Planning: Zoning Help

[extech 0]

The STEX is a cool site.  There is a ton of information.  The problem is locating worthwhile articles.  I desperately need help in planning.  Every city I create follows a grid pattern.  My industrial zone lies on the edges of the tile.

I would love to see images of cities developed using the original SimCity 4 Deluxe package.  They need to demonstrate layouts for residential, commercial, and industrial.  Images with the zoning data view would be extremely helpful.  This would allow me to see how many grid squares are in use.

A problem that continuously appears is how big to make a "city" block.  For example, should I zone for two 3x3 bldgs, four, or more (see below).  No one ever seems to address this in discussions. 

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==XXX | XXX | XXX | XXX ==

==XXX | XXX | XXX | XXX ==

==XXX | XXX | XXX | XXX ==

==---------------------------- ==

==XXX | XXX | XXX | XXX ==

==XXX | XXX | XXX | XXX ==

==XXX | XXX | XXX | XXX ==

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The X's are the actual grid squares. 

The hyphen indicates the rear of the bldg. 

The equal sign a road.

[tungston 19]

I think grid size is more of a personal preference, than anything. I use varied sizes for different RCI's most of the time. Usually, they vary from 4 to 6 tiles. IR is something else, I use whatever strikes me at the time.

[mistershnerples 0]

I generally like to do 6x6 square in commercial and residential. So that means I usually manually make them. I used to employ the automatic zoning grid, but then got tired of the 4x4's which I thought were too small. Especially since I like to put a bus stop and subway in a corner of the grid, of every block. In terms of industry, I like 6x6 as well. And with IHT, I alternate "industrial parks" or just blocks with parks or flower gardens in them to help with pollution and increase land value.

Here's a picture of what I'm talking about.

[extech 0]

Thank you for your responses to date.

mistershnerples: Thanks for providing an image in zone data view. However, your approach to city planning is still based on a grid.

I'm looking for planners that have gotten away from "GRID" cities.

Here's an example: http://www.485group.com/sc4/index.php

The planner of Carthage created an excellent website. He lacks zone data views demonstrating placement of R, C, and I.

Some improvements I would like to see in future installments:

1. Ability to build diagonally (plopables and all).

2. Ability for construction to occur one tile away from any street, road, or avenue. In other words, I want a store to pop up behind my bust stops or subway terminals.

3. Accessible region view from within the current city tile to aid in transportation design.

4. More to come as I get annoyed.

[mistershnerples 0]

ohhhh i thought you wanted grid ideas. yeah at one point in the game i got away from the grid, but saw with simcity and not using any cheats or like NAM i would need to do the grid to help with traffic and stuff. i mean its "somewhat" realistic in the big cities and suburbs, but not for all cities.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

If I am following you correctly, you want actual examples.  Here are a couple:

This city supports the next one with various services.  City name Gellicanefa Knee

This one is called Yacht Point and contains the Goldivea Yacht Club.  The zoning here is R/C b but all of it light.  Both cities are profitable.

The main feature of both of these is the June 2007 NAM.

[extech 0]

That's more like it N_O_Body. You seem to vary lot sizes. Some lots are 1Rx1C. Some are 3Rx1C.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

"My object all sublime

"I shall achieve in time

"To make the punishment fit the crime

"The punishment fit the crime"

W. S. Gilbert in The Mikado.

I do what has to be done.

[MidwestSimGeek 0]

Warning... Long obsessive essay ahead :-D

I don't have any visual examples at the moment (as my cities are on a different computer), but I can at least describe a couple of things I've done in order to force myself away from grid thinking.    Mostly, I look to real-world American cities for inspiration.

The western suburbs of Omaha and Kansas City follow a sort of "deviated grid" pattern that I've found useful in building the suburban areas of my cities.  These areas are griddy in the big picture (they retained the farm section roads defining each square mile, and expanded them as the area built up), but moderately to completely irregular in the small scale.

In some areas, residential streets have a short segment that follows what would have been the alignment of the urban grid, then curve off and follow their own logic (with some or many of the streets still parallelling one another as if they were traditional inner-city streets.)  A good example can be viewed by Mapquesting or Googling Overland Park, Kansas.  Check out the mile bounded by 95th, 103rd, Metcalf, and Nall, as well as the one bounded by 95th, 103rd, Antioch, and US 69.

