A Number of Questions

[Elius 0]

Brace yourselves. A long post is coming.

My region has three cities so far. The first has about 140k residents, 30k Commercial jobs and 8k Industrial jobs. The Industry is mostly IM, and I'm slowly phasing it out. The second city is an industrial one which supplies all the power and has about 30k Industrial jobs, about half in IM and half in ID. The third city, which is quite young, is destined to become a commercial center, surrounded by residential cities. Currently it has only about 4k C jobs.

I'm using NAM, perfect pathfinding, x2 capacity, x10 commute and x10 speed.

I have a very developed bus system, with thousands of buses moving on the main arteries, and a train system which isn't too effective yet.

All city tiles are of the medium size. The R city is still growing fast and the plans are to add at least another 30k jobs in the Industrial city and start building in earnest the C city. But before I can do that, I got a few questions:

1) I noticed that I don't have that many cars moving around. More importantly, I don't have any cars moving between the cities. I'm not even approximating - on every main inter-city artery there are a few thousands buses, some number of freight trucks and exactly 0 cars. And since the Ind and Com cities have 0 residents, there are no cars insider those cities at all. Does this makes sense? It helps with congestions and air pollution, but are there any drawbacks?

2) The Commercial city is supposed to become skyscraper central, so I'm leaving lots of room for plazas and gardens and all those wastes of good space. Before building any further, I want to make sure I understand how they work.

From what I know, all those stuff attract traffic which in turn attracts customers.

So would it be right to have an avenue on one side of which there is commercial zoning, and on the other side of which lots of plazas and stuff?

Also, do green stuff which are not adjacent to roads do nothing, or is there still some value from them? And, except differences due to size, are some green stuff more efficient than others?

And to connect this to the car problem, does the lack of cars means less traffic and so less customers?

3) Are there any rules of thumbs concerning airports? I understand that all they do is help commerce, and I built a landing strip(large by now) in the Residential city mostly out of curiosity. When to build which airport? Should I build an international one in the Commercial city, or maybe a Municipal one since it's only a medium sized tile?

4) As my sims gain more life expectancy and education, I get more and more R$$$ and R$$. I understand that too much of them can pose a problem. How do I know how much is too much, and how do I control it? Currently my taxes are 9/9.5/10.5 for R$/R$$/R$$$.

Not building schools and hospitals in certain regions is not an option - It's no fun having slums.

And if you read everything until here - thanks!

[gml_josea 2]

1) It makes sense, a bit. All your sims are simply using buses to go to the neighbouring cities, or they're working somewhere else INSIDE the city.

2) Don't spend too much space with plazas and gardens, they affect more residential areas and you can perfectly grow skyscrappers near or away from gardens and plazas.

3) Airports are only good for commercial areas, they boost the commercial demand, in this case you should put it on the commercial city instead of the residential city. If you want to make an skyscrapper district on the commercial city, better go for a medium size airport, since the landing strip won't be able to handle so much traffic.

BTW, airports lower desiderability, and skyscrappers don't like much to develop near them.

4) R$$ aren't bad, usually cities have a high percentage of R$$ sims, a much lower one of R$ sims and not many R$$$. If you want to control the development of any of them, taxes is the best way to deal with it.

[tungston 19]

Just in general, gml_josea is correct, airports attract business to the commercials, but from out of the region, your residents don't use them. Plazas in commercial add little, but landmarks bring in tourist.