Ring Roads (Loops)

[JShoota 0]

After recently going to Dallas and Houston as part of my vacation, I find myself considering how viable ring-roads are in SC4. For those that aren't familiar with this system, it basically consists of a freeway that circles all or most of a large city, with arteries that travel from the ring, into the city center. The completed project tends to end up looking like a wagon wheel. Most large cities in North America have at least one, some with 2 or 3.

Anyway, I am wondering what your experiences have been with this type of road network. I first thought, is that it will not work very well in the game because of the way sims travel. (shortest route, as opposed to quickest). The ring road works in real life because it is often much faster to travel around the outside of a city instead of fighting the traffic in the city center. This is a concept Sims can't seem to grasp.

Any screen shots would be appreciated.

[Gnargenox 6]

Here's a little experiment I did with a ring type city. It was done on a small city square. The terrain is from the Endor map here on the STEX.

One neighbor connection to the west, a medium sized city. Got the wild idea of building a ring road and used the KrispyKreme donut lot at the exact center, which comes with a nicely spaced police coverage radius and a square footprint.

The roads are symmetrical in three (almost) of the four quadrants I used to divide the city into.

I love to paint the ground with agriculture zone as a guide and to see which tiles are too steep for any other zone. Inner parallel streets are six tiles apart.

Four spoke roads lead to neighbors. Sorta symmetrical rail layout, but three basic rings with nice police and fire coverage. Decided to make it an industrial city, as the only growing neighbor has a need for jobs. Finished up the rail system almost.

Kind of broke away from the ring look in the corners of the city and threw in some residential areas so I could get some mayor rewards. Stuck in a power plant, incinerator, some parks, commercial spots, education system, water towers, and a pollution ionizer.

We see MASSIVE growth immediately, except inside the rail loop, there it is dead, except on the mountain-side where the streets are not symmetrical.

Even more growth outside the loop and a few farm adjustments made to match neighbors.

Simply added some plazas and got high-tech industry inside the loop.

I think it kinda works. Added another rail station with higher capacity. That's when the experiment halted for now.

Commuters come into town on train, walk to a taxi-stand and ride to work. Without the taxi stands I saw much fewer commuters. After the stand maxed out, growth halted.

A close up of transportation routes.

Freight automata shows alot of traffic.

Finally got the rail system loop connected with passengers everywhere.

I've had the most fun playing in traffic with this city. The concept of a ring-road city is just as mathematically pure as a grid system, if we had infinite resolution in the game, but even on a small scale it seemed to be a little boost to growth. In my urban planning classes at University, ring-road cites with greenbelts and planned communities had a large movement behind them a few decades ago and you can see the results in many huge urban areas today. Oh and I'm from Houston. It takes three hours to drive across it going 70 mph on our own ring-and-spoke highway system. Without it the city wouldn't ever be as big and sprawling as it is. There are plans for the "Grand Parkway" which is a proposed 170-mile circumferential scenic highway traversing seven counties and encircling the Greater Houston region. I think it's a great idea to try the idea out on SimCity4. Can't wait to see some other cities based on the idea.

[DuskTrooper 314]

My region of Montaukshire has a few ring roads either complete, under construction, or planned. This image from Dec 2005 shows the ring around downtown, the inner loop, as well as parts of the outer beltway that are under construction. There are plans for at least 2 more belt freeways after the inner loop, and first belt.

http://www.dusktrooper.dudyconstructor.com/Montaukshire_5.jpg

[jupitercrisis 1]

Being a native houstonian, I've built a city where the "ring road (tee hee)" works well. It's all about freeway access. In houston, if you're not on a freeway, you messed up in your route planning. I've never made a Loop 610 or 635 with any success, but I had a large neighborhood (about the size of West University near Houston, think low-res tool, click and drag to make an 6x8 block 'hood), that I encircled with a beltway of an avenue. This is on a small scale compared to Houston, but the houses furthest away from my commercial area nearby used the avenue and connecting roads to get to work.

See, the thing is this: None of the city planning I've come into contact with works much in Sim City 4. I think this game was developed by people not from Texas, and SURELY not from Houston. Come on, guys!! Where's the "no-zoning" zone tool! Let's let people build what they want WHERE they want!

I went to Boston recently, and the Sim City 4 game began to make a little more sense. I had a city of 12k, mostly low-density residential and the game was like "HEY! YOU DONT HAVE ENOUGH APARTMENTS! WHAT ARE YOU, CRAZY!?" and I was like "no...I'm from the Houston suburbs. we have all the land we want and we'll sprawl as we please, thank you!"

even though...I hate Houston's suburb planning. =( 

[JShoota 0]

Wow, great responses. Thanks a lot!

