As I said during the intro class on roads and bridges, roads are the blood vessels of your city along which people, power, water, sewage, and information flow. They are the grid that gives your city character, the instructions that gives your city shape, and the thoroughfares that grant or deny access.
Guidelines
Imagine that you are just building your city and you lay two parallel roads on the ground. When you go to lay out your third road, your city planners will show you guidelines that allow you to place the next road at the same distance from the second road as the second road is from the first.
This is incredibly useful when setting up a grid-based city layout.
Straight Roads
Straight roads are the most economical when it comes to preventing wasted space between your city's buildings.
Don't forget: holding down shift while placing roads will make them snap to 90 and 45-degree angles to the passing highway. Straight roads usually create less traffic.
Curved Roads
Curved roads are incredibly fun and can add an esthetic beauty and gracefulness that compliment your city.
Problems: Square Pegs in Arched Holes
The downside of curved roads is that because the buildings are square in nature, they will waste tiny bits of space as they are constructed. The bigger the building, the more space it wastes. Each of these tiny bits of wasted space adds up over time into large quantities of land that would otherwise host buildings if your city utilized a more bland, grid-based design.
If you create a city entirely made out of curved roads, you will have no shot at landing at the top of the leaderboard. However, I have created many curvy cities because they look freakin' awesome. So, it depends on what you're looking to accomplish. Being the best means as few curves as necessary; playing with friends for fun, curve away.
Problems: Disjointed Roads
Let's say that you are laying one of the squares of a road grid. By holding the shift button, you can extend any road in a straight line. Now, let's say that while extending a road, you stop half-way to the next intersection and then attempt to finish the road from the other side. There is a chance that if you are not 100% perfectly on the guideline that when those two sections of road meet, they will not connect properly -- creating, in fact, two overlapping cul de sacs that do not operate as a normal road. Be aware of this and make sure that when you connect roads in this fashion that you double check to make sure that they have created an actual road.
Again, this problem only occurs when you hold shift for each road. If at any time you release the shift key, the game will automatically connect these two roads with no problem. I, as it turns out, am the kind of person who compulsively demands straight roads. I use shift constantly and this happens from time to time as a result.
Problems: Traffic
If you have areas of your city where traffic always seems to back up, you may be tempted to think that this is a result of poor city design and blame yourself. Well, rest assured: it is your fault and had you designed a road system using four basic theories of city planning, you wouldn't have these problems?
So, what are these theories?
- Connect your corners
- Interlace residential and commercial properties
- When it comes to roads: never use anything less than medium density
- Love mass transit
The maximum distance that people have to travel is from each corner of your city site to the off ramp from the highway. To minimize the amount of traffic produced by your city, you want to connect the corners of your city to this off ramp using roads as direct as possible.
When you zone, if you interlace your commercial and residential zones, you will cut down on the amount of traffic that is on your roads as the people who live in your city can simply walk down to the street to the market instead of driving miles across the city. You do NOT want to interlace industrial into the same areas as this will create pollution and problems in the long run.
There are several types of roads to choose from. However, the low-density roads that seem like a cheap way to lay out your city quickly at the start of the game are an illusion. Using these roads will instantly send your precious baby into total gridlock. Avoid them at all costs by using only medium-density roadways or better.
Finally, you should fall in love with mass transit here and now and attempt in every way to move your citizens around your city using trains, streetcars, and other such tools. Every Sim who you put on a train is one less Sim pumping NOx and SOx into your atmosphere and gumming up the streets they share with cops and firefighters.
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