The machinery at Tunnings Quarry have begun mining operations!

The layer of un-useable dirt and debris on the surface (known as the Top Rubble) has been scraped off into piles, exposing the valuable Bauxite Ore underneath.

Then the huge Earth Moving equipment rolls in and digs huge pits into the ore, with a bee-line of rumbling dirt-covered trucks rolling back and forth carting the ore away to the nearby Electrolysis plant.

Of course the trucks are temporary, until the rail-line is put in.

Council is still dithering about regarding who is footing the bill for this, because they know it will cost Grimey a great deal of money to be forced to use large trucks on a dirt road. Grimey's legal team are stirred wasps.

Meanwhile the mine is becoming quite the eye-sore.

The remote northern community of Cradle Bay is nestled around a beautiful white-sanded sparkling salt-water inlet, and is one of Boston's most rapidly developing areas, despite it's distance from civilisation.

But as buildings go up and people move in, the fire hazard grows and grows.

In addition, Cradle Bay is completely surrounded by Bettledown Forest, and so wild fire poses are very real risk, especially during the drier summer months.

With the only access to the closest Fire Station (located in Gravatt, on the northern shores of Boston Central) being Old Cradle Bay Road - some 5 kilometers of winding woodland road - it is no wonder that Cradle Bay residents were nervous whenever someone sparked up a cigarette. In fact there have been recorded cases of Cradle Bay residents taking hoses to their neighbour's barbeques.

So the city council plopped a small fire station in, which happened to land of the Wicked Witch of the West as an added mayor ratings bonus. Hot.

The downside of course is that smoking has proliferated in the area now people feel safer to light up.

So now council is forced to consider health facilities for the area.

Damn the Butterfly Effect!

Hampton Thoroughbred Stud was founded in 1926 in the eastern suburbs of a fresh young Boston by Garibald Hampton, an Italian immigrant. Originally intended as a property to conduct experiments on creating the first electric horse, Garibald quickly discovered it was a lot more sensible to simply breed and sell horses. And so the Hampton Thoroughbred Stud was founded, and has done relatively well up until the last 10 years or so.

In 1921, the area that the Hampton Thoroughbred Stud was located on was nothing more than wild land, sliced here and there by the odd road and powerline.

In 1926 Hampton Thoroughbred Stud was founded, and was one of the leading studs in the entire region for almost a full three weeks, until Girder and Girder set up their automated horse factory, which could produce horses at almost five times the rate Garibald could bred them on his stud.

None-the-less the Hampton Thoroughbred Stud continued to prosper somewhat, and saw the conversion of the old coal power plant into a modern Natural Gas power plant, the proliferation of industry in the area, as well as the buy-out and development of old Jerry Hatcher's apple orchard by Grimey Industries Pty Ltd, just to the stud's north.

Little by little development enveloped the Hampton Thoroughbred Stud, until last year when it was so completely enveloped by modern industry and noisy train lines, that the Stud was seriously under threat. Combined with the area's almost total conversion to automobiles, and the recent shocking birth of a foal with a head at the back, a tail at the front, and all four legs facing backwards, Hampton's last shred of income potential was stripped and the Stud was utterly bankrupt.

Fortunately an enterprising counciller was at the time searching for a convincing means of slowing dirty industries growth and encouraging a much cleaner direction for the city's booming population.

Counciller Koffystane realised that while the stud's land was utterly useless to agriculture, and close to useless to every other zoning type except perhaps industry (which would have only increased the growing problems of traffic and pollution plaguing the area), it was a truly excellent location for a green project designed to boost the area's culture and wealth.

Koffystane proposed Boston's first Botonical Gardens, inspired by recent visits to some large SimNation cities that had some very fine examples of how botonical gardens could promote a region.

The City Council was enthrawled by the idea, and begun preparing the site and importing huge fully grown live trees from other parts of SimNation (and locally) at massive expense.

After almost a full year of construction, the new Hampton Botanical Gardens were complete!

Since the installation of Ol' Djohaal's Pontoon, Portsmouth Island has grown rapidly, spreading almost across the entire island in only a few short years.

Such rapid growth in a community is great, but with any growth comes requirements. In this case, elementary education.

The nearby mainland elementary school on Felix Point had served for the lucky few that could afford two daily ferry trips and the long walks to and from the pontoons, but it meant that only 8% of the kids on Portsmouth Island were getting any kind of eduction at all.

In addition, the daily traffic on the ferry was ensuring the ferry was nearly sinking from the weight of all the chewing gum stuck under the seats. Seriously, it was at a point where people were having to roll large balls of it down the isle and over the side of the ferry just so they could claim a seat.

However with such a small population it was a problem for the council to fork out the huge maintenance costs of a full-scale school, so the council had the brilliant idea of relocating an abandoned house from the mainland and turning it into a small one-teacher school house.

