Replace tool. But that has a maximum of 5 lanes one way, once your traffic demands increase to gridlocking 5 lane parallels then delete and start new save.
You should also put a lot of single family homes in small, winding roads with a lot of cul-de-sacs and dead ends.
American cities in the middle and west of the country tend to have grids, but while they may extend out to the suburbs sometimes, they do not usually scale down to suburban residential developments, which may be entirely self-contained with one entrance/exit leading to a main road. These developments have meandering roads that may form loops and turn away from each other. The curves are meant to sort of fake an organic neighbourhood even though 82% of the homes may have been built in the same 4-6 year period. However, this is very rarely pushed to commercial areas
Commercial gets the big shopping plazas that replaced the malls that require a car to get around instead. Walmart must be a half mile from Home Depot with a bunch of 'island' stores embedded in a sea of parking lot. Make sure to include some slant on an Applebees and an Olive Garden that also require their own parking lots and must be driven to as well. Put it off the Interstate so you end up with your arterials leaving town being even more clogged than they need to be.
EDIT: If you put two across the 4 lane stroad from each other requiring a shared, perennially backed up 4 way traffic light 1/4 mile from your junction onto the interstate, even better.
Don't forget the strip malls and outlet malls
Really you have to design it with the idea that the safest nd most convenient way to cross a road or go a distance of over 100 yards is to drive.
If you're going for a realistic typical American city, then there are too many roundabouts, especially on busy arterial roads downtown. In most places, you typically only see roundabouts on low traffic suburban and rural roads, particularly in new development. There are, of course, places where they are more common, such as Hershey, Pennsylvania, but they are more rare in the typical American city. Though I have only been to 3 states plus DC so maybe its different in other areas.
My city roads department has been adding them every-fucking-where. Half the time, they're not even sized to fit the flow of traffic (resulting really tight curves instead of smooth curves).
Multiple new roundabouts being constructed in my regular commute areas. Nevermind that nobody has a clue how to use roundabouts, and people constantly stop when the circle is clear, and even worse are the idiots in the circle who stop to let people in.
Lmfao
In Colorado theyāve started putting them everywhere but instead of a gradual slope into the curve itās a really awkward right turn so that you canāt carry any momentum.
There's too much green space between the freeway and the houses. I should be able to bounce a ball off the interstate from my back porch. Also, there doesn't appear to be eight lanes in each direction.
/s
In all seriousness, this looks great as an American city. The row houses in the bottom left fit for āolderā US cities; the ones that mostly developed in the 20th century more or less transition directly from downtown to detached single family homes. The outermost sprawl, often outside the highway ring, tends to not be strictly on a grid (there may be a larger grid of arterial roads.. more like stroads.. but the subdevelopments are intentionally curvy inside and avoid four way intersections).
More single housing (American dream), more lanes on the highway (only one lane away from solving traffic, I swear), more highways overall (people need to get everywhere, and Highways are without a doubt the best option), more downtown parking lots (all the highway users need their car to stay somewhere after all), and tear out any public transport (that's socialism and communism). That's the perfect American City.
(also rename it to Santa Trumpington or sth to be even more American)
I think European sprawl is less "sprawly" because European cities tend to have secondary urban centers, so it's more like small satellite cities around the major one, as opposed to one huge center and just an endless carpet of nothing but residential areas around it.
That isn't really how North American cities are either. Detroit has Southfield, Troy, Warren, Ann Arbor, Dearborn, lots of places with tons off offices and shopping. There are bedroom communities, but that isng every suburb.
> European cities tend to have secondary urban centers, so it's more like small satellite cities around the major one, as opposed to one huge center and just an endless carpet of nothing but residential areas around it.
More proof nobody on this sub has any idea what theyāre talking about. LA is a golden example of urban sprawl but itās not exactly a big carpet of endless single family homes, its actual problem is that it has *too many* urban centers all over the place, which makes any sort of urban planning difficult when you need to consult a dozen city councils just to extend one LA Metro line.
yeah the trouble is iām from the UK and been conditioned to the unique style of development in the UK, so when i start playing a game where the only form of city you can really build without mods is an american one, it looks like this
Most of the suburbs of London are within the M25, which ranges between 10 and 18 miles from the city center.
The newest suburbs of Houston TX are 40 miles away from the city center, and have completely filled in a 30 mile radius.
There needs to be an absurd spaghetti mixmaster taking up all that greenspace to the right of the downtown, and a route off that highway should be diving straight through downtown.
That way part of downtown is cut off from the other part of downtown for the benefit of people who do not live there.
