Milliano

Originally posted by: hamsterTK If sprawl is such a huge waste of money, why do the most urban areas in the USA pretty much all have so much financial issues, while the suburbs are mostly in relatively great financial shape? Why is the cost of living and the quality of life generally worse in more dense areas? Even areas that lack many freeways, and thus the federal money for freeway upkeep, such as Phoenix, have been booming.quote> Really? on what planet? There are fiscally dysfunctional suburban municipalities (Vallejo, Hamtramck). There are bad suburban school districts(North Oaks ISD in Houston). There are suburbs that disincorporate to the county or township. It's the way the boundaries are drawn and tax revenue. quote> Hamtramck as an example? It's in the middle of Detroit! I'm talking in general, suburbs have much better demographic, quality of life, and quality of services than the cities that they are connected to. Originally posted by: zambones Sprawl wastes space,consumes agricultural land unnecesarily,quote> Wastes? People live and work in the space. Goods and services are produced there. Simple economics explains that the space isn't wasted. If the land was so valuable as agriculture, farmers wouldn't have sold it off for development. The less space you have, the more expensive it is. The more expensive it is, the fewer people there are that can live there, and the people who are there have to pay more to use that land, thus raising cost of living. The mass exodus of millions from the NYC, SF, and LA metro areas to cheaper metropolitan areas shows what happens when there isn't enough space. its residents spend more of their income on petrol, quote> People in cities don't drive? How about the public transportation, don't they have to pay to use that? And what about all the time of their lives that get wasted from long commutes on public transportation, if using a vehicle is unfeasable due to density... isn't there any cost to that? Regarding costs of services: Sprawl opponents claim that urban services cost more in low-density suburbs. Helen Ladd, of Duke University, looked at real-world data to find out if this is true. She found that urban-service costs in high-density areas were significantly higher than in low-density areas. She concluded that "costs of sprawl" studies erred in focusing on capital costs, when in the long run operating costs are far more significant.quote> www.heartland.org/policybot/results/9156/Seven_myths_about_sprawl.html www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v21/review2.htm

I'm not sure these anti-sprawl arguments have any economic basis. Public transport is outdated. Density is extremely expensive. Congestion and commute times are extremely high in public transportation oriented cities. The suburbs actually have significantly shorter commutes than the inner cities that they're near, at least in the USA. New York City metro area has the highest commute times in the nation. Automobile usage keeps increasing and increasing... has been for 100 years... because it's most effective and efficient mode of transportation for an individual and business. Decentralization is occuring now, and the old model of everybody either walking to their factory or taking the train to the CBD is grossly outdated. The only thriving dense areas in the USA now are so expensive that only the wealthy can afford to move into them. The talk of "we have to buy local produce now" doesn't make sense. Do people who argue this have any understanding of the international nature of agribusiness? Or simple comparative advantage? If sprawl is such a huge waste of money, why do the most urban areas in the USA pretty much all have so much financial issues, while the suburbs are mostly in relatively great financial shape? Why is the cost of living and the quality of life generally worse in more dense areas? Even areas that lack many freeways, and thus the federal money for freeway upkeep, such as Phoenix, have been booming. And without the suburbs, where do you expect people to live? Most inner city neighborhoods were once considered suburbs. Originally posted by: duack I wouldn't be so quick to deem suburbs as "wasteful". The only thing wasted really is petrol. Big woop. On average, petrol accounts for about 5-10% of a households expenditure, so its not as if a small spike in its price will suddenly change the structure of our cities. See, suburbs rely on cheap transportation, not cheap fuel and by that I mean the real cost is the actual car itself. Previously, only the wealthy could afford a car, then it became the middle wealth as well and now everyone can afford a car. Cheaper cars also mean cheaper insurance, so transportation is still cheap. You dont drive petrol - you drive cars. I think the problem the US has with its suburbs is giving them innappropriate values. I was reading an article the other day, and something that really shocked me was when I read that at its peak, a two storey house in florida was about $220,000 (before the reccession) and that it dropped by $50,000. Am I reading right? Are houses in the US THAT CHEAP?? In Sydney, a two-storey house in the crappy suburbs (away from the CBD and the coast, which are considered to raise value) will cost you half a million dollars. Even with the exhcnage rate, the house in florida is grossely undervalued. Also in Sydney, a three bedroom house about 30 minutes from the CBD will cost you upwards of a million dollars. This led me to wonder, how can a two-stoery house in florida be so grossely undervalued? Then it hit me. From what Ive heard, places like O.C., which are far away from CBD's of any sort seem to have Sydney's "close to work" inflated prices. WHAT THE HECK? Really, people are paying that much to have a long commute? Makes no sense to me . I know in Australia, houses are mainly valued according to their proximity to the city and to the coast, the two main price raisers. Other than that, the only reason people move to the fringe is to save money, even thought our petrol is more pricey than petrol in the US, and our suburbs are gaining value right now. I think the main problem here is that suburbs in the US where over-valued because they look nice. But looking nice really shouldn't be the main factor in determining value. If fringe suburbs are really valued higher than inner-suburbs in the US (correct me if Im wrong) than I think this is one of the reasons for price instabilities. But eventually, once people realise its more about location than looking nice, appropriate values will be given to suburbs. Regardless, I think suburbs are necassary, especially if families plan to have children. Everyone I know who has children either lives in a single family home, or in an apartment only because they cant afford a single family home, and if they could they would buy one. quote> Houses are valued based on supply and demand. If the supply is low or expensive, because of zoning laws or high building costs (unions and all that), and the demand is high, then the prices will be sky high. If the government stays out of it, and lets property owners actually build what people want them to build, then housing stays cheap.

