solarpunk Dawnville (part 1)
@mitsos, @Raymond7cn, @Dgmc2013, @Tonraq, @Dead_End, @ByeByeBayou and @tomz16: Thank you very much for your comments, your likes and your follows. I hope you enjoy the rest of the CJ as well 
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Alright, let's go back to Fairview. As you can understand from the previous entry, not all of the map's tiles will be build and developed, so I planted trees and made entire forests in those areas to mark them as no man's land, were no sights of civilization will be there. This reduces even more our available land for construction, and even this land has already its own limitations by water bodies, hills, cliffs and other natural features. Of course we're not going to colonize the entire map and build an epic metropolis anywise, so that's not such a big deal for us.
Our first city will be build in the easternmost empty piece of land which is close to the small lake at the east.
This is our land. I choose it because it has enough building space, is close enough to a water source, and can be connected to the rest of SimNation by road and railroad so it can get supplies and not being isolated in the middle of the region. Since it's the dawn of a new age and area, let's name our first town Dawnville. This is from where our solarpunk eco-futuristic wackiness will begin.
First, let's give Dawnville its shape by building the backbone of it. Roads are flexible enough to be build in many ways and provide a fast access to most of the town's areas, making them useful for marking the edge of Dawnville as well. No avenues here, they're too big and noisy, and just unnecessary for our project.
Now we can connect Dawnville with the rest of SimNation in order to be supplied by people, food, products, energy etc, as well as with the rest of the map to pave the road for our next towns. It's also a good moment to build our holistic transportation system. The street layout follows the shape and the size of the town by mixing the American grid style with the European organic one, providing to our town both enough building space and enough road access for everybody. If necessary, extra streets with dead ends can be build in some of those building blocks.
We want to give a faster way for our Sims to commute in the region but we also want to encourage mass transit instead of car using to reduce our environmental footprint. Highways are big, ugly, noisy, consume too much space, and cause a lot of air pollution. With such a heavy environmental cost, highways are out of question. Railroads, on the other hand, are faster, quieter, cleaner, doesn't use too much space, and can transport plenty of Sims in no time. My first thought was using heavy railroads because are beneficial for both commuting and the transportation of industrial goods. But how about using magnetic monorails instead? Magnetic trains uses magnetic fields instead of wheels, making them even faster and less noisy than the standard ones. They're also not very popular in most of the CJ I've seen. So, let's give them a chance. And let's build some magnetic train stations that can also serve buses and subway trains.
The transportation system is ready, so let's building and zoning. Right? Not so fast! If we start building and zoning now, we'll eventually get an ugly and funny mess of bumpy roads, lot and building foundations, and retaining walls. Of course we can level the entire area to make our town absolutely flat, but this is an example of excessive terraforming we want to avoid. So in order to have a pretty and stable town while respecting the landscape, instead of one big plateau, our town will be made by plenty of smaller plateaus, giving Dawnville a stair-like look.
To make the small flat areas, I use the railroad tool instead of the road one. Railroads are more restricted that the roads, making our terraforming process more limited and challenging, but it also gives us a result much closer to what we want to do. This is very important because we want to adapt the landscape just enough to cover our needs, without utterly messing with it and destroying it. This gives enough space to both the natural landscape and our town to breath, without conflicting each other.
This picture might gives you a good example of why Dawnville and the rest of our towns in Fairview will have a stair-like looking. Why making our town absolutely flat when we can make it hugging the landscape? The small plateaus will be filled by homes, shops, parks, civic services, farms, industries, and anything else we'll need. When necessary, small extra streets will be build for even better access.
By making smaller flat areas we get plenty of narrows gaps, so it's time to fill them by planting man's best friends (after dogs, computers and each other). Trees. Lot's of trees. We're building a solarpunk town of the future and we can't do it without plenty of trees.
I'm using @Pegasus' plop-able trees, both the random woods and the pines, to have a nice variety of them. Seeing the same type of tree over and over again can be a little boring, right? The plop-able trees work as park, so by just having them we'll get a huge boost in our city without the need of building extra parks. But of course we'll build actual parks with playgrounds etc.
Magnetic trains are more quiet that the standard ones, but of course they're not absolutely quiet. Those tall pines are perfect for absorbing the extra noise and reducing the visual pollution of the railroads.
Trees are just too useful to be ignored. They reduce air, visual and sound pollution, provide fresh oxygen, prevent floods by absorbing the executive water and by working as barriers, reduce the heat with their shadows, increase the psychological morale of the citizens, and provide privacy for the homes. Every city must have plenty of trees and green zones to give us this contact with the nature we need, especially nowadays. If your city has more buildings than trees, I'm not going to live there.
Magnetic railroads are perfect for regional transportation, so how about the intercity one? Every corner and cross of Dawnville will now have bus stops. A bus can replace a large number of private cars, reducing traffic jams and road rages, as well as the air and sound pollution, so every Sim must have easy and fast access to an efficient enough public transportation system.
Those bus stops can also work as mini parks that give our Sims a small bench to sit down, relax and enjoy the moment.
My bus stops are actually a variation of @hugues aroux's mass transit stops I made for myself. My version has traffic signs and lights on a traffic island in the middle of the road. I did this to clean up a bit the sidewalk and to discourage my drivers from over-speeding. I like using those bus stops because they can be placed on top of cross and tee intersections, using even less building space and providing an even easier and faster access to public transportation.
If we can't build our bus stops on the top of our intersections, we can at least build them next to them. We have plenty of bus stops in our streets, so why not in our main roads as well?
By the way, did you notice something different with our on-road bus stops? They are subway stations as well. One very common idea for public transportation system is the Personal Rapid Transit, which features small automated vehicles operating on a network of specially built railroads, kind of a mix between an automatic taxi and a small elevated tram.
We can't have PRT in SimCity 4, so we'll use the next best thing, which is subways. Plenty of subway stations for even faster transportation to connect even more areas of our town, and they can connect Dawnville with the rest of Fairview as well. It's like PRT, just underground.
Let's add some nice details in our road system by building slip lines and wider turns for smoother and safer transportation.
I think we've made some good work, so let's call it a day. In part 2 we'll be building the utilities and civic structures, add some extra details and start zoning. In part 3, we'll see the town fully developed and ready to be explored.
See you there 
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