Piano Man

Some people might shoot this down as a "game" that has no place in schools, but it did play a big factor in getting me into architecture school. I would take this a step further. Rather than simply having a reward for best mayor rating score (or whatever), include a requirement. Make a starter city (30,000ish pop.) and require students to add a mass transit system. On the due date, final cities should have 60,000+ population, and the student with the shortest average commute time wins a prize. Using in-game graphs and screenshots, you could have each student present their method to the class for discussion.

+1 confirm (or whatever) I've had this same thing happen.

This doesn't look difficult to solve: Your city needs more poor sims. All I'm seeing is a ton of R$$$ and CS$$$/CO$$$, which will doom your city. I'm inclined to blame this instead of raw commute time because I'm seeing lots of commercial abandonment, while lots of public transportation systems. Simplest solution: Demolish your abandoned R$$$ buildings and wait for R$/R$$ to grow. If you are lucky enough to get a high-rise R$ tenement, make it historical. Leave taxes alone for now. It's really easy to get a high R$$$ population, but having highly educated R$ and R$$ is the best way to go. R$$$ jobs are 10% at most for any given business, but highly educated poor sims will keep demand up for $$$ commercial while not risking unemployment. I'm not quoting a textbook, but I'm sure another member can be more specific if you're looking for hard numbers/ratios/demand calculators. side note: keep in mind that residential located at or very near your map edge will have a much greater chance of working in that neighboring city. usually this simple border crossing will make all commutes longer than a hop and a skip be considered medium length.

I'll open some discussion for each image you've provided: First image: You've placed your industrial district in the map corner for pollution reasons I'm guessing, however the red lines indicate that it is not easily accessible. Most of the workers are probably coming from the neighboring area because Simcity favors neighboring cities when zoning employers near borders. The areas in green likely experience abandonment because access to the industrial employers does not take advantage of the fastest roads. The highway probably has low traffic because it doesn't link the two (noted with a stormy cloud). Sims living outside the large purple circle will probably have a long commute unless they live right by the highway. Second image: Districts A and C are experiencing abandonment because of your awkward road network. Particularly in the blue circled areas (just examples). I'm guessing most of your large roads are either way overused or have little traffic at all. This means obviously that they are congested (long commutes), or your sims take inefficient routes (long commutes)that don't follow your plan. I see you are developing some business districts, but you are missing out on further commercial development for three reasons: -They aren't big enough -Traffic isn't heavy enough -Commuters don't have very direct access to them (congestion is probably a big culprit for their long commutes) I notice most abandonment is for high-wealth residents. This leads me to believe two things: -They are too far away from industrial employers -Not enough commercial employers (which employ the highest % of high-wealth sims) This is probably the reason why the highrise at district B is abandoned Third Image: For this industrial district, Sims outside the purple circle will likely have a long commute regardless of road access. (the same for the previous images) The red paths indicate awkward and lengthy commute routes for those nearby, most of which are single-lane roads. Check congestion. Areas A and B will probably have medium commutes if they work in the industrial district, but most certainly will have a long commute if they work anywhere else in the city. The pollution within the orange circle will be the kicker when combined with commute issues. I'm noticing that you have an unusually small amount of low-wealth housing near your industry. Low-wealth sims are employed almost solely through industry, so I'm guessing that a lot of the employees are coming from other cities or distant neighborhoods in this city. Because CS$ is always in such high demand in reasonably developed cities, zoning some low-density commercial in the blue areas can help with that demand. The pollution will keep them from upgrading to higher wealth, but the traffic will ensure they higher maximum employees. ------Notes------- Keep in mind that dirty and manufacturing industry will have about 10% high-wealth employees. The same goes for low-density-low-wealth commercial services. I find that high wealth residential development can easily outpace job providers. I wouldn't develop the southern island with its current network. In fact, I would treat it almost as its own city until both shores have healthy transportation networks. Neighbor connections (in every form) can really mess up commute paths and sources of employment. I'd minimize (maybe even delete?! ) these until each city's infrastructure is more developed. You have a lot of dirty industry that can be upgraded to manufacturing in order to help employ more medium-high wealth residents. A little demolition and tax variation can be very persuasive! Create/transform an area of your city to offer high-tech industry. This is the easiest way to employ your excess high-wealth residents at this point. An increasing number of R$$$ residents will also want to live near the Central Business District, so place your "silicon valley" somewhere near both of those locations.

You seem a bit flustered right now, but before anyone starts rattling off lists of possible problems/fixes, we need to know a couple things: What mods do you have? (that are relevant) Do you have a particular city you want to work with? We will need screenshots. Including neighbor cities if applicable.