The bus range was smaller, the education the school impressed on the local community was less, and the size was physically smaller than a standard elementary school, however the costs were enormously less, both to build and maintain. And that's enough to make any councillor smile.

Foggy Inlet, a well established township that surrounded the crystal gently lapping salt waters of a natural bay, with a nearby freshwater lake (one of only a few in the region). As this township developped, the locals were quite happy to drive around the shores of the inlet, however as the sprawl moved up and down the coast, the trip around the inlet got longer and longer.

Combined with the traffic commuting from south and north of Foggy Inlet (for example between Crystal Bay and Felix Point), and Foggy Bay was beginning to get positively in the way.

A crossing was proposed where the north and south shores of Foggy Inlet were closest, to drastically reduce the trip from one side to the other. Since there was no major traffic, it only needed to be a small crossing.

Three crossings were proposed, and weighed on their merits.

In the end, Charlie's Crossing (named after the engineer that proposed the design) was selected as the best option, both because of cost and the minimal disruption to the local population. It only involved the purchase of Quiggley Manor, seven small residences, and a downtrodden half-abandoned old shopping centre that had been struggling to lease to video rentals and mower shops for years.

The trip up and down the north coast of Boston had now been greatly reduced, and Foggy Inlet and all of the northern reaches of the coast had grown enormously in attractiveness to sims. Hoorah, now let's have a beer.

Sound Way, south of Boston Central. A waking rural landscape that has been selected by the newly formed Department Of Forestry to undertake a trial plantation of Renewable Lumber.

As SimCity spread rapidly (Boston being only one of millions), farms and roads cleared the surrounding forest both for space and for lumber required to build the blossoming number of developments underway. Soon the local environment was under a very real threat, and SimNation Government formed what came to be known as the Department Of Forestry. The Dept of Forestry's purpose was to manage the green resources throughout SimNation, which included not only protecting and managing developmental impacts, but also providing renewable building resources to industry for the greater good of SimNational cities' development.

A farm in Sound Way was selected as a viable location for the trial, and Cedar was selected as the lumber to initially trial.

After only a couple of short years the saplings had grown to a healthy 3 meters (some even better where they'd tapped into water pipes) and were looking very healthy and productive.

After another three years the cedars were young mature harvest-ready plants, and Forestry's trial was now ready for the final report before lumber harvest began.

One of the first observations was that some of the trees often did not grow very well when too near developments such as roads and structures. This was put down to likely compression of roots and redirection of runoff water (into gutters and drains instead of an even spread and seepage into the ground where the trees' roots were).

Another observation that was never made public was that the trees posed a very serious fire threat to neighbourhoods that were immediately adjacent to the plantation. In addition roots tended to upset foundations and asphalt, requiring expensive repairs. Forestry did not release these results for fear of litigation, and the reports were shredded shortly after the trial plantation was harvested.

However the end deduction was clear: renewable pine plantations were cost-effective, improved the local environment, drastically helped prevent the clear felling of native forests, and in general were an extremely viable means of producing lumber.

With a few key adjustments like locating the plantations away from development and increasing the size and variety of species, the Department of Forestry was confident that a new industry was being born.

Plantation sites for cedars were selected all across the region, as well as trials for a variety of other tree species.

Miller Road, one of the very first roads to have been laid in Boston, heading north along the then newly developping coastline upriver.

Conjestion has forced council to upgrade the entire stretch of Miller Road, from Boston Harbour Bridge to just north of Industry Way Rail Bridge.

Step 1) - Identify the area that needs to be upgraded. Notice all the annoying buildings in the way. Since sims develop their structures at their own expense and will always move back in, don't worry about existing buildings, let's just blanket re-develop the entire zone to better suit future requirements.

Step 2) - Bulldoze the entire region to the ground, giving you a clear view of the area and allowing you to create a new and better infrastructure in whatever way you think works best.

Step 3) - Create a new, larger road up the guts of your new area. Make it nice and straight and pretty, because it will afterall be the hub of your new mega-plex.

Step 4) - Connect roads to your new avenue at regular tidy intervals. Keep it nice and neat and your new area will look suitably planned and pretty.

.... Okay if you believed that's how I'm going to upgrade a conjested road in this city, then your IP has been logged and you are hereby forbidden from ever reading this City Journal again.

That is exactly what you are NOT to do if you want to develop a city in the "natural growth" method.

You NEVER, EVER, EVER do things easy and tidy and let the sims come and enjoy your work later.

You work AROUND the sims and WITH the city, and to hell with how difficult that is, that's what it's allllll about.

So.

Let's start this again shall we?

Right.

Now.

This is the area we've identified as being heavilly conjested and requiring re-development.

