Suggestions on possible grid layout for my city.

[Sgt_Strider 0]

I'm a newbie to this game and I've done a lot of reading, but I still have a lot of questions to ask so I'm hoping someone will be able to help me. I heard a lot of ppl don't like the grid layout because it looks unrealistic, but I don't think that will distract me from using this method. I was wondering if this is a good start. I will start 3 cities, with each of them dedicated to one sector. The residential city will be facing the Commercial city to the right and to the right of the residential city, would be a industrial city. The problem is that I don't know what kind of blocking system to use like 4x4 or 3x3 or 4x6 or that kind of stuff. I heard that when someone refers to a 4x4, it means 4 blocks going horizontally and 4 blocks going vertically to create a total of 16 blocks, correct? If I have the money, is it wise to go all high density? Where should I place my schools and stuff? I guess I will probably use cheats in the beginning to get the hang of it so I will be able to afford all of these stuff. Thanks!

[garfiedude 2]

Grids are OK, as long as its not exactly the same all over the city.
I think the general vibe is not that grids are inherantly bad (unrealistic), but that if the entire city is defined by the exact same grids allover the place, then it looks artificial and unrealistic.
Renember, even new cities that grew following a set plan from day one - Washington, Canberra, Brasilia, New Delhi and others, don't have a uniform grid, all over, but rather, use differen grids in different parts of the city when they are used.
Most other cities tend to grow more organicly outwards from a central point, hard to immitate in Simcity because of the way the city grows.

Now to your city. It sounds like yo've taken a very segragated approach, so you might want to consider different sized blocks for the different zones. Industrial should have large blocks, 6x6 and upwards, don't bother using any streets here.

Commerce and residential is more complex, you have to decide what sort of feel you want, you can vary block sizes, or even zone large blocks with roads, and have smaller street blocks inside them that are sort of random.

High density? Consider that at the start only small buildings will grow, indeed for residential the first proper highdensity buildings won't start appearing untill your population hits 28,000 or so, and for commerce you'll have to waie even longer. Baring this in mind, if you zone high, it will cost more and not be used.

I would suggest initialy zoning low with a few mediums for residential and commerce, when the mediums start to grow into larger buildings, start zoning over low density areas with the medium tool. When your population hits 28,000 (or somewhere around there), you could try zoning for some high density residential, commercial will take longer, so just build up nice medium districts, some nice 3x3 and 4x4 buildings can grow, you can zoen these high when your population is high enough (i'm not sure what population is needed, maybe someone else will fill in here).

Industrial you can zone high right from the begining, initialy you are going to get all dirty industrial, with manufactoring not appearing untill later when your sims are a bit moer education.
Perhaps you could zone the industrial areas furthest away from your residential first, and only close in towards the residential when manufactoring appears, as they pollute less.

Hope that was of some help.

Try looking through various city journals for inspiration.

[6underground 11]

Couldnt have put it better myself Garfidude (Throws him a Welsh flag) , In my City Journal, i tend to avoid using grids all over the place, as with many other CJ's here we tend to mix up the gridded and the ungridded together too offer vairety, and it beats the basic humdrum. my best advice is to go slowly, zone low desnity until your raking in the dough, spread out before you plan to build vertically. Give it sometime, and it'll work out very nicely for you.

Hope that helped.

----Mayor of New Rhodesia----

[Sgt_Strider 0]

You said 6x6 with no streets. Care to show me what you mean by that? I don't mind the unrealistic look as I just want to have fun and I'm not out to create my own unique city. A cookie cutter build is what I'm after now as I just want to have fun. Ideally as I have a big population, I should use high density for Industrial, Commercial, and Residential? If I were to go by blocks and stuff, is it wise to have a dedicated block that would contain police, fire stations, hospitals and school group together?

 

Btw, do you know where I can go and download the biggest possible region that is flat? My computer is relatively powerful and build recently and I don't believe I'll have any problems with the demanding details. Thanks!

