkway that run along the edge of the tunnel. Oh, and then the height of the railing for that walkway. Then you got your width for highway shoulders, road shoulders. There are a ton more, but the next one to talk about is hill grades.

Put simply, dividing the height of the hill by its length then move the decimal to the left two places and you get the grade percentage. 216 ft road that elevates to 34 ft? You got a 15% grade. Not too bad.

For reference: The 10 Steepest Streets in America.

The steepest being 45%, where most people walk down backwards. Why backwards? For the same reason you go down a ladder backwards. Wicked steep.

So how does this all relate? Well, when I made the first concept of the city, I made a curve for the arm that looked good. Nothing too steep, but still a hill.

Once I had all the roads done separated by district, I was able to get an accurate grade calculation. 

The steepest hill was 49% ... woops.

Thankfully squishing it down was a very simple and quick process. With some fancy algebra (not really) I was able to determine the correct height to get a more comfortable grade of  31%. Remember that is the steepest hill's grade, see below for a good representation and overall grade.

At first I wasn't too sure if I liked what it had to be in order to be more practical.

In the end, I think it still delivers the desired scale-shock while still looking like something that could physically be built give the right technology (maybe).

By the way, check out the concept building X-Seed 4000. It is a stupidly large building that could actually be built with today's technology. Also, it has cool fucking name.