Underground Service Roads
Another Jamestown from the dead post! Was looking through old screenshots and found a series showing the small but immensely effective service road network below downtown Royals.
Looks like a simple interchange where the highway enters the area of the CBD
But wait! Underneath that intersection is another intersection! One of the portals to the lower level downtown streets. Lower level roads are highlighted in purple because tunnels don't show up in high res screenshots for some reason. Probably a good thing though because these tunnels are quite literally woven between the JMetro subway tunnels, which themselves are already woven together due to several tunnels crossing paths and years of renovations and reroutes leaving tunnel stubs galore.
The service roads are somewhat inspired by Chicago's stacked streets, such as Wacker Dr, Michigan Ave, Columbus Dr, Randolph St, etc. In Chicago the street level as you typically walk on it isn't actually at the level of the natural ground. Chicago, as some of you might know, is a lovely swamp. Americans for some reason LOVE to build cities on swamps. I don't get it. I will never get it. But alas, something at one point needed to be done about the water levels in the Loop, and the street level was artificially raised in many areas. The original streets were left down below and are now used as service roads that enter directly into the basements of buildings and garages. Some of the lower levels are simply grade separated arterial roads; shortcuts through and around the Loop.
Now, since we can't really change the level at which a building enters off the street, a true replica of Chicago's system is not possible. So I went for the next best alternative, which is to keep the spirit of the idea of these streets, and build them to the best of CS's abilities. As you can see, it doesn't work nearly as well as in real life. Because of how the ramps had to work to be able to come back to ground level, as well as the horrible difficulty created by having editable things neatly vertically stacked, the lower level streets are actually parallel and next to their upper levels instead of being directly beneath them. Other than looking physically different, and the buildings not actually having service levels, they operate much the same. There is still a ton of traffic on busy streets, but a lot of people get to benefit from the shortcuts created to the busiest areas.
Views of some of the entrance/exit portals to the lower levels
Stay tuned for another Jamestown from the dead post! I'm working more with cimtographer and now using an app called maperitive to display and style the OSM data. It may be a while though due to attempting to use a very ornery windows app using the mono framework on mac OS...tons of fun.
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