I built a city which is as nearly roadless as possible for one which contains all zone types. Car traffic is negligible, as you'll see from the following shots. Pedestrian malls and subways rule the day. Rail carries high-tech and farm freight.
Close-up of the CBD:
And a close-up of the high tech district. I had a downspike in education levels which caused some abandonment. For some reason the area never fully recovered after demolition of affected structures. The layout seems to work fine though, apart from that. The inter-zone El/Subway connection is visible on left. (ETA: Solution to this non-growth ended up being to add Mayor Mode trees, everything came back instantly after that.)
Zone view. 70k+ residents and counting!
And last but not least, here are my mockups for gridding a car free city. Pink is parks, light grey ped mall, dark grey the segregated streets required for residential zoning to function without no-car zots. Subway grids line up between the grid types allowing for easy side by side layout. Note the offset on the I-HT grid between Rail and Subway Stations, allowing pedestrian bridges across rail (1x3 size bridges means subway can't abut rail).
This layout has been remarkably stable aside from the troubles in 'regrowing' the I-HT zone after the education failure midway through the city's life. I had a screenshot of the traffic graph, or so I thought, but it's not showing up in my pictures. Anyway all traffic visible on the graph is Pedestrian, closely followed by Subway, with a tiny bit of Freight Train at the bottom. Car traffic is not visible on the graph, and commute time is .2. My Sims love me and have an EQ of 195. Budget has always been tight, but the city is in the black with enough money in the bank to lay out many more car-free developments.
Anyone with a real metropolis going car-free? 500k+? Would love to see it! My next experiment will use the same gridding on a larger map in order to fit a larger population.
---
ETA details of my layout for the person that posted a question thread here about this:
"How do I build a roadless city?"
The simple answer is to use unconnected sections of road for residential frontage, pedestrian malls for commercial frontage, rail for industrial frontage, and subway stations connecting everything.
The more detailed answer:
Residential:
- You must use roads of some sort to face the residential to. There is no way around this as far as I have learned. However, by making each road a short strip with no connections to commerce or industry, your Sims will not use cars on it.
- Put subway stations at the ends of your residential roads so that your Sims can get to work. Put them at the corner of each block.
- I've tried 6x6 and 6x12 and both work about the same.
Commercial:
- Pedestrian mall frontage, subway stations at each corner.
- Again, 6x12 blocks are what I'm currently using for this. I will probably go back to 6x6 because the center strip of the 6x12 commercial block is fairly heavily polluted (???), even with no truck, car or above ground rail traffic. The other zone types don't show this problem.
Industrial:
- Rail with 6 tiles between, I put this in the center of each 6x12 block. Freight can be shipped via rail within 3 tiles away.
- Subway stations between each block so Sims can get to work.
- Pedestrian mall frontage - not sure how far the Sims can walk from their ped malls across industrial to get to work, but with the 6x12 industrial blocks, I put rail on the long axis, pedestrian malls on the short axis. The blocks fill in and flourish.
- If you want farms, just run rail through the farm zones and cross the railroad with a short strip of road with a freight station, a farm will pop up and use it.
All zone types: For any side of the block that a building is not facing, you can put parks or more pedestrian malls.
Emergency services:
You're also going to need to draw very short roads to put police stations on, for stations not in your residential street segments. I haven't figured out the best way to do fire control yet, because the Fire Airstrip doesn't put out any of my fires, the plane just flies in a circle uselessly when summoned. I may have to design fire access roads that do not connect to residential roads (preventing car traffic), but it seems like this would be very wasteful of space. Currently I just let buildings burn and demolish/rebuild. Ugly.
Airport:
I haven't been able to get the Sims to use the airport if they can't drive to it. Short connector roads from the airport to mass transit stations go completely unused, and the airport just sits there wasting budget. I think there are custom BATs that feature mass transit enabled airports and I will be looking into that as a solution.
I am using the latest NAM Unified Traffic Simulator. I am sure there are many other ways to work a car free city, but this is what I've come up with so far. See the Roadless Cities thread for my pictures of these layouts. My system as depicted there produces no car traffic, some freight train traffic and very evenly matched amounts of subway and pedestrian traffic. Commute times are ridiculously low and citizens are happy. You could of course run a more dystopian setup, ignoring services entirely, but I like my car free Sims to be rewarded for their good behavior.
