Imcafin

For the purposes of lessening the chance of "orbiting" commuters, the normal toll booths should work better. You can make ridiculous amounts of money from the braindead drivers/bus riders with the Goldiva's booths, though.

The low-medium-high refer to density not wealth. If you zone medium density residental you are just saying that the biggest buildings that are allowed to develop in that area are medium height/size ones. You can not directly influence the wealth group of the buildings that develop in a given area. There are some ways to encourage certain types of development, though: lot sizes, taxes, desirability increasing/decreasing plopables (parks, certain rewards) and location (high wealth sims will not live next to dirty industry but low wealth ones will, for example). I-Ag is just that, agriculture. Only farms can grow on I-Ag zones. I-D and I-M refer to the density, I-D allows for bigger industrial buildings. I-HT refers to High Tech industry. It grows on I-D and I-M zones when circumstances are favourable (little pollution and a well educated workforce to mention a few). The Omnibus might make for a good reading. https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/categories.cfm?catid=147&entercat=y

I went and applied some of the things discussed in this thread to an old city of mine (150k inhabitants). Severing excess connections cut the commute time from 70+ to 40 (NAM 10x speed 10x commute). In my case the worst offender was the underground not roads. While severing connections in an area that is supposed to be a part of a dense urban area is not realistic, I'll take the more spread out traffic any time. Now people actually go to work in the middle of the map. Nice analysis mayormot (and the rest).

You haven't downloaded and installed PEG's God Mode Pine Tree Mod by any chance?

If the issue is that there is a track that is by far the shortest route that is seeing no use there is one thing worth checking. I had a similar problem yesterday: great rail connections but the freight was not moving. The culprit was a custom passanger rail station that was not allowing freight traffic through. Moving it to a spur solved the issue.

The effect of the BRF slope mod depends a lot on the terrain you play with. And on whether you are a fan of rails or not. Hilly terrain (like on the picture dussin23 posted) and rails are simply an impossible proposition unless you are willing to level whole mountains. This goes for all the roads as well but to a lesser extent. I'd be wary of applying it to an existing region with significant development. To get nice even terraces, if that is what you after, use single road tiles or PEG's leveling lots for optimum effect. Using the walls is pretty much a matter of taste. In many cases there is more than one way to place them. The end pieces (or the diagonal pieces) can be switched around depending on the desired look (a contracting or widening effect). The diagonal wall tile fix is here: https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/index.cfm?page=1&keyword=pjot&type=all# If the extra rock showing doesn't bother you it's well worth it. Hilly rugged terrains will look odd with it, though.

Nice topic. One thing that always strikes me as very odd is the fact that people are willing to put up with the commute times often associated with the big suburban sprawls. I live in northern Europe (southern Finland to be more exact) and commute times in the region of one hour each way are viewed as pretty long and very often happen not due to choice but sheer necessity from what I've observed (eg. family members working in opposite directions from their place of residence). I realize that the population density is far lower here than in the big metropolises of the world but one still can't help but wonder. I get the creeps thinking about wasting away 2+ hours sitting in a car five days a week, unless I get paid for it ). One of my pet peevees with suburbanitis (single family houses *only* with no end in sight) is that it makes cities and towns disappear. A CBD with skyscrapers does little to replace the medium-rise commercial/residential buildings.

Finished browsing through the whole thread (mostly the pictures I admit but even that took long enough ). All I can say is: Inspirational. Thank you for the veritable boatload of great tips, techniques and ideas jeronij (and all the other posters).

I had similar issues earlier myself. Some buildings showed up bright green when playing a medium map. The issue got fixed along with several other problems when I rolled back to 53.04 NVidiot drivers (cruddy old Atholon with GF5700FX running Win98, don't laugh [:0]). The buildings that suffered from the green disease were Elementary School and the medium sized firestation. This happened with the vanilla SC4 so the issue seems to be something older than RH. Oddly enough the newer NV drivers and my sad old comp. just simply refuse to work together but 53.04 is rock solid unless I get ambitious and try playing a big city on a large map. Progress my