It needs to be done as cost-effectively as possible, and at every stage we need to limit the amount of public upheaval and inconvenience. If possible we need to ensure that at all times during construction works traffic can still flow, even if its in a limited way.

Area's 1 and 4 (and 5, which is not shown in the above map, but is a little further to the north in Poshland) are the areas that are least conjested. But if we're gonna upgrade the whole area, we might as well do it all now to prevent us having to upset sims later anyways. If we upgrade just areas 2 and 3 now then the resulting traffic flow will only ensure areas 1,4, and 5 become rapidly more conjested, so we'll treat the entire thing as one big project.

Area 2 is the most conjested through-flow road (Miller Road).

Area 3 is heavilly conjested with bus and car traffic taking sims to and from the rail terminal and the ferry (immediately next to the rail station, between Cove Park and Outlook Park).

So let's begin.

Step 1) - Rail crossings (especially with realistic slope mods) are the most difficult to work with because rails have such a slight incline allowance. So where-ever possible I work with the crossing FIRST and make everything else fit to that road-works.

Step 2) - Use the bulldozer tool and hover over the various buildings and structures in the area you want to upgrade, to get a feel for what costs what. Always choose to upgrade and build infrastructure in the least-expensive way possible, so that means spending as little as possible bulldozing as well as building. Notice how public structures and commercial buildings are always more expensive, and how higher-density buildings are more expensive than lower-density buildings. This gives you a good idea of where to place your new roads.

Step 3) - Having identified what buildings you'd like to issue a "Compulsory Acquistion" notice to, let's begin at the rail crossing, and work through the road upgrade from there.

Step 4) - Surgically bulldoze individual structures that are in your way, and especially road intersections and street to road tiles, as these can make dragging a new avenue difficult. It's much easier to drag an avenue and then connect roads and streets to it, but remember you're trying to be cost effective AND disrupt traffic as little as possible, so dont bulldoze unless you are having difficulty dragging your avenue.

Step 5) - Drag your avenue rail crossing.

Step 6) - Repeat the process for the next stage of the development. Take the time to delight in the number of phonecalls and meetings that are being disrupted by the jack-hammers and earth-moving machinery's noise.

Step 7) - Continue the development carefully, one stretch at a time, always choosing the least expensive direction, but without letting your bean counting make your avenue start heading off into low-density suburbs... remember what point A and point B that you're trying to connect is and ensure you're always choosing an efficient route between them as well. It's a balancing act. Nobody said it was gunna be easy.

Step - As you create new roads, try not to interrupt existing roads' traffic flow. All this development can and should be going on while the simulator is running. Roads never just pop into existance overnight. They shouldn't in your city either. If you're a real nutbag like me, build them slowly over months of game time, for that added realism. Traffic will NOT thank you for it and sims will almost certainly move out, but sacrifice for the greater good, eh.

Step 9) - To minimise the amount of cleanup and risk of "isolated streets" and other misfortunes from your development, re-zone and reconnect roads as you go. This is a great opportunity to make zones near the new (and what will become very heavilly trafficked in the future) road into commercial (loves traffic) instead of residential (hates traffic).

Step 10) - Try to go around commercial buildings if you can, because a single commercial structure can cost as much to bulldoze as building 100 or 200 meters of avenue through low-density residential. That beige scraper above this stretch costs $700 to bulldoze, and those smaller ones to it's right cost about $500 each... the decision to go around them is easy.

Step 11) - Dont forget to connect your roads and streets as you go! It'll be a shame if you come back in a few game months and find enter suburbs that were "cut off" from the new development being abandoned because you forgot about one lousy street connection.

Step 12) - When larger buildings are demolished, they leave their "driveway points" in the direction the entire structure had faced, which can often be different to the smaller constituent zones you had originally laid which it had amalgamated to build onto. Make sure these are re-zoned to face their neighbouring streets or of course they wont develop.

Step 13) - If you thought rail crossings were hard, try rail crossings close to rail bridges. Make sure you dont build right up to this sort of crossing and then find out too late your road needs to cross two or three tiles to the left.

Step 14) - Build your crossing first, and then connect to that - it's SO much easier that way.

Step 15) - Admire your handiwork. The fewer buildings you've knocked down, the better the job you've done. Of course unless you have reserves near your road then some buildings WILL be knocked down, but try to minimise it. Now let the simulator run while you work on other areas and when you come back this area should be developped as well or better than when you started, and should have zero road conjestion problems for many, many game years to come.

Okay now all you people who thought I'd actually bulldoze half a city to lay a road, your IP is not actually logged and you can keep reading if you want to, but srsly if by this entry you haven't realised that I don't take the easy-way-out like that, then maybe this journal isn't really yer cuppatea. Try Quake. Or CounterStrike.