Valiko87

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and put this on the BAT request thread, though the final lot will definitely need some TE-ing and probably a bit of modding, if anyone decides to try their hand at this rather interesting project. Now, I love the bridge variety that came with Rush Hour, enough so that I don't mind the lack of diagnal bridges. However, with suspension bridges, you soon run out of designs, since you have 4. Now, in real life, nearly every suspension bridge is unique in design; you wouldn't mistake the Golden Gate for the Ambassador, or the Mackinac Straits for the George Washington. So...I found a bridge design that I thought would be quite awesome to have in-game. This one conceptual painting, however, is all I could find of it. It was supposed to be built in Detroit as a sister to the Ambassador Bridge, but the Depression cancelled it. Enough rambling, here's the pic: http://www.internationalmetropolis.com/unbuilt/bridge.jpg align=baseline> If there isn't anyone up to it, I suppose I can take a crack at it after I finish my San Andreas fast food franchises, but I know none of the modding needed to make a functional bridge (and I've been told that it is possible)

As per the arguments against mass-transit, most notably by the German contributor, from my personal experiences with mass-transit (and personal experience is really irrelevant to the overall issue, but I digress), I know that mass-transit is not inherently awful cheap, badly maintained, and generally unbearable to use. When I was younger, I often stayed with an aunt who lived in Westland, a suburb of Detroit. We often went downtown to shop or attend special events, and the lack of mass-transit was a bit of a drain on her pocketbook even back then. With gas prices rising this year, she was forced to move to the rural north of Michigan because, in her personal experience, the suburban style of life was unsustainable, and her experience is an example of what is likely to happen on a massive scale within the next few decades. I firmly hold to the belief that had Detroit not built highway after highway through downtown, and instead concentrated on a workable mass-transit transit, the beauty the city displayed in its early 1900s heyday would not have been lost, and it likely would have been far more successful in its attempts to recover from the riots. Case-in-point for mass-tranit: San Francisco, the city where I am attending university. San Francisco, for the most part, is beautiful, clean, and very pedestrian friendly and easy to get around in. The mass-transit is well-maintained, clean, and actually enjoyable to travel in. While annoying teenagers are still a 'problem', that's far from any intelligent reason to argue against mass-transit and the new-urbanism ideal of supporting it in city design. Just observing San Francisco, I find myself constantly aching to see Detroit renewed in such a manner. A great portion of Downtown has already been abandoned or demolished, so why not use the space all those parking lots and garages occupy for something useful, like, say, el-train stations? The (I gag at the name of it everytime I mention it =P) people mover could be expanded to cover at least the majority of downtown, though that would be rather expensive. Personally, I see no real reason why the bus lines couldn't be expanded to suburbia, except perhaps some squabbling with the suburban governments. It would certainly be cheaper that expanding the el-train or trying to create a subway, but in the end, it will be neccessary to find the money to create a workign mass-transit system in the city, or the city will die for good when oil runs out. This is an issue that almost all of the United States is facing right now. I've concentrated most of the post on Detroit, because Detroit really is a prime example of the utter failure of the sprawl mentality, whereas San Francisco is a wonderful example of how mass-transit can create a city that is mostly uncongested and in good condition overall.