[garfiedude 2]

You said 6x6 with no streets. Care to show me what you mean by that?

quote>

For industrial areas, zone blocks that are at least 6x6 with roads around them. Don't use streets.
rrrrrrrr
r******r
r******r
r******r
r******r
r******r
r******r
rrrrrrrr
Where r = road and * = industrial, you can make them bigger too, you could vary them slightly too.

I should use high density for Industrial, Commercial, and Residential?

quote>

In the begining, zone high density for Industrial, but only low and medium for residential and commerce. As your population grows, start upgrading to more medium and high.

If I were to go by blocks and stuff, is it wise to have a dedicated block that would contain police, fire stations, hospitals and school group together?

quote>

This is indeed a sound idea, and could be placed at the heart of your residential area, with additional police and fire stations for the commercial and residential areas.

As for the biggest map, i don't know, you'll have to look throug the STEX, but if you get the Landscape designer, you could make your own flat map and config.bmp to go with it very easyily, and pretty much whatever size you want too.

Have a look at this thread, its a good introductory guide, and the link to the Landscape Designer is in there too.

[ephorex_77 0]

IMO, the overuse of grids serves to spoil the whole gaming experience. Of course, this is not coming from someone who's never used grids before (I doubt anyone fits that category ), but rather from someone who spent two years straight using grids EXCLUSIVELY. I ever did believe in grids as they were hard to zone and I thought they looked disorgainsed and cluttered.

However, as of two months ago, I've used a combination of both and I must say, it looks very nice. SC4 is not meant to be played using gids only (though the game does have a propensity towards grids ) but rather with a combination of both.

 

Also, seeing as you seem new here on ST , I suggest that you download the NAM (Network Add-on Modd) to assist you in your city building. Not only does the NAM come with plenty of modds to enhance (and make more realistic) your game, it also comes with a whole assortment of other transportation options and pieces. Trust me, this is the must have modd.

 

Good luck mayoring sgt_strider!!

[Tolomar 5]

well i grid out constantly.... I do use different grids sometimes...and sometimes bend the grid to fit terrian...but pull back to the grid ussually quickly

 

grids make money...period...it's the main reason I use them...easy to place thing evenly and helps with school and hospital coverage...myself I use a 9 x 9 square (road at every 10)as the base (yea it's doesn't work out evenly...as i leave space for a highway somwhere)...this gives you the ability to have 4 4x4 building in a square and have parks or a form of transit inbetween (bus stop or subway entrance....and there are very few buildings in the game that won't fit inna 9x9 box ... i do mix my zoning up from time to time ( not that often)... i leave in cross roads at the start to get com desire up...then slowly remove cross streets to quicken comute times

 

 

 

did notice 1 strange thing....i can plop down my cittes beside each other...and the automaticly connect to each other... and i'm having fun too

 

will admit... most non grid cities tend to more pleasing to the eye

[+Guest]

Oh the wonderful life of a grid.As mentioned it's not eye candy but darn easy to lay out but remember to plan ahead as your city grows.

   A lot of Real World cities were planned using the grid but are now running into headaches do to lack of future planning.

 

 Goodluck and have fun.

[Tolomar 5]

well it's the agrument...plops vs growables...mod vs noncheat...farms vs star wars skyscrapers...coke vs pepsi

 

never ends...i don't use plops....nothing aginst ppl who do, some are wonderful buildings (ps watchout for the res buildings) just like to simulate my city, see what grows, personel choice...i like using grids, personel choice...but I'm having fun. i like my cities

 

the game is to have fun...i congratulate those who make the eye candy cities....make the CJ's great to read...read them all the time myself... good stories too... keep up the good work mayors

 

don't condeme ppl cuz you play differently...bet there are more then a few mayors who would differe on your playing style being better than theirs around  here

 

 

ps grid it out baby!... 9x9... it's a money maker

 

 

[Odainsaker 2,137]

