Hey! Subconsciously, I zone my own style of New Urbanism anyhow. Sim City is quite unrealistic in that the cost of maintaining an excellent bus and rail network for a city of about 20,000 is marginal compared to maintaining an effective education system or police force, let alone highways. If anything, my style of New Urbanism exists because my cities have grown up not around highway offramps, but around stations. I think when building a region, the existance of both high density urban areas (like Bend) must be complimented by smaller towns supporting a freight station and agricultural industries, as well as dense, dirty industrial parks. I find it frustating, as has been in the news in Austrlaia recently with rail freight lines being closed meaning more semi trailers clogging rural roads which in Sim City would barely pass for a road. But naturally, a region would need major freeways to connect cities within a state or a country. Australia's east coast is an example of this, as Sydney's expansion to the north, along the Pacific Highway to Hornsby, through the Central Coast where it eventually nearly meets Newcastle, and to the South along the Hume to Illawarra and Wollongong has made Sydney one of the world's largest cities in terms of area (building around its harbour and river system also complicates matters leading to a reliance on urban sprawl). So it's not so much how a city exists within a vaccuum, and even though some of Sim City 4's regional interplay is a little crude, you have begun to explore it well in the new stadium subplot, but your future updates I would like you to present how, without a major highway system, your cities interrelate (and in my experience, forcing Sims to utilise my rail freight stations rather than semi trailers can only be achieved by cutting off road connections to neighbouring regions). Excuse the sprawling essay style post, but I felt a city journal as interesting as this one justified such a response. Keep up the good work!