I agree that the game was not really designed to handle massive amounts of urban sprawl, like I saw in Texas.  I think I will still do some experimenting with it however. I recently started a new region using the main island of Hawaii as my map, and am going to try to implement some sort of ring road concept.

[storms991 0]

I always use them in my cities, especially the english ones, take a look at show us your accomplishments, they are really useful, and I usually add around 5 or 6 rings.

[thesonofgray 0]

There are a lot of Houstonians on ST. Houston is different from many other large cities (especially in the east) because "zoning" was largely non-existant in the early stages of the city's history. Therefore, like jupitercrisis said, we sprawled out as we pleased. It has cought up to us though. And we are paying for our sprawled-outed-ness with a 24-hour "rush hour".

But in response to the original post, I usually just stick to a grid-like system. Circles don't really work (or more importantly look good) in SC4.

[cnystrom1 1]

i dont really understand why a ring road would reduce traffic... they seem to work though... anyone care to explain why they are so effective? yes, im a little clueless with road building... lol

[JShoota 0]

Originally posted by: cnystrom1 i dont really understand why a ring road would reduce traffic... they seem to work though... anyone care to explain why they are so effective? yes, im a little clueless with road building... lolquote>

 

Assuming you are talking about real life, ring roads are effective because they route a lot of "just passing through" traffic around the outside of the city. For example... as I originally posted, I had recently been in Texas on vacation. We drove from Dallas to Galveston, going straight through Houston along the way. Instead of driving directly through Houston we took the ring road around the outside of town. Taking the ring road probably added 15 or 20 miles to the actual distance of our trip, but travel time was way less. Take this example, and imagine tens of thousands of trucks and cars doing the same thing, and you can understand why this works.

As far as Simcity is concerened however, it doesn't seem to work as well because sims aren't intelligent enough to know that there is less traffic on the ring road then the freeway that goes through the city center. The freeway that goes straight through the city is always a shorter route distance wise, so they take it instead. I think the only way it would work in game, is to force the sims onto the freeway by cutting off any other routes. This could be disaterous however, as commute times would probably soar.

[cnystrom1 1]

o now i see, thanks for that. wish that would work in simcity though... o well in simcity i suppose most traffic would actually be going downtown, unless they were going to a strip mall or some other commercial district.

[eikenhorst 1]

Yes, that is the big problem I have with ringroads too. They work in real live but nog in SC. My sims just take the shortest route from A to B. They will go on streets even if there is a great highway running beside it. 

Gnargenox, in your last picture is see you have build an university in an industrial city, why is that?

[Gnargenox 6]

eikenhorst, maybe I don't understand the game mechanics, but I thought higher levels of education for residence in the city would boost the demand for high-tech. Maybe I'm completely wrong.

[scrap104 0]

S-104 | Blue Beltway

I got the inspiration a while back passing through I-95/495 on the Capital Beltway. I took a large city tile, surround it with large and medium tiles and ran the beltway around without touching the central city. Gamewise, traffic mostly serves the local city tile and its highway connected neighbor.

[aminom 0]

Great ring city Gnargenox! I'm a big fan of unusual symmetrical transportation structures and grids. Recently I made a residential ziggurat designed like one of the aztec pyramids using Smoncrie's raisers, with boulevards as the "stairs." I think I'll see how the idea works with rings instead of concentric squares...

[Odainsaker 2,133]

We actually have a triple highway ring system here in San Antonio, though the outer loop is the least developed, particularly on its southern stretch. For a time in the 1960s, this was the nation's largest highway system (not bad for what is the nation's smallest big city), and it has allowed suburban sprawl to an almost unprecedented degree.

But I always wondered how a ring road like Vienna's Ringstrasse would work in SimCity. For those unfamiliar, the old star-shaped fortifications surrounding the medieval core of historic Vienna were torn down in the late 19th century and replaced with a ring of heavily landscaped urban boulevards dotted with grandiose public buildings befitting an imperial capital. After Haussman's directional boulevards in Paris, this Ringstrasse became the biggest highlight of European urban road construction at that time and a heavily visited public space.

[Corrado Ciccone 0]

I'm building a rather large metropolis, I'v tried to use outer loop freeways at least 6 or 7 times only to find that sims will not use them unless there is no other way. I'm using the lessons from the previous cities to bulid my current metropolis. Instead if using a large city map as the central city, I'm using it only as the downtown area, and running the outer loop around the outermost maps of the region. There are no roads or avenues with exits off the freeway that go into the city. All roadways that have exits either go out farther into suburbia away from the loop or go into neighboring maps on either side (away from the city center). As long as the roads with exits do not intersect with roads that lead into the city ( I use overpasses) sims seem to take the loop. 