Some other random ideas on grid design to chew on, most of which are admittedly aimed at adding richness and realism to a city, rather than optimizing game simulation strategies.  Some of it will be too much for somebody just starting (where the aim is getting enough money to stay afloat), others will already be known intuitively, and other ideas may not even work in SimCity, but the thought process can be insightful (and for me verbose--you are warned!):

Not all grids need to be thoroughly uniform.  Some roadways within the grid can be emphasized over others by becoming avenues or boulevards with special civic landmarks at the endpoints.  This forms hierarchies, with can either visually reinforce the economice importance of commercial main streets, or the social importance of ceremonial boulevards in front of civic and governmental buildings.  Sometimes, this can be taken a step further by connecting important civic buildings and landmarks by networks of upper hierachy avenues in order to further empasize their importance for the inhabitants.  You may even slash across grids with diagonal roads to achieve this effect, though SimCity's underlying map grid structure can make zoning tricky.  Haussman's Paris is organized in this way using spiderwebs of boulevards to connect prominent buildings like opera houses and rail stations (as well to ease mobility for troops crushing riots amongst the communes).  Papal Rome is another good example, where a network of avenues connects all the major pilgrimage churches and cathedrals.  A visiting pilgrim would walk down the avenue network to each major church, his direction guided by landmark obelisks and columns down the sightlines of the avenues demarcating the next stop, until ultimately the paths converge upon St. Peter's Basilica.  These examples use more web, radial, and starburst layouts, but then even these can be superimposed over a grid, like Washington, D.C., creating both important moments for landmarks and challenges for traffic planners in places where a diagonal intersects the grid.

 

With main commercial streets, often times a primary consideration with early planners was store frontage.  I am reminded of the grid system in Austin, Texas, in which a main central ceremonial avenue leading to the state capitol building bisects the grid on the north-south axis.  Another major cross avenue travels east-west, further dividing the grid into quadrants.  These two avenues were the main cardinal routes out of the city with the highest traffic, and hence with that many people passing street level shop windows, were also the most economically important.  The crossing of these avenues in the center is the most important commercial retail property in the downtown area, as it has the most pedestrians passing the storefronts.  The make the most money, the most amount of street frontage on these two roads was desired.  However, the individual blocks of the city were further bisected by service alleyways, which  required openings at the center of each block for access to the streets.  It was undesirable to have lots of alleyway openings along your main commercial thoroughfares, for this breaks up and reduces the amount of revenue-generating store frontage.  Therefore, the planners freely altered the direction each bisecting alley as they went from block to block:  some cut north-south, others east-west, all arrayed to minimize cutting into important commercial street facades and optimize sreet-level retail revenue.

 

I'm going to jump to a vast scale all of a sudden, and mention regional planning.  Consider a regional network of highways and trunk roads connectng your communties.  Sometimes, even this network can have a vague supergrid layout (the Los Angeles network is like this).  Within a city, these highways subdivide the city into different huge sectors or quadrants, and these large areas are then further divided into smaller sections by main boulevards or thoroughfares which deliver traffic to or from the limited access highways.  These sections defined by the boulevards are then finally divided into main blocks by the grid of the streets.  Sometimes, even these blocks are further divided by smaller incidental roads or alleyways.  The result is a nestled pattern of grids, each maintaining the hierarchy of important streets without uniformity throughout.  Of course, this is not necessarily planned outright--sometimes connections between growing small starting communties over time became the major thoroughfares of a city, and these communites became the neighborhoods and satellite subcenters of that city.  You might always try starting with a number of small villages and outlying communties around your main town on the same map, perhaps each using a simple grid and maybe even with a central main square for a courthouse (or church/school/town hall).  As they grow and you connect them with roads and rail lines (real rail routes are laid out by topography and geology and have their own parameters), let those connections and subconnections help determine the size and shapes of sections for your later metropolis, and from that work out how you plan their further subdivision into large plats, neighborhoods, and street grids.  A point to note, the gleaming skyscraper district of Shinjuku in Tokyo, where the metropolitan city hall and giant zaibatsu headquarter towers of that gargantuan megalopolis are now located, was once just a tiny satellite post town surrounded by rice paddies outside old Edo, and was primarily a control post on the rural trunk roads leading east from Edo to Kyoto.  Even later it had nearby the outlying water treatment facilities of early modern Tokyo.  The trunk roads it controlled, the Ome-kaido and Koshu-kaido, have evolved into main city boulevards and expressways.  While we often think of a great top-down approach to dividing our cities into larger pre-conceived subdivisions and smaller blocks, we can also try a bottom-up approach of connecting our scattered communties and farmsteads with rural connecting roads, and over time grow those happenstance routes into our great avenues and superhighways.

