#20yearsSC4 Challenge - The Walkable City

[Ulisse Wolf 4,454]

#20yearsSC4 Challenge
A tribute to the creativity that gives us to SimCity 4

The new challenges will touch on various aspects of the game with and without NAM. Some of the challenges will be very challenging and that is why they will last longer but other challenges will be easier and last less. The main purpose of these challenges is to engage the community in a fun way and at the same time have them learn new gameplay styles and specific building techniques

The Challenge

The challenge we decided to give is a modern challenge that abandons the concept of "just add one more lane bro" and embraces a new concept. The Walkable City. A city or neighborhood free of cars, and sims use pedmalls to get around

Requirements

If you want to participate in the challenge, you must first read the challenge code of conduct. These rules apply to all challenges, and complying with these rules allows the challenges to run more smoothly.  You can see the code of conduct for the challenges here

In addition to these rules, additional rules developed specifically for the challenge must be respected.

1.  Aesthetics that guarantees consistency with the styles of pedmalls that serve (Example: Industrial PedMall is used in industrial areas while Retrowave PedMall is more suitable for use in science fiction & cyberpunk environments or in modern downtown etc ..)

2.  Must not exceed 10% of pedestian traffic, measured using the Traffic Query cursor

3.  Maximizing pedestrian transportation

4. The player must post at least one image without UI and UDI icon of the city and an image with the volume of traffic highlighting the area subject to the challenge 

5. In this challenge it is ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to use the Park n Ride mode

6. Although the challenge is for pedmalls, players are encouraged to use other pedestrian-related NAM mods such as crosswalk midblocks 

Obviously the two mandatory mods are Network Addon Mod 47 and Slope Mod.

All other mods like terrain mod, building mod etc.. are at the free choice of the user

Instructions 

To participate you must post your images within this thread by May 6, 2023 All images received from May 6 onward will be excluded. The voting phase will be announced after two weeks (around May 20, 2023) to complete the verification steps and resolve irregularity issues. Voting lasts one month and will end June 20, 2023 (approximately)

DEADLINE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE CHALLENGE: MAY 20, 2023

 

If there are any other questions do not hesitate to ask them here and the scrutineers will be able to answer your questions immediately. I also recommend using hashtags #20yearsSC4 for your creations to celebrate SimCity 4.

Have fun and good building mayors!

 

[Propfam 2,302]

Alley City
A city within alleys

Dedicated to my struggle to enter National Polytechnics of Accounting, Tangerang, a highly-contested school. Unfortunately, This will be the last significant activity here in Simtropolis before I take hiatus. I'll back when I finally entered the uni. Hopefully, I'll be accepted this year. Otherwise, you'll have to wait another year or even, possibly longer if I have to try to another uni. So, sit back and enjoy!

This is Alley City. As the name suggests, this is a city within alleys. Wdym? Well, it's a city with most of the blocks contained in alleys. So, offices, residentials, and civics are located inside walkable areas. There are some roads built for buses and garbage trucks.

The route looks weird but that's okay. At least, I get quite decent pedestrian traffic.

And this is another proof.

For some reasons, there are some sims that using cars.

 

Let's dive in into the power section.

This area only consists of 2 SimPeg Utopia Gasification Plant and some residential blocks. Well, there is a complex of passenger and freight train station. But we can forget those. This is what I meant as "some roads built for... garbage trucks." There's a nearby station too.

 

This is the water area. It has 7 pumps plus 1 that's recently completed. It has a station in the east.

 

Oh.

Just near this area, there's a complex of residential. This the far east area.

 

This was the first high-rise tower built in the city. It feels so historical imho. It used to be located on a street. Now, it's blocked from car traffic. And therefore, the parking is now useless, except for bikes.

 

The university area. It's now home to emerging high-wealth companies. This is a preparation for making the city into a high-wealth city.

Let's take a look at a newly emerged CBD.

The city overall is still emerging. There are lots of progress within just 5 years alone, as proven by this census.

Unfortunately, the budget has been in deficit since early days. It's quite hard to make money on a new city.

I hope you enjoy my short CJ. Stay tuned for the next. Thanks for reading!

[Ulisse Wolf 4,454]

There are less than 10 days left for the challenge to close. If you want to participate you can do it by May 6th at 00:00 AM Pacific Time

[Lucario Boricua 7,049]

Only one week left! Really hoping more players are preparing entries for this contest.

[Terring 6,476]

#20yearsSC4

Welcome to Eden Prime, a city with more parks than parking lots

Eden Prime is a futuristic city based on various and actually proposed concepts, and designed to maximize pedestrian traffic by using a variety of strategies to make everything accessible in walking distances, such as homejobs to simulate a variety of jobs like freelancing and teleworking, complete communities in superblocks so everything you need is right next to you, ordinances such as carpool incentive and shuttle services, and lots of mass transit that allows you to go anywhere you want without ever using a car. There are still some main roads and avenues for buses, supply and freight trucks, and civil and emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire trucks, but most of the traffic is by walking and mass transit.

