writingliberty

Not mine, though I'm trying to figure out how to reconstruct this in SC4... probably with RHW? It's the original configuration of the CA-163 and I-8 interchange in San Diego (when it was built, in 1947, the highways were numbered US-395 and US-80). If anyone is wondering, Balboa Park would be off the upper right corner of the picture. http://members.cox.net/mkpl2/hist/60-07-old80-395.jpg>

You can build underwater tunnels, sort of. The trick is to temporarily raise the land where the tunnel will be to above the surroundings, build the tunnel, then lower it back down. Once the tunnel is built, it'll stay unless you mess with one of the ends. Also, as for the one thinking of Melbourne... what about rotating the map to get your CBD straight? Or is it diagonal to everything else? As for Duluth... "Without the ability to make nice curved streets, everything looks very jagged and sharp. " ... there are "smooth road curve" and other plugin type things that you might be able to use.

Also, you can take advantage of region mode, and "compartmentalize" your industry into a seperate city from your residential anc ommercial. If you put a row of tollbooths on all the roads crossing the boundary, you can even make money off this arrangement (by forcing your sims to drive on toll roads to get from one city to the other).

I just leave everything at default at first, unless I want to specifically encourage or discourage one class, in which case I will drop it to like 6% or raise it to like 15%. After my city is highly profitable (which I usually do through design; the only "cheat" I use is a toll booth revenue multiplier) I will drop taxes across the board by 1-2%.

It looks like a pathfinding issue - the Maxis default pretty much ignores the speed differential between the avenues and highways and thus the sims want to take the shortest route, which is the avenue to the congested ramps. I, personally, would go through the res. city and break a lot of the road connections that parallel the highway network, especially closer to the congested ramps. This will give you space for more houses, and make the sims that are further from the northwest corner use the other ramps. You could also put in some mass transit to take cars off the roads, but unless the highway itself is also congested, that's not absolutely necessary at this stage. The NAM traffic plugins, as mentioned, should also help.

Highways are not absolutely necessary. Cities with low populations and/or a LOT of mass transit can get by without them. Generally, though, they are a high-speed, high-capacity option for supplementing or replacing parts of your road networks. (You can't use them everywhere, because buildings cannot interact with them directly.)

San Diego also has multiple high-rise areas... there's the old CBD with the numbered/lettered streets near PETCO Park, and also a concentration of high rises a few miles north along I-805 near CA-52, and a small number of high rise hotels along I-8 (which is between the two). There is also a bit of the same effect in Orange County, California - the cities of Anaheim, Santa Ana, Irvine, and a couple others each have a CBD with high rises, but the cities themselves are so close together that it's really more of a single city with multiple cores, rather than seperate cities.

If you create a new region and then (before opening any of the cities) exit the game, you can go into the region folder and change the config.bmp (you can open it in MS Paint, which comes with Windows...). If the entire BMP is one color, you will get all the city tiles the same size. If I remember correctly red is small, green is medium and blue is large... You can also use this trick to make the region larger or smaller (by changing the size of the config.bmp) It will ONLY work with a brand new region in which NONE of the cities have yet been opened.

I just want to say I never suggested building Sac to Bakersfield. There are existing ROWs to LA from Sac (some dating back to the 1880s) and you are right, there needs to be major cities to get people to use it. My comment about avoiding a "second" mountain range should be clear on that. I just think that geographically Sacramento makes a more logical north end *for the first trunk line*, with the idea that folks from the Bay Area can travel to Sac to get on at first, and later an extension line could go down from Sac to the Bay, an alternative that puts you into geographically better terrain for it (and the same routes historically used in California railroads).

Oh, another point on the "generating electrictiy causes CO2"... California - especially southern California - has a lot of non-polluting renewable energy already being generated. There are several large wind farms near Bakersfield and near Palm Springs, and several hydroelecric plants along the Colorado River. So at least in terms of our local situation, electric is much greener than gasoline, diesel, etc. and does NOT necessarily pollute inherently. Also, in response to our German friend's comment on the alternative uses of flat land - California, especilly the Central Valley, actually has much lower population density than most of Europe. And we were settled during the rail age, so much of the area was built around rail lines. There are existing passnger and freight rail lines all over, especially in the LA-Sacramento corridor. The HSR might (I don't know the engineering) be able to be built mostly or completely within the footprint of the current rail system, and in cases where that is not possible the land values (and uses) are not as high as an obstacle as they might be elsewhere. I voted no only because my reading of it looked like they were ignoring geography and building the main north-south line between the two big cities - which may make sense for usage numbers, but not for construction costs, because it forces crossing a *second* mountain range.

Actually, Boycey, that's the design I would use for an industrial district. Commercial is best placed near your freeway access points, so the commuters have to go past them on the way to the industrial from the residential. (Commercial loves traffic.) Usually my commercial is along avenues and surrounded by residential on the back streets, and the avenues are the only access points to highways that lead to industrial.

Actually - in response to someone's earlier comment - I'm not from Sac, I'm from Riverside (which is connected into the LA Metrolink system), so the routing would not affect me either way. I just happen to be a history buff and know about things like the history of the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific and such. Historically the main rail line between the north and south was always Sac-LA with SF being connected off to the side (possibly the Pacheco Pass route mentioned, I'm not too familiar with that part of the state). The advantage of the Sacramento, rather than SF-crossing-into-Central-Valley idea, of course, is that Sacramento is already IN the Central Valley.

Being from California, I use highways a lot, and while I do use some mass transit it's not much. (Usually limited to buses unless traffic gets bad enough to put in a subway or monorail.) The general idea with highways is - just like other sorts of roads - to make them go where the sims want to go anyway. Since it's generally a good idea to have industry separated from everything else, and commercial likes high traffic, I tend to build avenues lined with commercial that are the only possible accesses to a highway that goes toward my industrial areas. And there will be no road connection except the highway. And quite often (although this is not realistic in terms of California) I stick toll booths on the highway.

The two side-by-side in the upper right are in fact the RHW. The one that crosss over the freeway appears to be a standard Maxis road which appears to have a dashed line simply due to the picture quality.

I am voting no - not because of the finances or the technology, but because the measure specifies that the first line is to be built on a direct SF-LA route, which is not good terrain for a railway and will cost more than is necessary. (Historically the north-south lines were and are built on a Sacramento-LA route, with SF accessible via a transfer in or near Sacramento; the reason for this is terrain.)