Jamaica Bay: Neighbour Connection Strategy with a C$$$ Tourism Focus
Jamaica Bay: Neighbour Connection Strategy with a C$$$ Tourism Focus
Neighbour Connections are one of the keys to C$$ and C$$$ commercial wealth generation in SimCity 4, so they form a vital part of my strategic planning.
Here's the latest update of my regional map, showing the neighbour connection strategy for my newest region East New York.
I created this region map by taking a screenshot from SC4Mapper, then pasting it into Excel so that I could overlay the neighbour connection symbols shown in the Key (above), and move the symbols around to my heart's content. Jamaica Bay is only in the initial terraforming and planning stages as yet, and is only the 2nd city tile in my new region, spotlighted in the centre of that regional screenshot. The names for each city tile are real localities from New York, which I love to re-create with a vague semblance to the real thing, in SimCity 4 + NAM36.
By the way, the SimCity 4 Ferries, and Car Ferries, are Neighbour Connections, too! That's why I've got them on this map. You might wonder, why so much careful planning here? There is reason to my ferry madness, and it centres on this city tile's high wealth C$$$ economic strategy. (and I just LOVE ferries, too!) 
Our city neighbour to the south, Breezy Point, is the first city tile in the region, currently at simdate 29th September'07 and population 17k. It's a little tourist town with an economic backbone of manufacturing (I-M), a temporary little slab of dirty industry (I-D) and an expectation of increasing tourist and commuter traffic from neighbouring cities ... which don't exist yet, so it's experiencing a bit of a middle-class unemployment problem for lack of commercial growth around their ferry terminals. That's actually a really common problem for a city tile with no neighbours in the region at all, which is why I've swapped over to setting up Jamaica Bay now.
My first draft of Jamaica Bay neighbour connections included 5 ferries, but I've since upgraded the plan to add a 6th and 7th passenger ferry F and 3 car ferries C , too! My reasoning is that I've now decided to develop Jamaica Bay with an economic backbone of high wealth C$$$, not industry, using a combination of ferry tourist traffic (aka eternal commuters) and highway through-traffic from Breezy Point to Marine Park, to drive commercial C$$$ growth. This commercial growth is dependent on region development, so it will take some time, but I'm building now with that end in mind. The geography of this city tile makes Jamaica Bay ideally suited to becoming a tourism powerhouse, with strategic use of the ferries.
The Eternal Commuter Bug ... what I call "tourist traffic" 
7 ferries F , and 3 car ferries C , might be living a wee little bit dangerously in terms of the eternal commuter bug, what I call "tourists". You see, when your sim residents leave your city through a Neighbour Connection, they don't actually know where they're going ... just a vague idea that there might be a job waiting for them in the next city tile. Rather than knuckling down and looking for a job in the neighbouring city, they are fairly likely to decide that perhaps the next city tile on provides even greener pastures for them, especially if that second Neighbour Connection is close by, so they roam and wander further.and still further afield, almost forgetting the mission they came for ... to look for a job. While they won't re-enter the original city through the same neighbour connection, it's entirely possible that they can travel through 4, or even 6, highway-based Neighbour Connections to other cities, and then wind up right back where they started in their home city — and then they do the loop all over again, all in the same day!
That would be quite nice, if they looped just once or twice. I'm pretty happy to get extra traffic on my smaller regional highways, thereby boosting commercial growth in the C$$ and C$$$ lots positioned in the 2 tiles adjacent to the highway (with RCI avenue access on the other side of the lot), but these sims are entirely capable of looping the same road loop through 3 or more neighbouring cities over, and over, and over. By the time they start looping, these sims become entirely consumed with wanderlust, and become "tourists", just travelling all day.
@CorinaMarie very succinctly demonstrated the problem of the Eternal Commuter Bug, in a thorough test following a small controlled sim population, in this, my favourite post of hers:
This is the reason I carefully plan my highway-based Neighbour Connections, so that I don't end up with a bright red road loop through the region.
Ferries are deadly attractors for the Eternal Commuter Bug, sending my transportation advisor, Jamil Herd, crazy with concerns about bright red spots of traffic congestion on the map. However, I'm not going to give up my ferries so easily. I don't see a problem, I see a C$$$ commercial tourism opportunity! 