While building the city, I've had been taking into consideration 4 ideas and advises suggested by Jeff Speck, a city planner and urban designer who advocates internationally for more walk-able cities. According to him, walking should be useful, safe, comfortable and interesting. Let's have a closer look at them and see some examples while exploring the city.

1) Walking must be useful. Just telling your Sims to get up and start walking is not enough, especially if the city is still car-centric. To make walking the very first choice of transportation, drop the concepts of suburbans and Central Businesses Districts to the nearest trashcan and forget the "just add more lines, bro" mentality. All neighborhoods and city blocks are a self-efficient mix of residential and commercial buildings with anything you need in walking distances, including various amenities and services such as libraries, playgrounds, recycling spaces and vertical farms with food markets.

In case you need to go somewhere beyond your neighborhood, such as the university and the central services tower, don't worry. There are bus stops and train, tram and subway stations in every corner of the city, making the need of cars obsolete. The 3 specific areas I'm highlighting are some of the busiest regarding the pedestrian traffic.

Yes, there is still some "car" traffic in the pedmalls, but we can imagine that the green arrows doesn't represent regular cars but personal transportation vehicles, such as scooters, bicycles and mini cars.

2) Walking must be safe. Not only from criminals obviously, but also from car accidents, tram collisions, and anything else that could put Sims' life into jeopardy. Sims should not feel they're in danger when they're walking. This is why railroads are elevated, pedmalls and main roads are separated from each other, and tram lines are surrounded by fences.

3) Walking must be comfortable. Would you like to drive for hours without rest, no matter how comfortable is your car? If no, then you can imagine how tiresome can be walking. That's another reason to build so many parks, especially if they came with plenty of comfortable benches, trash cans, shady trees, clean public toilets and other useful amenities.

4) Walking must be interesting. Dealing with the same building design and the same blank walls every day and no matter where you are, is lame and will make the option of walking even less appealing. Variety is the spice of life. You can have it by building landmarks, statues, ponds, different types of pedmalls, rewards like hotels, anything that would make your city interesting and your Sims want to explore it by foot or bicycle.

Once again, welcome to Eden Prime. A city so walk-able and futuristic that even electric flying cars with ion engines are considered as useless and outdated

  Edited May 23, 2023 by Terring  
Updating the submission post to include screenshots with traffic numbers

[Lucario Boricua 7,049]

@Ulisse Wolf and I have evaluated the current situation with the Walkable City challenge. Given the current deadline for May 6th, and the contest only having 2 entries, we are extending the submission deadline by 2 weeks, until May 20th's midnight, Pacific Standard Time.

We really hope to see at least 5 entries in total, before we evaluate entries and then open voting. Looking forward to have more participants with the new possibilities of SimCity 4 pedestrian transportation!

[Edvarz 1,985]

YES!!! I feel like I just got an extension on a college paper . I'll be sure to submit my entry!

[Propfam 2,302]

On 5/5/2023 at 12:02 AM, Lucario Boricua said:

@Ulisse Wolf and I have evaluated the current situation with the Walkable City challenge. Given the current deadline for May 6th, and the contest only having 2 entries, we are extending the submission deadline by 2 weeks, until May 20th's midnight, Pacific Standard Time.

We really hope to see at least 5 entries in total, before we evaluate entries and then open voting. Looking forward to have more participants with the new possibilities of SimCity 4 pedestrian transportation!

Yeah, would be much fairer with 5. Let's see what others will present.

[Girafarig 1,412]

So, I really want to participate in this challenge, but I'm having some trouble understanding the additional rules. In particular:

• Regarding rule #2, what is exactly 10% of pedestrian traffic? As the total in the city? In regards to capacity?
• Rule #3 is a bit ambiguous. Should we maximise exclusively pedestrian traffic, to the detriment of people walking (maybe long distances) to a mass transit station? Because I get a lot of pedestrians walking towards stations, and I find that to be a great way to push people into pedmalls and the like, but I could also understand if you don't want to make the challenge about that. As a matter of fact, the number of pedestrians in my walkable neighbourhood pales in comparison to the short stretches of pedmall, or even plain road, where people switch from trains to subway.

I've also found rule #5 to be a bit restrictive because there are so many stations that enable Park N' Ride, especially the ones with a larger footprint, and those stations also encourage a lot of pedestrian usage simply by allowing them to walk inside them. I had to try at least three rail stations in attempting to fulfill this challenge, for instance.

