Cob92

Honestly, I'd simply be happy to be able to build zoned buildings outside of the border. Biggest problem with the current maps is that you have to raise your city to an absurd density level in order to achieve any decently high population figure. You have cities of 60,000 people that look like Brooklyn because a suburban city can fit only a few thousand people at best.

I wish that Maxis would at least give modders a jumping off point to implement that sort of thing. Even if it would crash 50% of computers, it would still be nice to have the option and see for ourselves just how bad the performance hit is.

I go around and look for ways to optimize and redevelop. In order to enjoy the late game fully, you have to be willing to carry out wholesale urban renewal, demolishing entire neighborhoods to make way for your latest project. I add bypasses to ease traffic hotspots, the goal being to reduce rush hour traffic jams to 1 hour or less. Check quality of life measures like sickness and injury treatment rates, crime, education, etc. It is possible to get your city to have zero deaths per day and a five-cap education level.

That's part of the game, my friend. When you decide to develop heavy industries like petroleum or mining, you have to take into account the environmental impacts and try to mitigate the damage. In real life, there are sites that are unusuable for residential development because of contamination by industrial wastes (Google "Superfund"). The same thing will happen in SimCity, especially if you don't have the infrastructure to remove the wastes safely.

This thread is for the discussion of the onerous traffic problems in this game, and for the proposal of any new solutions. I think that it is best to have a central place to discuss traffic in SimCity, both for the purpose of making it easier for newbies to find out how to fix gridlock and so that we can better bounce ideas off of each other instead of everyone experimenting in a vacuum. In my experience, it seems that there is a major spike in traffic congestion when a city gets to a size of about 150,000. Though I am not completely certain of this, clicking various cars in the traffic jams indicates to me that the problem is largely a result of inter-city traffic. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the traffic jams always are centered at the city entrance. Solutions that have been proposed so far include: -The reduction of intersections along the main avenue coming off the highway, to create what is effectively an expressway. -Avoidance of zoning along main roads and near the entrance. -Reduction or elimination of four-way intersections -Balance city zones to reduce commuter traffic I've run into yet another episode of gridlock with my city of Kanopolis, as seen in my Los Santos CJ. Initially, the city had no traffic problems at all. I had a series of main roads in the downtown running north-south with no stops and a main avenue running north-south with no stops. Traffic would flow from the side streets into the main roads and then zip to its destination, while freight would be shipped out along the main avenue. The traffic jams started up at the entrance when my population started to pass 150k and when I built a second city in the region. Now they have gotten to the point where nearly every street is totally backed up and nothing gets anywhere. Half my downtown burned down because the fire trucks were stuck in traffic. So I've decided to throw my contribution out here and see where the discussion goes.

At least they should be able to ignore red lights. Emergency vehicles should proceed to a call as fast as possible and only stop if they are physically prevented from advancing. They should not stop or yield at intersections.

Don't forget Dallas/Fort Worth Int'l is American Airlines' hub. And Bush Intercontinental for United Airlines. They were the home base for Continental prior to the merger.

A region I've been working on for a while now. The flat terrain really allows me to use the RHW to its potential:

I wouldn't mess around with the taxes so much if I were you. Choking off the supply of one or more sectors can cause serious problems with your regional economy in the long run.

Also, be sure to watch your homeless population. Too many of them taking over a medium or high wealth park will dilute its effect, lowering the surrounding land value.

I start off with a grid of streets, with a single "Main Street" that starts off as a road. Over time, I increase capacity along the most congested streets, and when a street starts to extend out of the original townsite to connect outlying developments, I may go so far as to upgrade it to an avenue. All my transportation networks coalesce in this original grid, so you eventually have trains, subways, freeways, and arterial roads all serving what has evolved from a sleepy village into the CBD of a large metropolis.

You just have to make sure that they follow existing commute patterns, and that they aren't so long that the advantage of extra speed is negated by the distance. I can think of at least one real life example of a ring road that has mostly failed to get the hoped-for usage; the 130 around Austin was built to alleviate traffic on I-35 in the urban core, but because the 130 was built so far out to the east of the developed parts of the city, it gets little usage outside of traffic bound for San Antonio (proposals have emerged to toll the original 35 and force traffic to reroute to the ring road). Houston's ring roads took some time to get high usage as well, with the rise of congestion on Beltway 8 following the growth of suburban sprawl and secondary employment centers along it. It's generally used for suburb to suburb commuting or as a bypass to get around the far worse traffic in Houston proper.