 

Grids sizes can change over time.  In most American grid cities, private developers were resposible for laying out streets in there areas, and they often set grid sizes and orientation based on their own real estate needs and the size of lots they wanted to sell to the market demographic they were aiming for.   In other places, mutiple small communities with different layouts eventually grew and coalesced into larger cities.  However the means, a patchwork of grids developed, with some grids overlapping others through growth and many others going in different different diagonal directions based on whatever important point of interest, shape of topography, or means of access the planner dealt with.  While many grids had square blocks, just as many had rectangular blocks, and some others alternated in size from block to block.  How they relate to each other where they meet and overlap can be a headache or opportunity for planners.  For some, interesting building project sites are created with sites in unusual shapes or with multiple important facades.  For others, dealing with roads that have radically different spaced grids on each side can mean too many intersections or lots of complex and difficult intersections on a single stretch of road, breaking up valuable frontage and creating traffic headaches.  We all have been on those roads, and it is all a part of the realism.

 

You can also experiment with mixing your zones within a block.  Most people zone entire blocks with a single zone type, such a vast 8x8 commercial blocks, followed by 8x8 residential blocks, and further away, an 8x8 industrial block.  An alternative method is to think away from looking down on color-coded block patterns and instead think of the streets themselves as, say, a commerical street or a residential road.  If you think about it, walking down a street that has houses on one side, and businesses on the other is rather strange and conflicting--most people don't want their houses on a commercial road but instead want their houses nestled among other houses on all sides, and many business do better alongside and facing other business where they can feed-off each other and reinforce the economy of the street.  The character of the street is also preserved, as people move about the city mainly by the street system, and they percieve these streets as a network of either residential streets or commerical streets, instead of jumping from big residential color block to big commercial color block hiding the big industrial color block.  So you might zone your block where one side is commercial shops on a devoted commercial street with more shops facing across the street, and the other side of the block is residential apartments facing a residential street.  Typically in gridded urban areas, a service alleyway is the division within the block, and different compatible zones can backup to each other within the block.  You can set up a layer of hierarchies to scale down zones along each street:  a busy and noisy business avenue with shops on the blocks of each side, where behind the shops and butting into them on the same blocks are medium density apartments, which in turn face a residential apartment street with more apartments across the road on the next block, where the rear of those aparmtnets adjoins medium-wealth homes, which in their turn face a low-density and quite residential road.  Within a few streets and blocks, you have stepped-down from an urbane commercial avenue to a quieter residential street, with neither inhabitant feeling out of place nor facing or adjoining what they consider an undesireable land use type or land density.  Indeed, many urban areas are organized in this manner, for it is the block edges along the street that are the visible and defining public faces.