Anyway, since I didn't want to end in a sour note, here's the whole-city picture of the place where I'm building (rather, extending) a walkable neighbourhood.

[Lucario Boricua 7,049]

Thank you @Girafarig for your interest in participating, and for your questions on the rules! Here's some clarifications based off your questions:

RULE 2: The 10% car traffic rule is using the Traffic Query Tool (the cursor which allows you to check traffic volumes and routes in a network tile). With it, you'll do the following:

• You're gonna choose one or a handful of key sites of your pedmall network, where you'll find the greatest pedestrian volumes.
• Sample the sites and check the traffic volume numbers for pedestrians and for cars. 
• You'll compare the car volume with the pedestrian volume, the car volume value should be 10% or less of the pedestrian volume. Say, you query 5,400 pedestrians, your car numbers on the same tile shouldn't be more than 540.
• As a hint for all contestants (and players overall!), don't forget that we have the pedmall puzzle pieces and the mid-block crosswalk FLEX pieces. If you have a site with lots of ped traffic, but it's also getting lots of car traffic, you can plop a mid-block crosswalk or a pedmall puzzle piece, these lack car paths entirely, and will help you block car traffic along the particular route.

RULE 3: On maximizing pedestrian transportation (Rule 3), there's no condition against using transit as part of your plan. Make sure to check the game's data views (Traffic Volume views and the Traffic Volume graphs), make sure you increase the number and/or share of pedestrian trips (not necessarily the distance). A busy pedestrian city will have lots of green, yellow, orange and red in the pedestrian traffic volume view, and will have the pedestrian traffic line in the graph as the highest of all values. You can achieve this by creating mixed-use neighborhoods (distances are so short that walking is competitive), blocking car traffic at select spots (make car trips unattractive) or use transit services (all transit trips start and end as pedestrian trips).

RULE 5: What no one's allowed to do is editing the traffic simulator to tweak the Traffic Simulator parameters which enable the Park and Ride behavior (remove the ability of sims to reach their destination by car). In the past, players who used this feature installed it (using the now-deprecated Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool), but didn't place parking lots, this forced sims to travel as pedestrians everywhere. For the purposes of this competition, it's cheating because it doesn't require the player to plan out a city which favors pedestrian travel. When we talk about the Park and Ride mode, it's about the Traffic Simulator, not about transit stations which include parking facilities, nor pairing parking facilities with transit stations. Thank you for noticing this detail, I hope the rule is more clear.

[Girafarig 1,412]

Thanks for the quick reply! Anyway, here's my submission.

I had a small-ish walking district in the city of Anclaje, at the foot of a hill, between the rails and the university campus, pretty much since founding that city. It had gone through a few changes and expansions, but it was mostly centered around the Siete Reyes train station. I took these pictures right before starting the whole expansion process but after having replaced the old pedmalls with the new ones. You can actually see me setting up the terrain if you look carefully.

Here's from the North. The rail station that underpins the whole area is towards the right, between the two tall office buildings.

View looking South, with transit enabled. You can barely see the actual station. The original walkable area is to the left. To the right, there's a commercial zone where I added a few more pedmalls that see a fair amount of usage. Note the pedmall-over-rail connection that enables pedestrians to reach the station from that side.

So anyway, I decided to expand this neighbourhood towards the hill, which was not an easy place to build over with conventional transit and roads. Hills, however, are fairly conductive to pedestrian paths and stairs, as you can see in real-life examples like Valparaíso.

The Cerro Planalto neighbourhood, named after the nearby landmark that looks suspiciously like the Brazilian center of government, is the residential and commercial extension of the Anclaje walkable district. It features bus connections to the diagonal avenue to its east (left, small roundabout), a cable car (right) to the valley to the west and a hilltop train station (right, next to the cable car) that connects to the rest of the rail network. I put a small rural shed instead of a terminal station in an attempt to avoid what I misunderstood was Park & Ride.

Here's a night-time picture looking towards the east. I've found really enjoyable to take these since the new pedmalls have lightpoles, unlike most of the old pedmalls.

Here's the traffic flow in Cerro Planalto, with two different versions of the rail station. As you can see, there's plenty of traffic on the stairway leading to the train station, but a lot of said traffic then chooses to go down the cable car and into the valley shops. There's also traffic that comes up the road, gets off at the hilltop station, and then walks down the stairs to their places of work.

Another popular pedestrian route is the long transfer from Siete Reyes to the bus stop at the roundabout. This one was a bit surprising to me, but it makes sense since the roads are so tortuous around this area and there's no actual, straightforward driving connection.

Finally, as this is a neighbourhood in an established city (it turned 100 years old while I was taking these pictures), the traffic numbers don't really say much. I captured a bit of data (which looks terribly on account of macs not doing proper screen captures on SimCity 4) regarding pedestrian usage in the new neighbourhood, which suggests that people like walking in here, but don't do it that much on account of the low density.