Originally posted by: The_sanderson Well,it´s a really nice mod,but many things here don´t work well.quote> What?

Originally posted by: XenesisMayor I'm trying to build a heavily populated, somewhat realistic city on a large map. I was wondering what system (grid layout, suburban style, etc.) would be best suited for High Density Development. quote> Only a small fraction of almost all large, real life cities is high density development. If you want to emulate a typical street grid, try making 4x9 blocks. These can be 18x18, subdivided to 9x9, to 4x9, or even 4x4. This would be reminiscent of Chicago. A Manhattan street grid would be like... 4x14 (three blocks makes a square) On Simtropolis, most cities I see have an extreme amount of high density, in really strange locations, next to single family homes. This isn't realistic. It's also very common to use square shaped city blocks, which isn't realistic either, except maybe for CBDs.

The problem with Detroit, that cities like Manchester didn't have, is the people. Did Manchester ever have a homicide rate similar to Detroit? Probably not even in the Middle Ages. Has Manchester's population ever in the last 50 years been less educated than that of Detroit's? Businesses go where there are employees to hire. There isn't exactly much skilled untapped labor in Detroit. Sorry if I'm not being head-in-the-clouds politically correct about it.

I have the NAM with the Radical Custom Special transit edit. I want to increase the speed of commuting, so my sims will be more likely to get jobs from further out. With ilive reader, I've tried editing the speeds of all the commute methods in the simcity_1.dat file. I didn't notice any change in the game, and certainly not to 'commute time'. So then I tried editing the values of the radical custom special dat file in my plugins folder for NAM. Basically I made each commute mode 10x faster than it was already set at. But in the game, it acts exactly the same as before. No change of commute time. So my question is, is it even possible to edit the simulator->traffic/commute values? And if so, which dat file should I be editing? Somebody on this forum said that with that NAM option, sims will even commute all the way across a region. I don't find this to be true. Even just 1-2 cities away, with no traffic overload, on freeway/car/bus/train/subway, the commutes are still labelled as "long" and average commute IIRC hovers around 20-50 minutes. Edit: In the radical custom special dat file (in my plugins\nam folder) I changed the option for commute preference for each wealth $. Now both R$$/R$$$ have the same preference as R$. The result: 100% public transit use! CPU going crazy apparently trying to do the pathfinding. But still, the edits on commute speed for each transit type haven't done a thing. Sorry if this is in the wrong forum. I've lurked here long but haven't posted before. Thanks for any help! Edit: In my region of 20k-200k populated cities, I just tried going without public transit. And it made a huge difference. Commute times dropped from 20-50min to 1-15 minutes. Another thing is the game runs WAY faster (far less time bogged down, hardly moving a day). Pathfinding with public transit seems to take up a HUGE amount of CPU time. I changed the traffic-air pollution variable to zero and now the traffic gives off no air pollution (but still traffic noise) to counteract no public transit. Because of the huge CPU need for public transit and the increased commute time, I think I'm going to 'cheat' and go without it. For me seems better to make it all commute by car, increasing road capacities and speeds, and eliminating car air pollution. With larger (+100K) populated regions anyway, it seems more reasonable to do this. I still don't know why public transit commutes take so long though. But if a city has over 100K, with public transit, things get so bogged down that it's nearly unplayable on my computer. Moving to transporation modding forum NOB