 

There is much more that can be added (like adding public squares and plazas, weaving in rail and weaving around water networks, overall transportation and traffic stategy, etc.), but here is something else we can stand back and think upon:  while much can be said for pre-plannning, making the most rigidly perfect and efficient patterns, leaving paths for future highways, setting up large enough lots for later rewards with huge footprint, etc., there is something to be said for the evolving game design.  In real cities where the only constant is change, design leaders come and go, and so do their plans and goals.  Streets are widened, and buildings and neighborhoods get torn down to make way.  Some buildings are too important to demolish, so highways weave their way through in strange directions.  Land is too tight to widen roads, so busy streets simply must remain congested.  Sometimes roads are narrowed, to create congestion and pedestrian passerbys from street-level shops.  If the special reward building is too large, sometimes streets are removed, blocks combined, and existing buildings demolished to make space.  Residents tend to get YIMBY or NIMBY stuff based on their economic status and political clout, rather than the best game strategy, so structures and services are placed in locations according to criteria completely devoid of and even deliberately opposed to the designs of grand city master planning schemes.  Your overlapping grids made an unwieldy shaped block between them that won't grow ever a great skyscraper.  Fine, make it instead a small funky shaped park.  The point is it is okay to have fun with those seemingly messy aspects, to have successess and failures, to turn the unexpected problems into opportunities, and to actually simulate the life of a city (yeah, yeah, my poor sims choke on pollution and are always stuck in traffic, but they sure do live realistically).

 

I can easily go on until our eyes are bloodshot from the reading, and there is much much more to add, with lots of explainable diagrams and example images, but my lunch is ready and getting cold.  Hopefully something here was useful.

 

[fightcancer 0]

Dear poster,

 

Yes, your assumption about 4x4 is correct. 

 

As you are keenly aware most people here do not like grids.  Grids require intense work and critical thought, and this is a game.  Games are supposed to help one escape from mental exercises.  So discussion here is rather limited.

 

To each his or her own, I suppose.  I,  however, prefer the symmetric beauty and challenge of consistency.

 

A Perfect 8

 

I prefer the grid size 8x8 for R, C, and I.  Then add one row for future MT support which gives an 8x9 grid.  With a road on one side and an avenue below, my total grid size comes to 9x11 and it fits almost perfectly!  (The avenue is underground thereby allowing even more space for growth.)

 

CCC  RRR|  | Road

CCC  RRR|  C Commercial

CCC  RRR|  R Residential

CCC  RRR|  S Subway station

RRR  CCC|  B Bus Stop

RRR  CCC|  = Avenue

RRR  CCC|  T Tunnel

RRR  CCC|

SRRRCCCB|

TRRRCCCT=

TRRRCCCT=

 

The number 8 is perfect in SC4 for 2 reasons.

1. The best buildings have dimensions of 4x4.  Of course building preference is subjective, but 4x4 is the dimension of the tallest skyscrapers.
2. A building must be next to a road to populate, or in the case of industrial zoning, within 4 spaces of a road.

6x6 grids are OK.  The drawback is that they limit your building sizes.  For example, let's say my 6x6 grid gives birth to the Ong Condos which measures 4x4.  Now I'm left with a row of 4x2 and a couple 4x1's.  4x2's and 4x1's are very limiting in terms of what buildings can grow there.  hence, my personal distaste for 6x6.

 

So 8 it is.  Then add one row (or column) for future mass transit (MT) support.  NOTE: In the beginning, before there's demand for skyscrapers I only zone 3 deep in the 8x9 grid.  This grid leaves a row in the middle--perfect for anti-pollution trees or demand-cap-busting tennis courts and small plazas.  Later, when demand for skyscrapers picks up you can rezone from 3x4 to 4x4.  By that time your HT industry should phase out the D and M.

 

Sink or Swim

 

If--and only if--you want to learn about the obscure game mechanics do not make 3 cities.  Instead make 1 small city (64 x 64) on the most difficult level.  (If you're playing the original SC4 then ignore the difficulty suggestion.)  This way you will be forced to learn the nuances, or quickly go broke trying.

 

Elementary schools and libraries go in the center of your residential district.  Museums, city colleges, and universities can be placed anywhere as their radius is infinite.

 

Hope this gets you started.

[FavreKev04 13]

Actualy grid layouts are very realistic, its funny but you can cram more people in and thats what newyork does all the time

[fightcancer 0]

exactly.  that's why I contend that most people don't use grids simply for the reason that it causes them to think too hard.

 

that and they're not as pretty.

