Walkability

[BigO_ 0]

What are some of your best tips for increasing walkability (and "bikability") in your city and decreasing private car use?

[Distanced 114]

Obviously, add more ped and bike paths, and upgrade the roads that you can into ones with bike lanes. Provide many transportation options if you want to decrease private vehicle usage. People also need a reason to go somewhere - build parks, plazas, etc. Also, when building the paths provide may options; I found that providing an A to B path is less effective then building a vast network of paths.

[BigO_ 0]

On 2018-05-03 at 12:47 AM, Distanced said:

Obviously, add more ped and bike paths, and upgrade the roads that you can into ones with bike lanes. Provide many transportation options if you want to decrease private vehicle usage. People also need a reason to go somewhere - build parks, plazas, etc. Also, when building the paths provide may options; I found that providing an A to B path is less effective then building a vast network of paths.

How do you go about with placing stops for trams, buses etc? I've heard that that's quite important to achieve a functional network.

[Ltw 401]

I could help you with this issue I guess! 

As far as public transportation goes it is in my view important to get (eventually) an extensive subway-network in which people can change lines. You can check the workshop for some good multi-platform stations, practically everything is possible nowadays. Personally, I rely heavily on the subway. However, a mixture of different transportation-types is most feasible. In the beginning, I start with busses. These are quite cheap and are a good way to start public transport in a city. However, there are also downsides, the most important downsides in my opinion are the fact that they only carry 30 passengers and that they are using the road itself, which could reduce congestion a little bit, but will eventually lead to more problems regarding traffic. Hence, the introduction of the subway. The subway is a relatively cheap solution and could carry a lot of passengers. Furthermore you can transfer from line to line quite easily and you can adjust the lines more to your liking by choosing day- and night-lines, and adjusting day- and night budget off course. This is also possible with busses and trams but the fact that they use a depot could lead to some heavy congestion as well. I use other networks as well but I'll get back to that later. First I'm going to elaborate some more on building a subway-network.

I often start with one or two subway-lines. I choose a certain point in which I can centralize most subway-traffic. This is mostly Downtown. From this point I build one or two lines to other parts of the city. It is important to keep in mind the destinations citizens want to travel to. These are in general home, work, school, shops, parks and unique buildings. By building a subway-line you want to connect those different destination-types to each other. A subway-line which for instance only covers a residential area would probably not be utilized. Furthermore, I always build a line which goes from one end of the city to the other. Thus, there are two terminus-stations on each line. There are also alternatives like circle-lines but I like this approach better since it is quite straight-forward and it is more flexible as your city expands. A small sidenote is that it is important to think about future expansions as well, if you don't think that through placing new lines could be quite a hassle. Once you've planned out the general direction of your subway-line you can place different stations. In high density areas I place them a few blocks from each other and in lower density areas I often choose to place them at a further distance. Lately, I've also experimented with proper placement regarding noise-pollution. Noise-pollution has quite some effect on health (at least in the latest update). Therefore, I chose to place stations in residential zones strategically next to for instance parks, schools, or offices. At last I (at least in the beginning) don't place subway-lines in industrial zones since those lines aren't used that much. Therefore I stick with residential zones, commercial zones and offices and all the points of interest in those zones.

Now that I've laid down the foundation of my subway-network I could work further on different connecting networks. Starting by bus, the bus is the cheapest option and even though it has downsides it is great for those areas in the city in which the subway is just not feasible. I start a bus-line the same way as a subway line. Thus, I choose two sides of the city and I check whether the line is serving the different destinations of citizens. Furthermore, I place different stops next to subway-stations. This way people can easily transfer to subway-lines as well. Bus-connections might not be very lucrative but it is very important to serve the entire city, this way you can easily get high passenger numbers in public transport and thus decrease car-usage. If your bus-line is getting too much passengers leading to congestion and long waiting-times you can consider upgrading to trams. If that doesn't work either you can upgrade to the subway. In both cases it is important to connect lines to a subway-station with several lines, either by placing a stop next to it (like with tram-stops) or by using a dedicated platform in the station itself (with subway). For subway-lines I would recommend getting a dedicated platform for each line, a dedicated platform doesn't cost that much more since multi-platform stations are as expensive (or maybe a little bit more expensive) than standard stations and it makes a huge difference. If financially possible I would also recommend having a dedicated tube for the entire line if you want to use a lot of trains. This is a quite expensive solution but it allows you to increase the number of trains on your line a lot. However, in the beginning I wouldn't worry about that too much. In general it is very beneficial to expand your subway-network a lot if you have sufficient funds. A large network makes people use it more, even if you have some lines with less passengers than you hoped for it helps increasing the number of passengers on busy lines as well. I often have around 15 lines in the end, sometimes more, sometimes less, that mostly depends on the characteristics of the city itself.

Furthermore, there are some other transportation options you could consider. I use the subway most, next to the bus and tram. I use the train for outside-connections and long distance connections such as the airport. In general the train station is a central hub in my subway-network. This way I can connect traffic from tourists from outside train-connections and the airport to the extensive subway-network, spreading out the huge amount of tourists over several bus- and metro lines. Next to that the transit DLC gave us some more options. I use the monorail for long distances as well, also for airports. This works pretty nice when you have large custom airports with different terminals. The other transportation types I generally don't use except for the cable cars, but more incidentally, cable cars work nicely when connecting islands or areas which are hard to reach by metro due to the steepness of the ground itself. However, since it is possible that you don't have this DLC I'm not going to elaborate further on this.

This is the way I handle public transport. I think I have included everything but it could be that I forgot some things that are important. So just let me know if you're still having some struggles.

At last but not least I want to include bikes in this post as well. I use bikes a lot. I often use them after I've established an extensive public transportation network. At this moment I notice that I can't really expand any further on public transport but I'm still having some issues with traffic. I've posted something about bikes and the way I use them in a post years ago. I still do that the same way and it has some great benefits. Therefore I wanted to include that old post as well, you can see it over here: 

 

[Rpdodd 2]

Wheels and spokes for public transport. Spokes shuttle, wheeles transport. Every street and side walk has access to public transport, pedestrian and cyclist paths. Service vehicles are the main street traffic in this city. Transport lines have vehicles populated enough to run like clockwork, the next tram, metro, etc. is just a minute away. Most walkable areas are at city center where distances are close. But with frequent public transport stops every 500 meters, pedestrians and cyclists can easily navigate the city no matter how far from center you are. Rings are zoned to separate residential, commerce, and office, plus leisure and activities, but are effectively spaced and interspersed--commercial within the residential, leisure all over and in two outer rings surround the whole city, and offices as the outermost rings providing easy access to all needs of life, work, education, and play. 

95% of trips in this city do not rely on car.

[skallben 21]

Mix up zoning so people can walk to work/shopping.