Building low-use highways?

[armpit43 172]

A thought came to me today - is there any merit in building avenues and highways early on, before there's enough traffic to actually justify them, just to provide a faster road speed for sims to reach job markets? I ask because I'm trying to find ways to get Sims to commute as far as possible to reach a Downtown office area, in order to create a more realistic, low density LA-style urban-sprawl, and I'm assuming standard roads, with their lower speeds, would lead to commute time abandonment in the suburbs.

[SIM-ple Jack 17,451]

52 minutes ago, armpit43 said:

A thought came to me today - is there any merit in building avenues and highways early on, before there's enough traffic to actually justify them,...

The merit I find is not having to struggle having to up-grade to them after the city has been built and things are running smoothly. Especially demolishing things to get an on-ramp built.

[Lucario Boricua 7,053]

There's many ways to tackle this problem!

 

• Pre-build an oversized network and grow your city to match it demand-wise (the premise of the thread). That's when you start with avenues and freeways/motorways, which isn't particularly realistic, but really convenient. This is especially beneficial if your playstyle favors form over function, wanting to have your cities carefully planned to look nice with the least amount of demolition and frustration.
   
• Build a small capacity network prepared for future expansion. Make sure to leave space for widening, or place Streets parallel and directly adjacent to Roads, such that you can later widen your Roads into Avenues, dual One-Way Roads, Network Widening Mod, Real Highway, or configurations with road and rail transit. Alternatively, it's possible to use RHW-2 as a fast and higher capacity road substitute, at present, the ground level version supports pedestrian traffic (albeit at a lower speed), but this might not be the status quo forever. This one's more complicated because you have to be familiar with the size and interaction between the various networks, but if you're up to the challenge, you can be rewarded with the satisfaction of upgrading your transportation while your sims get to keep their homes and businesses.
   
• Build a small capacity network and embrace the challenge of eminent domain and expanding without a pre-planned right-of-way. This one's especially favorable for players who like to retrofit their cities from time to time, as well as for those who like realistic transportation infrastructure. It isn't, however, for the faint of heart who would rather build their city once, and closest to the finalized form.
   
• Build low capacity and low speed road networks, and offload traffic growth to rail networks. This is one of the most clever ways to do it, and it's one of the underlying themes of my (currently inactive) CJ, the Kingdom of Rota. This region has a robust rail network featuring RRW (dual and single tracked), High Speed Rail, and GLR, and no road whatsoever has more than 3 lanes total.
   
• Adjust your traffic simulator capacity to obtain congestion more quickly / more slowly. Maybe you like to build your transportation network in a particular way, but feel that it either never gets congested (too high of a capacity) or it gets congested prematurely (too low of a capacity). You can adjust this using the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool, or by re-installing the NAM. I myself realized that using the ultra capacity was overkill and wasn't getting credible congestion behavior, so I dropped to the high capacity. This way, you can get congestion well-before you have a mega city to tame, or build your mega city first before congestion becomes a problem!
   

The merit of each option ultimately boils down to what makes you happiest and most satisfied. SimCity 4 is a videogame, and its ultimate purpose is provide entertainment. If you feel that pre-building the ovesrized transportation network from the start feels off, try experimenting with the other approaches.

[Propfam 2,308]

1 hour ago, Lucario Boricua said:

Build low capacity and low speed road networks, and offload traffic growth to rail networks. This is one of the most clever ways to do it, and it's one of the underlying themes of my (currently inactive) CJ, the Kingdom of Rota. This region has a robust rail network featuring RRW (dual and single tracked), High Speed Rail, and GLR, and no road whatsoever has more than 3 lanes total.

This is also my way, too! In fact, in one of my one-off cities, I made a city with only one avenue and the rest is just streets. Both the avenue and the streets are the tram variant, so there's a tram network. Although I still failed to reduce the congestion of the avenue since it's the only way to connect with neighboring city, I have somewhat successfully reduce the traffic in the streets. Still not perfect cuz someone still prefer their cars, but still progress compared to my previous cities.