Canarsie Pol: An Underwater Trash Solution for an Island City

 Carnarsie Pol, island city in East New York, has the problem that all island cities have.  What to do with all the garbage!  

Real estate on the island is at a premium, and sims hate few things worse than landfill.  Way to make the land values plummet!

It's a problem that plagues real-life island cities, too, and the most common solution is a garbage barge.  I'm cautious about mods that might upset the economic gameplay, so I haven't installed any trash mods yet ... but there's a SimCity 4 vanilla solution to the this sticky problem.

Underwater tunnels.

When you construct a vanilla tunnel in SimCity 4, the tunnel entrance and exit is exquisitely fragile to subsequent terraforming, but the underground tunnel route can be terraformed as much as you like.  To make an underwater tunnel back to the mainland, all you need is a temporary orthogonal land-bridge while you're building the tunnel.  When you're done, just terraform the ocean back over the landbridge.  Of course, the Mayor mode terraforming tools are utterly inadequate for a job of this magnitude, so God mode here I come.  

Ctrl+Alt+Shift and click the God mode button, and da-dahhh, all the original God mode terraforming tools are back again ... one of my favourite cheats.  Here goes!

I like to terraform to produce a little realism around the tunnel entrance, before I build the tunnel.  Notice the entrance is a little lower than the surrounding tiles, too.  Canarsie Pol is very close to sea level, so I couldn't do much of a ramp down, but I dropped the tunnel entrance elevation to the lowest level that would take a 1x1 street plop.

Mischief Managed. The landfill is far, far away ... the sea terraformed back where it was.  Eventually, I'll connect the other side of the landfill to a Neighbour Connection, where I painted the red line, to export the trash right off the city tile, but for now this will do.  I don't have a convenient city neighbour to take my trash, yet.

This solution only works because Canarsie Pol is fortunate enough to have a little strip of mainland on the same city tile.  There are techniques for building an underwater tunnel Neighbour Connection, too, for city tiles that have no mainland at all, but I didn't want my Canarsie Pol residents to use this tunnel.  Given the tunnel only leads to the landfill, the only tunnel users will be garbage trucks.  Trust me, the sims will all stay well away from this dedicated landfill route!