Ray Oliver

I feel like a lot of the suggestions in this thread would lead to unnecessary micromanagement or high levels of complexity and are probably better left to the modding community. I'd like to see the game embrace new urbanism. The critical missing piece is the lack of mixed use zoning. Both offices and high density residential should offer the option of ground-floor commercial. These would not completely satiate the demand for commercial zoning but it would meet some of the demand. Secondary to that it would be good to see walkable neighborhoods behave as they do in real life, with higher property values, people not owning cars, etc. I also have some minor quibbles with things like noise pollution. Does a water tower really cause noise pollution in real life? That doesn't seem realistic.

That would be very useful. It can be tough to lay them perfectly side by side and the same length.

Central business district.

Having offices as a separate zone from commercial is awesome. It gives you more flexibility and doesn't necessitate having a ton of ugly and pollution filled industrial zones. The large maps are great. When I first started playing I built my city dense with little to no open space because that's what was necessary in SimCity if you wanted a reasonable population. But in CS you don't need to do that and as a result you can create much more attractive cities. Decoupling street types from zone density is also more realistic.