Other mile blocks are built on a convergence-point pattern, i.e. they have a couple of different radius points which neighboorhood streets seem to center around.  The best example I've found is located on the outskirts of Sioux Falls, SD, in the mile bounded by 41st, 57th, Marion, and Sertoma.  Still other areas seem to have no logic at all -- just randomly curving streets inside the mile grid.

The main issue with this style of building is that, due to Sims' notorious aversion to long-distance commuting, you end up needing to zone commercial more frequently and diffusely than you'd expect in reality -- i.e. you can't have the three or four miles at a time of pure residential that you observe in many suburbs.  This has led me to place a couple of major intersections on each mile-long segment of suburban road, and center small to medium sized commercial developments around each intersection -- say, a 6x6 light commercial with the Ctrl zoning trick (to force a Lee Mall or a Fashion Center) plus a strip of 2-by-x or 3-by-x light commercial for smaller shops and gas stations.  Occasionally I'll take a chunk (say, 20x20) at a corner of two section roads and turn it into a medium commercial office center, perhaps including some medium industrial plus LOTS of green lawn to ensure high-tech development.  (Frontage roads are quite helpful in the above developments, not only to encourage realism and break up the grid monotony, but also to keep the avenues clear for any longer-distance commuters you DO have.)  This has allowed me to preserve at least a vestige of realism, while still building game-functional cities.  (I've taken some liberties with the definition of a mile -- theoretically each tile is supposed to be 53 feet (16m) on a side, but that resulted in ridiculously high population density.  Thus, I've taken to pretending that each tile represents just under 75 feet and that the game's aspect ratio is slightly off, resulting in 70x72 "mile" grids that contain a much more believable number of Sim soccer moms and are easily subdivided into even numbers of city blocks in my urban core.)  As far as industrial areas, it's often helpful to set aside areas for large-scale industrial-park developments that don't necessarily follow the city grid -- just kind of build randomly, with roads only as needed to provide access to the plants.  (Google-maps Eagan, MN and look at the area near Lone Oak Road and Lexington Avenue.)

As far as the city proper, I take my inspiration from the craziness I've seen here in Minneapolis-St. Paul.  Minneapolis is mostly laid out on a grid pattern... but there are several different grids that were laid out in various stages of the city's history, leading to very interesting and irregular neighborhoods where the incompatible grids converge.  The downtown and West Bank neighborhoods are on a 45-degree angle to the cardinal directions (built this way in order to parallel the Mississippi), but this grid all ends abruptly at Franklin Avenue (except for Hennepin Avenue, which plays by its own weird rules until it reaches 28th.)  South of here, things are mostly orthogonal to the compass (as they also are northwest of downtown, in North Minneapolis).  The Warehouse District twists into some kind of bizarre halfway compromise between the downtown grid and North Minneapolis (67.5 degrees?!?)  Northeast Minneapolis (across the river from downtown) is kind of a hodgepodge of all the grids, with East Hennepin Ave. defining the neighborhood by running through it at its own strange angle.  Then there's Hiawatha and Minnehaha Avenues slicing through the otherwise-orthogonal southeastern part of the city (now MN 55, but built several decades ago as US 218, a radial highway aimed at the suburb of Eagan).  Also worth noting is the way Minneapolis allows geographical features to break up the grid (particularly the lakes -- several of these are ringed by parkways and angling residential streets.)

St. Paul is interesting due to the very long, linear warehouse / industrial district which occupies the space between two major railroads in the north-central part of the city.  The residential grid ends abruptly at the Pierce Butler Route, then picks up again north of Como Avenue (3/4 mi. to the north.)  As in Minneapolis, city officials had the wisdom to let the city's geography define its growth in certain places, rather than attempting to subdue it completely -- leading to charming irregularities in neighborhoods like Dayton's Bluff (due east of downtown), Cherokee Heights (south of downtown, across the river), and Crocus Hill (up the hill north of I-35E.)  Also notable are West 7th Street, which runs all the way from downtown to MN 55 in south Minneapolis at its own goofy angle, as well as Hampden Park and St. Anthony Park, whose random curves make them appear to have been platted by a spider on drugs (just east of MN 280, for those looking on Google Maps.)

