Hendrix Creek: Small City Tile Neighbour - Belt Parkway
Hendrix Creek: Small City Tile Neighbour - Belt Parkway
It's been so long since I've done a small city tile, I'd forgotten how darn incredibly small they are!
I'm building this one for two reasons:
- I want my Resort Hotel in neighbouring Canarsie Pol, my tourist island and bedroom community.
- One strip of the regional highway "Belt Parkway", East New York, resides here, and I wanted to decide it's exact tile position to maximise the orthogonality (is that a word?) of this regional RHW-4 highway, as it heads south along the mainland sliver of the Canarsie Pol city tile.
Here's the city tile on Google Satellite view, delineated by the red box ... so small! 
I'll be keeping the south-east section as a nature reserve. It's too small to be a residential area, and being so close to the highway Neighbour Connection, it won't get many sims turning off the highway to go to work in that spot.
I'll be developing the other three quadrants as residential, with commercial lining the highway, arterials, and near my ferry. I'll do one simple little diamond RHW interchange in the south.
Here's the city tile ... at the end of my initial planning and terraforming stage. So small! This will be another clean little town, with a C$$ economic backbone using ferry and highway traffic for growth. This being the first section of "Belt Parkway", the highway traffic commercial growth will be some time coming. I'll have to budget carefully! No hospital or high school for awhile. 
Signposts indicate the eventual locations of the nature reserve, three elementary schools, one high school, one hospital, plus the simple little RHW diamond interchange I mentioned.
I usually use §0 school bus and ambulance funding, but this time the central high school and hospital will get school bus and ambulance funding, to increase their coverage radius ... when they finally get built. I'll use Pro-Reading Campaign and Free Clinic Program from the City Ordinances , in the meantime, to give their poor health and EQ a little city-wide boost.
All the level land is terraformed completely flat, using the God mode, Quick Level Brush tool, at an elevation of 254.2 (using Ctrl+X terrainquery on ) ... I think that's 4.2 metres above sea level. That's my first job, to get the exact same elevation on both sides of the bridge, and flatten the land in preparation for development.
I then terraformed the space for the ferry and beach plops, built my OWR-4 ferry loop, and positioned the main highway to run north-south on the tile adjoining those 2x3 commercial lots, which is fairly realistic to the Google Satellite image. That will allow those RCI facing lots to collect the commercial growth benefit of the adjacent highway on their back door.
After that, I deepened the creek using the God mode Quick Level Brush, to make the water look nice, and neatened up the shores using the God mode Plains tool, to make them look more like the Google Satellite image.
I then built a rough ramp for the bridge, north and south of the creek, using the 24m Raiser Piece, with 12m and 7.5m raiser pieces at 4 tile intervals, and 1x1 street plops to bridge the gaps. I might use the southern 7.5m raised tile to do an onslope transition to L1 RHW viaduct for the RHW diamond interachange near the southern highway Neighbour Connection.
Then it gets entirely unrealistic! There isn't enough room for proper RHW interchanges near the northern highway Neighbour Connection, AND there's no interchange there on Google Satellite, but I want an interchange, so I'll be using this MHW vanilla interchange ... it's the only one that fits the squeezy tile requirements! I will make it look a wee bit nicer by using a 15m L2 onslope transition to the bridge.
A few little challenges for me. I'm still new to the NAM onslope tools, but I'm feeling confident.
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