 

[xtn 0]

posted by fightcancer: Later, when demand for skyscrapers picks up you can rezone from 3x4 to 4x4.

quote>

My current R-zones are mostly 3x3 and I have even difficulties to rezone them to 3x4. Sometimes it works fine but every now and then game trys to divide zones too often to smaller areas. Is there any logic why? Way I try to do it just drag R-zones with Shitf-key pressed down.

[ephorex_77 0]

Date: 6/13/2005 1:31:49 AM Author: xtn

posted by fightcancer: Later, when demand for skyscrapers picks up you can rezone from 3x4 to 4x4.

quote> My current R-zones are mostly 3x3 and I have even difficulties to rezone them to 3x4. Sometimes it works fine but every now and then game trys to divide zones too often to smaller areas. Is there any logic why? Way I try to do it just drag R-zones with Shitf-key pressed down.

quote>

I'm not really sure why the game does that, but suffice to say that it does, and it's really quite annoying .

 

When I'm trying to zone grids, I usually lay down the road network first and then I zone in the zones. Kind of like putting the bones then the meat of your city (sorry for the crude analogy ). It works out usually well and the maximum I've gotten it with that method is 5X6, although it might even be larger as I've never tried it before.

[Compromise 1]

I use grids in well organised uban areas which is realistic and I find it makes city planning easier.

[oroen 0]

I don't like to think of grids as blocks. I prefer thinking of them as orthogonally intersecting parallel roads.

My grids are never squares. They are usually four or five units wide and maybe 8 or 10 long. I find this to be much nicer to look at than squares; I think the ugliness factor coming from endless tracts of squares. In fact, many real cities' grids are more rectangular than square; rectangular blocks actually have many benefits in real life, but I won't get into that.

To get the feel of different neighborhoods in your city, you can vary the length or width of your blocks. Actually, I should appropriately say, vary the spacing in between the parallel roads.

I zone similarly along a road rather than within a block. That is to say, I don't fill in the block with zones and buildings, but rather I build alongside a street as if nothing else were there. Again, if you don't build by blocks, you don't think of them as blocks.

[ephorex_77 0]

Yes, it's true that rectangular 'blocks' are much nicer looking than square ones. Lately in my newer cities, I've been zoning a rectangular block, and then placing a small block of trees to offset the amount of concrete and steel in that area. The end results look very nice indeed.

[Compromise 1]

Yes my grid system has blocks which vary in size and development type to make it more intresting.

[manu-fan 0]

I've been trying blocks of the following and it seems to be working OK so far:

RRRRRR
RZZZZR
RZZZZR
RZZZZR
RZZZZR
RBPRRR
RRRRPR
RZZZZR
RZZZZR
RZZZZR
RZZZZR
RRRRRR

R - Road
Z - Res Zone
B - Bus Stop
P - Small Park

The basic idea is 2 4 x 4 zones with room for a Bus Stop and 2 small parks between them.

Hmm. Now I'm looking at it. If I kept the road in the middle straight, I could save 1 tile. What else could I put in that tile?

Cheers.

[JaxCoJazz 3]

From my personal experience (not in any particular order)....

1. AVOID grids as much as possible
2. Give your sims as many ways to get somewhere via road as possible whilst still leaving plenty of room for some of the large stuff to grow
3. Use diagonal roads occaisionally--not only does it look interesting, it will give your city a more natural feel
4. Leave room for expansion--make sure you can upgrade busy thoroughfares* into avenues or highways--I'd use elevated highways because they cost just as much to build and maintain as the ground-level highways (plus the onramps use less room)
5. DOWNLOAD the Network Addon Mod in the Modding Files section of the site--it'll be under the essentials section
6. Do NOT keep your budget on the edge--leave a fairly sizeable income so you can afford that

[DuskTrooper 316]

Grids can be ok, as long as you create viarations of the grid, and place some angled roads, roundabouts, etc in the mix to add variety.