[storms991 0]

take a look at London's M25!!, its so used, thats its like a parking lot. by the way, you people should start being realistic and smart, have a CBD, and have all people go there, people use the ringroads in my cities, and always reach their destination, the average commute time in a 130,000 city is 1.2 minutes.

[Brasdf 0]

Saw a post on another thread that might be relevant to this Ring Road topic.  There's a detailed description of a "commute circle" phenomenon/bug here:

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=75769&enterthread=y#750351

[blobbdobb 0]

The radical ordinance mod has an option that makes your sims choose the Quickest Commute rather than the Shortest (Length)

Don't worry too much about traffic though, Sims complain about it WAYY to much. I have a 2 hr long commute every day and I don't complain. One of my sims had a 20 minute commute and he was winging about his eggs going rotten on the journey!

[sir scott 0]

city rings (or "ring roads" as people here in britain usually call them) are a great idea. i live in the london suburbs and without the M25 im pretty certain london would grind to a halt , most traffic going through london can divert round it.

on a more practical SC4 note , ring roads are commonly used in planned communities. for any city journal based on one a ring road is surely a must

[Micah 16]

Wow, I didn't even know people visited Houston. But yes, we have a highway that encircles the whole downtown. But that is actually not acurate. In fact, there are several highways that circle not only the city, but the whole county!

[markmass 0]

I live in Los Angeles now but I'm from Houston, TX where city rings/ring roads are very common ---  there are I believe 3 or 4 highly used ring roads in Houston that carry major traffic loads.

Same with the London comment above, without these ring roads, congestion would be even worse and the city would grind to a halt.  Here in LA, the mountains/hills and ocean kinda determine where freeways/roads can go.

Also, the land in Houston is so flat that it makes building these types of networks possible.  But now the city looks like one big doughnut....mmmmm doughnuts....haha

[Gnargenox 6]

Some interesting info on the new ring road proposed for houston:

This is a website for STOPPING the construction of the worlds largest ring, but we all know houston and dallas will some day converge. Ring roads are the future (until hover cars come along).

http://mypeoplepc.com/members/chrisodonnell/unitedtosaveourspring/id89.html

[Awful Waffles 0]

Is this the kind of thing you're talking about?

[newyorkrunaway1 110]

i do, but its more realistic, as in real life

[simzebu 19]

I'm actually still not up to the stage of effective transport yet, but I know what you mean about ring roads.

I have a theory about RL (Real Life) cities:

You can judge the size of a cities by the number of rings.

For example, the city I live in (Albany, NY) has one ring, if you can call it that. Metro area of about a million, if you're liberal about it.

Boston, on the other hand, has what, like 3 or 4. Check it out sometime. You'll see what I mean.

One major exception is NYC. I consider Islands to fall outside of the theory, because it's harder to build rings in small spaces.

[cheeseman 3]

Where I live, in Baltimore, its almost impossible to get into or out of the city without taking our beltway which is a giant circle around the city. I'm not quite sure why it is so much faster, but to get from my parents house to my apartment, it takes 45 minutes without the beltway, and 15 with taking it ... of course i usually only take the back roads when the beltway isnt moving, which happens quite often ...

[justintime 8]

Originally posted by: JohnSchutte After recently going to Dallas and Houston as part of my vacation, I find myself considering how viable ring-roads are in SC4. For those that aren't familiar with this system, it basically consists of a freeway that circles all or most of a large city, with arteries that travel from the ring, into the city center. The completed project tends to end up looking like a wagon wheel. Most large cities in North America have at least one, some with 2 or 3.

Anyway, I am wondering what your experiences have been with this type of road network. I first thought, is that it will not work very well in the game because of the way sims travel. (shortest route, as opposed to quickest). The ring road works in real life because it is often much faster to travel around the outside of a city instead of fighting the traffic in the city center. This is a concept Sims can't seem to grasp.

Any screen shots would be appreciated.quote>

 

are you talking about the Loops that what they called

P.S.I live in houston

[bourneid 13]

If you look at a map of the east coast of the US....I belive that he is talking about the interchages (beltways) they have around cities like DC, baltmor, and major citys like that....US 81 and US 95 are the major north-south routes along the eastern states....to funnel traffic in and around these major uban centers they developed these beltways 

Below id the DC beltway (highlighted)

[Odainsaker 2,133]

Yep, in Texas we would call such beltways and bypasses, and even some convenient tangles of interstates, as a Loop. We even go so far as to say "Loop 410" rather than "I-410."