None of the above.

I have found that you really can't "force" anything in this game to happen. For example, you cannot create a successful commercial area with maxed jobs unless the road traffic is already there. Obviously you can zone light commercial and it'll probably develop, but it won't dent a tall demand-bar. Once a zoned lot has something develop on it, those businesses have employees that come from somewhere. You'll need to find where that is, and place jobs there. If the road traffic in that area is weak, industrial jobs are likely the better option. Convincing them to work there may involve cutting off access to other employers, or demolishing them entirely. Finding and viewing these patterns is especially difficult in a huge gridded city. I find that developing cities through districts a few blocks in size and limiting exit/entry through one road makes understanding everything easier. -oh, and entrance/exit to these districts always creates an area of heavy (but controllable) traffic that's perfect for some commercial development.

The above two posters are forgetting that when a clinic/hospital is experiencing a strike, its capacity always drops very low for the duration of the strike. Knowing the patient capacities of the different buildings gives you an idea how much funding will be enough. Then you can fast-forward about a month and the capacity will go back up, and be appropriate to the funding level you have provided.

The city planner is generally a cool-guy who tells me what I like to hear. As for the other advisers. . . the environmental b#@$% is always #@$!%ing about everything. If it's not pollution it's the parks. . . if it's not the parks it's the trees. Transportation guy is runner-up for always #%!@$ing about road congestion on some single-tile section of road in a low-density residential area.

Even with an un-modded game, a bus system + basic roads will take you far enough to start seeing some of the early stage high-rises.

How the hell does that city stay afloat financially . . . But in all seriousness lets approach this from a purely logical standpoint: I am seeing a lot of job zots. If the jobs aren't there, for any tax bracket, your educational facilities aren't gonna get used. For one, you are going to have a pyramid for education just like for wealth levels, meaning that less students go to high school than elementary school (just like in real life), even more so for colleges and beyond. However if the job prospects are bad in your city, higher educated residents are going to move away. (high wealth does not necessarily equal high education though) Essentially you have to provide job zoning for all education and wealth levels to establish a population base that supports demand for the high-education jobs. Just like in real-life, if you try to force any one area through tax leveraging, you're fighting natural supply and demand. At the population you have, and the likely high taxes you need to stay afloat (>10%?), prospects and demand for high wealth employers will be low. It will get a lot easier to clean things up once you've established a greater population base (30,000+)

I found a solution to my problem. I found out that I had such high demand for all residential incomes because of my exceedingly low tax rates (3-4%). Because land values are all high, high-wealth residential buildings would almost always take priority over the lower wealth structures. Due to the pyramid structure of income brackets, there weren't enough R$ and R$$ residents to support demand for high-wealth employers. So, what I did was tax R$$$ enough that their demand went to zero or below, allowing mid and low-wealth high-rises to develop. This increased my population, and therefore demand for all levels of Commercial Service/Office and Industry (largely high-tech). A little bit unrealistic (people don't move to places where job prospects are poor under any circumstances), however my problem is on its way to being solved.

Nope, no demand mods, and only quality growables for buildings. You are a silly moose! I have been taking the realistic approach to mayoring, and have improved the situation slightly by zoning higher density, adding parks, and adjusting tax rates. I have been using the god-mode tree tool extensively to add forests to my city, are there any negative side-effects to this?

My issue is still that residential demand for all wealth levels are at their maximum levels, however I have zero demand (and mostly negative) for any commercial or industrial except for C$. The result: Most of my city is abandoned/reduced wealth occupants due to unemployment, but nobody seems willing to commute to neighboring cities. I did find that when I plopped some CS$$$ skyscrapers, the unemployment went away. This isn't natural or realistic though since commercial and industrial demands are almost completely maxxed out in the negative.

Right now in my core city the demand is maxed for R$ and R$$, and about even for R$$$. But on the eastern side of my city there is a whole ton of R$$$ buildings dilapidated (that is, with reduced wealth residents living inside). My goal is to either bring back the appropriate class of residents to these buildings, or to have the sims replace them with lower wealth buildings so they don't have to house reduced wealth residents in the first place. But the sims seem to always prefer to construct high wealth buildings, and then house many many lower wealth sims in them, thus making them dilapidated. This makes for very crappy looking cities. Even with maxed R$ and R$$ demand, they still build R$$$ anyways instead of building the needed wealth class buildings... this doesn't make sense to me. I am experiencing almost the exact same issue, we need more discussion on this!