Just a few long-winded suggestions... Hope they help. 

[extech 0]

MidWestSimGeek: You lost me at Hello. Seriously, I appreciate the input. My problems are linked to the direct limitations of the game. The streets don't act like roads. They can only make 90 degree turns -- nothing in between. This limits neighborhood construction to "grids". And, no, I have no mods installed.

I would still like to see images of your cities.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

If you look at the images I posted for you, you will see diagonal streets.  You need the NAM for this.

[extech 0]

Is the NAM safe? Are there any issues? And is the programmer affiliated with the original team in any way?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Parts of the NAM are beta.  You need to read the instructions very carefully with respect to the use of puzzle pieces.  It is perfectly OK for diagonal streets.

Careless or ignorant use of the NAM can either mess up your game or crash it to the desktop.  All of this is avoidable with a little reading, however.

[Cob92 360]

Here's a couple of tips:

-Avoid using the puzzle piece GLR (draggable is fine)

-Be careful when installing

-Don't use the in-avenue GLR, it is crash-prone and has bad stations (the only one available looks like a big white T stabbed in between the rails).

[Spinmaster 75]

Originally posted by: Cobhris96 Here's a couple of tips:

-Avoid using the puzzle piece GLR (draggable is fine)

-Be careful when installing

-Don't use the in-avenue GLR, it is crash-prone and has bad stations (the only one available looks like a big white T stabbed in between the rails).quote>

Can't completely avoid the puzzle pieces, particularly if you mix avenue with non-avenue GLR at all. gshmails just released a very nice GLR-in-avenue station. It has a UDI issue but otherwise it works fine. Hopefully there'll be others soon (and gshmails did allude to an update to his in-the-works). Yes, be very careful with GLR in general. It's near 100% sure, if you drag a puzzle piece (not just GLR but the road puzzle-pieces as well) over a station, kaboom - crash. So... don't do that (get in the habit to always hit ESC immediately after opening any menu, just to be sure you don't have a puzzle-piece stuck to your cursor before you'd selected anything). But with careful patience, and paranoid-frequency saving, it all works quite well. I'd strongly recommend spending a good chunk of time in an empty city just building GLR, learning how the pieces fit together, what pieces exist (and what don't), etc.... Sometimes a "learning" city becomes interesting enough to actually build out. Happens often with me, in fact. "Let me try this... oh that looks niiiiiiiice... hmm... might as well actually build this city, now that it has a sweet centerpiece anyway!"

As for zoning (the topic) ... N_O_Body hit the best advice: variation. Some areas with total x-by-y symmetry, ok. But not all. Mix it up, various sizes, sometimes back-to-back, sometimes not. Variety is the spice of life, and definitely the key to an interesting city. Why bother looking at every nook of the city if it all follows a single block model anyway?

One minor point I've been thinking about recently, but haven't yet confidently proven to myself... and someone correct me if this theory is wrong, but high-wealth needs minimum 4x3 zone dimensions, whereas low and medium are maximum 3x3 (at low density). I've been wondering if a) this is true (I think so), and b) if so, if I can use it to my advantage i.e. provide all the services even the high-wealth folks like, while at the same time controlling specifically how much and where high-wealth residential builds by simply making sure there are no zones larger than 3x3 unless I want high-wealth housing there. If someone can confirm or disprove this, great. Otherwise, if I figure it out myself I'll post it. All the current ways to control high-wealth res, I don't like much. Tax 'em out, then you can't have any. No water - ok, but then no water for the businesses that need it either, unless I meticulously keep the water pipes far away from residential - which means no watered businesses in local neighborhoods. A definitive, more precise way to say "rich folks here, but nowhere else" would be so so nice. I hope this zone-size theory proves correct.

[tungston 19]

Spinmaster: I am afraid your assumptions about the zone sizes is flawed. :-) If you have the Lot Editor you can see what size lots there are for each wealth, and stage.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

This has wandered so far afield from the topic, I think it is time to call it closed.