need advice on good traffic plan + placement

[thehandyman 11]

im attempting to make a metropolis, medium sized city, with the help with another city. my main city is prospering, but eventually i run out of space in the city, and although its prospering with high rise apartments/condos, my commercial is staying at medium (eventhough i put dense commercial tiles) and before i know it, some of my high rise residential start becoming abandoned due to commute time (i thought my traffic layout was perfect). first i thought it was because of me improving my other city, but i thought thats impossible, who in simcity 4 would go to another city to work?

 

ive made 2 cities, one is the main one, (commercial and res only) and another for mostly industry. my main city's "traffic layout" (well my industry city traffic is chaos because i dont really care for it) still angers my road advisor, telling me this highway road underpass is congested, and its only this one. plenty others are fine. so i thought maybe u can help me on that.

my main city placements (schools, police, firefighter, hospital, etc.). it does affect the way my city grow, and my school/health advisor always complains to me about strikes. i would place more schools and stuff, but in my opinion, its unrealistic. i know its stupid, but if i have no choice, please tell me that. tips on the right place to put my schools in residentials, police in all, etc. etc. depending on my traffic layout would help. i recently realized that the circle of schools and other buildings dont necessairely mean it has an effect with everyone in the circle.

one more thing, my region is flat land, so no trees or water. does water affect my city in any way? like city development (excluding use of transportation), i know trees help with development because its relaxation.

[ScarcticCG 3]

If you are planning to RADICLY change the layout of your city take the following steps to maximize the use of mass transit and reduce congestion on most road types.

1. When laying out cities ALWAYS start with an avenue with two a strip of tiles that are untouched by anything alongside them. This alows for easy highway placement and means that Avenues aren't needed later.

2. On said avenues , always plan a place for them to go, e.g. future commercial district. The worst case scenario is when you have an avenue of highway to places where people don't want to go.

3. Place more avenues off this avenue in various directions. leave them open ended for use just about anywhere.

4 Lets say you have a residential district adjacent to a commercial district. You have an avenue that leads there, but your zones are gridded (default layout). Because of the extra roads going to the commercial district from the gridded layout, the sims will use these and shortcut your avenue. This WILL clog up those roads and increase commute.

Bottem line, make sure that you major roads aren't shortcut by smaller roads.

5. Sims always take the shortest routes. This likely means that they are bottle necking you highway overpass from different routes t a certain destination. unfortunately I don't know how to tackle this. So try placing mass transit on any surrounding congested roads.

Oh, and your commercials staying medium because there's not enough demand for it.

Sorry if that was hard to follow, I'm typing it up on short notice.

[thehandyman 11]

ohh i forgot to mention, my commercial demand is skyrocketing over 16,000. its strange because last time i had this abnormal commercial demand, large towers would pop out like expected, but not this time.

[_alphaBeta_ 6]

High density buildings have less to do with demand and more to do with total population. Looking at the total commercial job numbers is useless. If you want Cs$$ high density buildings you'll need a Cs$$ population of around 25,000. Given that there are five different commercial developer types (Cs$, Cs$$, Cs$$$, Co$$ & Co$$$), it takes a long time to amass enough population of any one type for a building that size to go up.

Demand is needed for the large building to be built, but you'll need the population numbers first before this is even a possibility.

[Jezus53 18]

I would make sure you check the desirability of the area. If they don't like the area, they won't move in. Also check the Education of the people and the amount of high and medium wealth people you have. These two things will affect the way commercial and industry grows in you're city. If there are not enough wealthy and medium wealth sims to fill up those upper jobs, then the companies won't come. Also, if everyone is stupid big business is not interested. Just like in real life.

As for you're school problem, go to the stex and try and find a school you like that has a larger population cap. I found one that has a capacity of 8,000? I'm not sure. I've never had to use and plus I never found the dependencies for it. There should also be larger hospitals too. If you can't find any here go to the LEX on SC4Devotion.

The traffic situation is inevitable. The only way to fix it is by upgrading. If you're highways are full and you have a highway every 10 blocks then I suggest a huge overhaul with the Rural Highway mod. use the 8 lane or 10 lane highway. Good luck man!

[shaylan221 0]

You should try using one of the NAM simulators found in the NAM instalation setup. They've helped me quite a bit.

[thehandyman 11]

every single city of mine has its own demand (right now my main city is flocking over 300k or less [cant remember the exact numbers] with a single help of another city). my main city would sometimes hit minus RES demand, and my commercial demand, i would expect it to always stay up even if i filled the region with commercial jobs. For HT industry, its high to along with medium and dirty and agriculture, but not as high as commercial, and i would use a HT landmark with 25,000 jobs to save up a lot of space in my industry city, industry is the last zone il use to waste space on a region(and i would need to place the landmarks near the RES zone otherwise itll go abandoned, but sometimes the landmarks go abandoned anyway due to 'low demand' which doesnt make sense because my HT demand stays over 15000 nomatter how many landmarks i put.. maybe its a glitch?). I wish there were a landmark with 25,000 jobs for medium,dirty industry and agriculture, would help a guy like me a lot. the thing that bothers me a lot is the abandonment caused by commute time.

and sorry ScarcticGG, i couldnt picture what u were trying to tell me on #1, maybe more details would help.

i do have a lot of mods including NAM, CAM, and SAM.