[TheCrybKeeper 301]

It's all in the math: If you really like grid cities I can tell you the formula, for a utopian society. I mean solid green, mayor rating above 99%. Very logical and boring though it allows for some creativity smattered about.

[Compromise 1]

Date: 6/15/2005 3:26:57 PM Author: DuskTrooper Grids can be ok, as long as you create viarations of the grid, and place some angled roads, roundabouts, etc in the mix to add variety.

quote>

DuskTrooper pretty much has the same opinion as I do about grids. Grids are like a medicine.

[popewiz 1]

If there is any such Trixie award as for a best post I'd like to nominate Odainsaker.

[Mexicanboy13r 12]

Grids are very cool in simcity. If you know how to use them.

http://img269.echo.cx/img269/2708/pril166pa.jpg align=baseline>

 

Larger--> http://img270.echo.cx/img270/7365/april162dh.jpg

 

More info on my CJ.

 

[TheCrybKeeper 301]

JaxCoJazz: I just read your entire post. Yes, you know the game fairly well.

 

 Grids: this is my main style(not only tho) and I have done it so much so, that I can build it correct the first time out. No need to allow for expansions, as I know what, where and how, in advance. I pre-build a cities demands, basically.

 

I am currently working on my biggest ever gridded city. will be posting images in a CJ soon, or maybe in Game experiments thread.

 Funny thing is; I have never seen more than 2 cars crash at once, in  my all-grid cities and yes, traffic data is all green lines. I have found many factors, must be in proper place, for grid to work flawlessly. Trains are a no. Buses seem to be best of all transports, for a grid city. All blocks must be identical number of tiles: 6x6. any other number and the buses begin to faulter in performance. any less and traffic accidents begin to increase. every thing must be built to an exact maximum performance numeral. find these numbers,... and find Utopia.

 

 Mexicanboy13: I like your sig and yes, I donated through work this week. gave up my coffee money. Since I am not wealthy or anything. It was all I had to give. I wish I could have done more and have done other things.

 Anyways you are absolutely correct. If everyone gave a dollar, I would still have some coffee this week. heeeheee. seriously though, That is a wise statement in your signature and I applaud you.

[Dragonsbrethren 0]

I always use a retangular grid, 11x6, streets on the long end (Where the zones are aligned to) and roads on the short end. Industrial zones are always above or below the residential zones (So the roads are used for commuting), commercial zones are aligned to the roads. Works great too, and is very realistic to where I live. When I feel the need is there I build an avenue going the same way as the streets (Commericial zones line this as well). If it starts to look boring I make the roads run diagonal for a while, or I flip the grid entirely. If I flip the grid it is always after the avenue.

My industrial zones use the same layout but replace every other street with a rail line running through the middle (Also I don't use streets in the industrial areas because I can't align where the buildings will grow.)

[BlakeMW 84]

I usually prefer funnelling traffic onto avenues/highways to true gridding, like the avenues head east-west and the streets/roads north-south. With good planning I believe this actually results in equal to lower commute times compared with gridding, since the larger roads are higher speed.

The best networks are fairly complex systems of one-way roads, avenues and possibly highways / one-way highways, probably using busses for the main to/from-work direction, and subways for lateral travel. However this kind of network is based on quirks and flaws in the transit simulation and doesn't resemble reality, I might post an experimental city journel for the benefit of those who enjoy the genuinely bizzare.

[simheel 1]

I do not claim to be a great city designer by any means (which should be clear since I've never posted a city journal or made any great lots).

But I tend to use grids with variations, because I think having a basic grid layout can allow you to plan better and embellish.

 

Making cities in SC4 is a art form, and with any art - music, writing, etc. - you have got to follow and master the rules before you can break away into your own individual embellishments.

Let the grid be your rule for the art form, but once you've got the pattern down, you can break loose from it more often to create areas of beauty and individuality. 

 

Take a great jazz musician, for instance. There might seem to be chaos in what they are playing (and there can be some chaos), but there is always an underlying pattern.