Here's a comparison with a much shorter stretch of pedmall and street that connects a different train station to the neighbourhood across the highway, which is of a much higher density. I'm gonna convert this to 100% pedmall after I upload this post.

Anyway, I don't know how much sense does it make to upload traffic numbers on a literally centennial city, but as you can see, Anclaje is a very walkable city overall, on account of its difficult geography and the fact that I'm terrible at building roads.

And here's why people aren't flocking to move to one of the new hilltop neighbourhoods.

Whoops.

And since I already uploaded a photo of the whole city, here's another one. This one is much older, and you can see that the city was substantially less built up. But I bet you can guess the date in which I took it (in real life).

[kSlank 151]

@Terring nice entry I see you got raphaelninja's buildings

[Phazon8058 24]

I sure do love me a walkable city, so here's one I've been working on! This is the City of Verdantia, a smaller city of ~31 000 people. The city is named for the Verdant River which it was established next to, at the point where the river drains into Lake Osborne. Verdantia is the first municipality of the North Odica settlement, a region around the northern shores of the large Lake Odica. This is the second major settlement project on the planet First Landing. The first major settlement was New Tranquility, located far to the south on the other end of Lake Odica (not depicted in this region).

Verdantia started life as a small farming village along the river, where some hoped to start a quiet life away from the more intensive settlement around New Tranquility. This didn't last long, as the first successful settlement in North Odica drew yet more settlers. Before long, the farming village was a small city, and the nucleus of a grand plan for human settlement in North Odica as a whole.

As you can see, many people in Verdantia get around with a combination of their own two feet, and robust public transit. As I'll get into later, the light rail network sees a lot of use, especially bringing people to the Financial District.

Verdantia's mode share overwhelmingly leans toward walking and transit, with driving relegated largely along a few roads, especially into the farms south of the railroad.

Here we have Central Old Town, the original part of the village. City Hall and the Mayoral Residence flank Main Street, and the Main Street Tram carries a lot of people from the south of the city to the Financial District.

This is West Old Town, the earliest expansion to the original settlement. It has a distinct working class character, with tenement buildings dominating the neighbourhood. The road with the light rail line running parallel to it is Verdant Street, which marked the original boundary of the settlement. Today it's an important road that connects the city to the farmland south of the railroad.

Folks in Central and West Old Town largely work here, in the Financial District. New plans and projects are popping up left and right for new settlement in North Odica, and with all that capital flowing, the need for a financial district in Verdantia arose. As an important nexus of employment, the city made it a priority to build high quality transit connections. Up until the economic boom the Financial District brought, Verdantia had been a very low-car city, and residents sought to keep it that way.

As you can see, it's been a resounding success. The overwhelming majority of Old Town residents either walk to workplaces within their neighbourhoods, or take the buses or light rail to work in the Financial District. There are also a fair chunk that take a bus up to the Lakeshore Manufacturing District, which isn't documented in this post.

The other major neighbourhood of Verdantia is the Church Quarter. The Church Quarter was originally founded by the crew of an independent courier ship who wanted to settle down and retire from the spacer's life. They started with a few quaint little houses around a small hill. Some friends of one crew member heard about the new North Odica settlement and decided to settle down as well. More crew members told more friends. It didn't take long for a little community to take shape. The church was built on the hill as a gathering place for the community. The whole community doesn't share one faith, so the church is something of a multi-faith house of worship. The Church Quarter came to be known rather widely as a community where many former spacers have settled down. As more folks moved into the community, the need to densify grew, and so most of the houses were traded in for walkups.

With no car streets on the interior of the Church Quarter, pretty much everyone walks and takes transit. Spacers' talents are myriad, so many work down in the Financial District, while others work in the West Industrial Park, or up in the Lakeshore Industrial District.

This little neighbourhood, tucked between the farms, the Church Quarter, and Old Town is West Market, named for the commercial street at the neighbourhood's center, Market Avenue. The neighbourhood itself isn't new, but it's only more recently that it's developed its own character as a quiet little neighbourhood. People here either work in the farms, or up in the Industrial Park.

And finally we have the farms from which the community was born. While the original vision was for a great farming community, that dream, at least in Verdantia, is dead. The farms have been stagnant for years. There was fear of industrial encroachment with the factories near Verdant Street, but that encroachment halted with the establishment of the two industrial districts to the north. At the southwest corner of the intersection of Verdant Street and Riel Avenue is the North Odica Farmers' Association Office, as well as the Verdantia Farmers' Market. Despite agriculture's bleak future in Verdantia, the Farmers' Market remains a vibrant point of pride among Verdantian farmers.