Here's a snapshot of some very healthy downtown ferry traffic in my last big region, Boston, using vanilla SimCity 4 Rush Hour. Beautiful city buildings on the left, and on the right, the very same snapshot showing the traffic congestion that keeps Jamil Herd awake at night. A bit of congestion is actually a healthy thing, in your commercial downtown areas, so this isn't bad at all, but every now and then that avenue loop would turn intensely bright red all the way around it ... that's the tourists (aka eternal commuters).
(50pct).png.194116e78b9efa9b445a7b73beed7044.png)
Notice how the red (inbound) ferry traffic runs in a counter clockwise motion (right-side drive), and then re-enters the car ferry as orange congestion (outbound). That's actually super-healthy, showing that more sims are coming to work downtown than are leaving for greener pastures. The single red spot on the car ferry itself is the congestion heading aboard through the outbound ticket gate.
These 7 businesses adjacent the avenue loop, benefit from having more employees, and they benefit even more from the traffic volume in the 2-tile radius of each commercial lot. There's 3959 employees working in the 7 commercial lots surrounding that little avenue loop, and 3 of those lots are high wealth C$$$ ... and that's only on SimCity 4 vanilla! I'm expecting more from the NAM, and the NAM provides fascinating possibilities for milking the commercial benefit of the ferry traffic even further, with higher capacity NWM roads.
In SimCity 4 vanilla, I found that avenues were the best option with RCI access for handling these high capacity intersections, but I was always disappointed that the inner carriageway of that avenue loop was almost always green. Children could literally play a game of cricket on the inner clockwise carriage-way of these little avenue loops! With the NWM in the NAM, I now have options for distributing traffic across both inner and outer road tiles, higher capacity roads, and also some fascinatingly smooth solutions for extending this tourist and commuter traffic through a larger swathe of commercial lots. More on that in a future post in this city journal.
This same issue has had some other names, "endless commuter loop" and "infinite commuting bug". Possibilities.
Now Back to Jamaica Bay
With so many ferry terminals, the tourist traffic has the possibility of forming red eternal commuter loops from ferry to ferry, and from ferry to road neighbour connection, hence my careful separation of all the Neighbour Connections in the regional map screenshot at the top of this post. I'll also have an excellent NAM Real Highway (RHW) network joining each of these Neighbour Connections, with high capacity interchanges, so that any tourist traffic that develops won't clog the arterial avenues my local sims use to get around on their shorter commute hops.
Furthermore, the tourists will have many ample C$$ and C$$$ job opportunities en-route, which will help keep the eternal commuter loops down to a manageable level. The sims only become tourists because they can't find the right jobs. Having a good healthy mix of RCI to maximise full employment across all wealth levels in each city is one solution. Milking the tourist traffic for C$$ and C$$$ commercial growth is another solution.
Milking the tourist dollar is exactly what Jamaica Bay is going to do!
Who knows, I might even experiment with making the neighbouring Canarsie city tile a bedroom community to increase the number of commuters and tourists, we'll see.
Happy tourists with smooth roads and lower congestion, happy businesses with lots of $$$, happy local R$$ sims who can still drive to work without being bothered by the tourist traffic, and happy local highly educated R$$$ sims who have cushy executive office jobs nearby. Best of all, this tourist city will be super clean, because it runs off a commercial C$$ and C$$$ economic backbone, not industry. The only pollution will be road pollution ... and lots of that. I'll definitely be needing the Clean Air Act in the City Ordinances section of the city budget.
That's the plan, anyway. I've learned that SimCity 4 has ways of throwing spanners in the works, creating interesting new problems to solve. In fact, that's part of what I love about the game!
Each ferry terminal and neighbour connection (and highway) will be neatly padded with commercial lots to take advantage of traffic-based commercial growth, with a surrounding set of residential zones to provide short commutes to work for the locals. If you'd like to see a detailed rundown of my further C$$ and C$$$ commercial growth plans, I go into that in detail in this related post.
-
10
2 Comments
Recommended Comments
Sign In or register to comment...
To comment in reply, you must be a community member
Sign In
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In NowCreate an Account
Sign up to join our friendly community. It's easy!
Register a New Account