jns

Parks and majority of rewards will provide permanent park effect, but you don't really need more than few grass lots to maximize its desirability boost. Depending on block size, this might be enough to have full park effect over entire city. Temporary desirability boost you're talking about is 'transient aura effect', exaggerated and slightly annoying feature in my opinion...

There's unfortunately no way to make it so that you can make a "completely" carless city; Residential zoning requires it, otherwise they'll become abandoned. Although there's this, it just hides much of the main transit systems by using Subway instead. What about putting the NAM in Park and Ride mode, and then not building any parking structures at all? I've tried this while ago. Well yes, it works. Meaning that you will indeed get rid of cars, but it seems to cause some major issues... At first everything worked just fine, until population reached 20,000 and development stopped completely. I ran simulation few years after this happened, trying everything I could possibly think of. I was able to get some growth by plopping parks, but at the same time noticed abandonment elsewhere. Population stayed roughly the same. So clearly it got something to do with traffic (or lack of it). Next I did a little test and opened traffic simulator exemplar in reader. Switched 'travel type generates traffic' for pedestrians to 'true'. After this population increased within a game year by 2000 without any new zoning. So, my conclusion is, that theres correlation between amount of traffic and population. Also found out that pedestrians don't count as customers. This seems to be the case even when they contribute to traffic. In a nut shell: carless city = bad idea