Increase the number of resource trucks you have on your recycling center.

Honestly, I want SC4 with GlassBox. 2013 gets a lot of things right with regards to the agent simulation, a fleshed out tourism system, etc. All it really needs in my view is a doubling of the map size so we have some room to sprawl a bit, and somewhat better integration of the region.

When you're playing a specialization city other than tourism, don't bother looking at the hourly profit/loss number anymore. What you need to pay attention to is the monthly profit/loss in the expanded budget panel, which takes into account your export and import transactions to show whether you are really losing or making money. As long as you make a profit on a monthly basis, your city is fine. If your raw resources run out, you can keep making money by either getting a new specialization or just importing the oil from the global market. It's still possible to have a profitable oil city without any oil extraction taking place in the city limits.

Check to see what's generating the flow of intercity traffic. You need to limit how much commuting you encourage because of the fixed intercity freeway capacity. Add more jobs/stores to your cities as needed to encourage people to stay local. I've also heard there's a bug with GW that causes trucks to get stuck at the construction site.

Actually the RHW-2 does have ped paths. You're right about the zone access though.

I wanted to use bridges that would go from residential to the industrial going over the main road but it wouldn't take it whatever i tried, but are you saying i should use normal high density roads between the residential areas? and keep the big avenues for the sides, etc? i think i'm starting to get the hang of it but it's still hard -edit- I'm also thinking of keeping my use of districts but using underground tunnels and bridges above ground (with a main road above), do you think it would work, or would i just end up getting jams underground XD You need to make sure that your bypasses are direct routes from point A to point B. Sims will not drive on excessively long roads unless there is seriously insane traffic congestion on the shorter route. Your district plan would work as long as you have enough lane capacity connecting each district. Most of the congestion inside your city is caused by intersections and driveways. Eliminate those and you'll find that traffic flows smoothly.

You don't have that much traffic; it's just being managed very poorly. You're using avenues unnecessarily, forcing local traffic to go through intersections whereas it could just turn at will if you used normal streets. Additionally, it looks like your system tries to funnel all the traffic into a handful of connectors, which is guaranteed to cause traffic issues even in small cities (this is the reason IRL why Austin, TX has traffic as bad as cities 3 times its size). What I find is that a well connected grid works well for dispersing traffic within districts, while avenues should be restricted to use as main thoroughfares. If you want to use a dendrite system, make sure that you don't overload any avenue with too much development on the branch streets. Avoid zoning on avenues whenever possible, since traffic turning in and out of driveways slows down the flow. Build elevated bypasses or tunnels to connect key areas and avoid local congestion. Do not build a road unless it is absolutely needed; redundant roads just create unnecessary intersections and exacerbate congestion.

This isn't really true. I have 5 hats with just a grade school. The way students work is at 6AM or 7AM school bus stops send demand messages to residential in the "green" of the road, it does this every hour until 3PM. The students then go to the bus stop. Higher education like CC and Uni's will send demand messages to every single residential building in the tile, the students then take their parents car to school or use mass transportation. Higher education demand occurs every 3 hours. With proper mass transit you can get every student educated at one university without gridlock. If it's true that higher education demand only occurs every 3 hours, wouldn't it be simple to solve the attendance issues by having universities call for a certain number of students every hour? You'd stagger student traffic more and avoid the backup of cars that usually happens at a university once the city grows.

Depends on where you are. Seems like Texas is moving toward the model of making the lot as tiny as possible while still fitting the house, but if you look in older, not-yet-gentrified neighborhoods here most of the houses have sizeable front and back yards.

You want this one: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1664

You could restrict it to the NAM, and perhaps a handful of other common mods based on creator approval.

Custom airports are really just for looks. I find that the AC Functional Airport is enough of an aesthetic improvement over the Maxis airports without having to dedicate an entire city to it. Plus, it has so many upgrade stages that you probably will never need a second airport in the same city.

Build a Third World city to start off. Only a basic school, no police, no fire stations, no clinics, no running water, and no sanitation. Use coal power to keep your utility costs down. No public transit, no public spaces, no amenities whatsoever. Zone and grow your slum and allow the surpluses to pile up. Once you have money in the bank you can gradually start to add public water and services.