Jay Ray

I see. I can't find the readme on my hard drive anywhere. It could be I misread whatever it was I think I read. Two hours straight of downloading all these packs and dependencies, a good number of which aren't active anymore, could easily have addled my brain. So then if what you say is true regarding one-ways, what do you do if the road is a two-way to begin with?

Hopefully a few quick questions. If I understood the readme correctly, and I'm not sure I did, I must "transit enable" a RTBS by dragging a one way street across the stop. This means that these stops wont work in both directions on my ubiquitous 2 way streets, yes? Would I have to place two stops in close proximity and drag a one way street across each one in the direction I'd like them to go? Will this then break the 2 way streets?

Well, great news! The highway did the trick. Thanks for the tip, Lolek. Within a week over 2000 cars used the border and everything dead or dying in my city sprung back to life with a vengence. Pow, instant vitialization! And best of all, no cheats necessary. Of course, it took nearly every simoleon in my coffer. And I am still wondering why the avenue didn't work... Thanks again.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've been trying it for the last hour or so. Laying down the highway over the old avenue was the easy part, took about 30 seconds. Connecting up the existing crossroads to the highway, on the other hand... the onramp tools are a bit unwieldy. I can see now why city planners seldom if ever upgrade existing roads into major highways. For example, here in Portland where I live is "Interstate Avenue." As its name suggests, it is a bonafide avenue right in a mature part of the city, crossed by every street in the quadrant and hampered by stoplights every few blocks. As its name also suggests, it led to the bridge crossing over the Columbia River and on into Washington. It was, for its time, the fastest way to head North. For most of its length it is lined by commercial districts, just like the avenue in the map I'm struggling with now. Portland naturally outgrew good ol' Interstate Avenue, and rather than rip up everything within a block or two to either side while they upgraded, they just built a bigger one half a mile to the east. They call it I-5. Makes me wonder if that wouldn't make sense in SC4. I would say yes except for a few minor differences. One, my city is still young; there isn't much to rip up, but it is unstable, and ripping it up any further just might kill it. Two, unlike the mature city of Portland, my wee lad of a city has relatively insignificant coffers. Three, ripping up the aorta of a fledging city to install a major highway seems like overkill. And perhaps most importantly, I can see no reason why the avenue isn't working in the first place. I am thinking of starting over. Or, gasp!, finding a cheat somewhere to fund the reconstruction effort. After all, it does seem like a bug of some sort is discouraging my sims from driving five minutes down the avenue to get a job. As an update, overnight I added a couple more neighborhoods in the res district, and added some more industry across the regional lines. Most of the new zones on both sides filled up with buildings. Lo and behold, I saw some action! 153 of the citizens actually worked up the gumption to get jobs over there; That's a 1500% increase in industrial jobs! Sounds like alot. Except that I had about 8,500 citizens at the time, and thus by sheer math 153 is a drop in the bucket. So in all I'd say something was still seriously askew. Nevertheless, I was heartened by the site of those new green lines in the traffic view/question mark thingy and had hope it would work itself out. Then the game crashed and I lost it. Could this be an artifact of one the NAM plugins? Also, I noticed that there are freight trucks all over the place in the industrial district. Does that normally happen if nobody is working there? I'm very flummoxed by all this.

I found Soldyne's well written tutorial, "Making Money the Easy Way." As useful if not more so than the money aspect was his careful explanation of specialized regions. What a great feature, kudos to Maxis for the implementation. This is my first city out of the tutorial, so its possible I'm missing something obvious, but I can't tease out the culprit here. That said, I'm in the process of following Soldyne's advice essentially to the letter. So far, I've built and connected a residential to an industrial region. I'm pretty sure I did it all correctly. On the residential side, I've zoned some neighborhoods with 1x1 or 2x2 low density lots with the roads all piping into the main avenue, which in turn connects the regions. The industrial region is zoned with medium density lots. Almost all of it is built up into dirty industries. After awhile I noticed that nobody on the residential side was going to work in the industrial residential region, with the sole exception of the power plant. Since the plant has workers, it appears that the regions are properly connected. Yet out of 2700 residents, ten and only ten of them cross over to work in a region where there are over 2,000 jobs available. Vast portions of my population are unemployed. Eventually, I watered up both regions and began educating my citizens, thinking that perhaps my citizenry was too unedjumacated to figgur them valves and pipes and whatnot . I'm not sure how much of an effect the schools had, but still the lazy sods refuse to cross the regional line. Except, of course, for those ten ambitious power plant employees. Must be a great 401k over there. Any idea what is going haywire here? Grazie, Jay