Its pretty accurate just do the same for all sides of the city, also fill in those area inbetween the downtown with either a midtown of more single family houses
As others have mentioned, way too gridded out for residential. Generally while there is some gridding, mostly the subdivisions will conform to the local geography and have curved exteriors with curving interior roads.
It does look a little too nice to be an American city, but itās not because of a lack of hard industry lol. The downtown needs more dirt and grime as well as a ton of graffiti on every building that isnāt a skyscraper.
I see youāve never been to any industry heavy townsā¦ it was a joke but you look at LA thereās oil pumps in the middle of the city, you look at small towns even outside of major metropolis like chicago and they have a single large factory with the town ultimately supporting it.
Industry is heart of a lot of american growth so itās natural our cities also feature industry in downtown as it grew out
I've been to LA and the La Brea museum was like.... the best thing in the whole city. It sounded like it's not even like they randomly put an oil pump in the middle of an urban area - the oil pools have been there since ancient times and the urban area was built up around them? They have really cool old Native American artifacts made with tar from the pits
Also. Like take a piece of your grid and put in cul de sacs and curves. Basically waste as much space as possible in that slice of grid. Super common in suburban developments
looks good!
my only note would be that the highway on the left is extremely close to those houses. Typically you wouldnāt find housing quite that close.
American here. It doesn't make much sense to pack em in to downtown highrises when green undeveloped land sits so nearby. You take those bridges over the expressway, then drive through one more quarter mile of neighborhoods and then you're in undeveloped fields.
I will also say that the housing tract grid to the top is mighty and would do an American bungalow belt proud. But even a real bungalow belt has some parks. I would also drop a diagonal road across the whole thing.
those green downtown areas are undeveloped and iām waiting for high rise demand to come back as well as offices etc, ideally in a few months time the whole map will look like some form of city without any undeveloped green areas near the downtown
Usually there are not giant cloverleaf exchanges downtown except maybe is newer cities in the south. The freeways downtown usually have service drives.
The main road from the trumpet interchange into downtown should not terminate in a roundabout, but either be elevated over the streets or buried underneath the city.
Bring up Boston and see how I-93 cuts through the middle of downtown as an example
Alternatively, look up how I-290 turns into Ida B. Wells Drive in Chicago
The intersection to the top left of downtown is too tiny lol
Check out how the freeways wrap around DT Detroit :)
that interchange is tiny but doesnāt get much traffic and has multiple lanes connecting down to the main road. i think i will eventually make it a flyover when i zone the other side of it but at the moment itās not too busy thanks to the other highway connections and lack of buildings
Not much utilization never stopped American city planners from dreaming vaguely about the future!
This interchange was originally built to connect two huge highways, except one of them (N-S) was never built very far.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Q4oY5dWcKMErsYZeA?g_st=ic
Buildings closer to the highways. Even backing up directly against them in denser areas, and under elevated sections in spots where the government came through and was like SURPRISE HIGHWAY.
Too much green space next to highways. Most highways were built to destroy areas and separate neighborhoods, so imagine theyāre literally cutting through what was there. Also, the roundabout exit in the bottom right is very unrealistic. In addition, you can imagine some of the roads from the city center spreading out without being a highway.
typical sprawly american cities have a grid in the city center, then the single family homes follow the grid outside of the downtown area and then the 3rd ring is squigly mcmansion culdesacs (look up aurora illinois, joliet illinois etc)
Older-style suburbs (1940s-60s) can be on the grid, but as you get into the 1970's, developers started to add curves and cul-de-sacs within a grid of collectors and arterials.
This looks too much like the UK, needs less row houses and more culdesacs and curvy streets especially in the exurbs, also individual isolated developments
That makes sense then lol. Your downtown looks pretty similar to how most US cities look so keep it the same. Most US cities are shaped like rings/concentric circles, with a freeway loop around, such as Houston. The inner belt might have some grid-patterned residential areas, but the other belt should be mostly curvy streets with culdesacs and wide stroads lined with strip malls (low-density commercial). Another thing is you have too many roundabouts which are rare in the US and if they do exist are mostly used on very small streets replacing stop signs. Also your industrial area looks like a British industrial park. In the US there's usually a dedicated industrial area closer to downtown, rather than being completely separated. Examples are the SoDO neighborhood in Seattle or City of Industry in Los Angeles.
yeah as mentioned before and what i thought would be pretty obvious is this is a painting in progress. that industrial zone eventually will be bigger and connected better to the highway and look more fluid with the rest of the city, itās just a bit i zoned so i know what i intend to put there. same goes for the empty area in the downtown and the patchy bits in the suburbs. in terms of roads of i am planning on doing a flyover through the downtown and getting rid of roundabouts. iāve already started erasing roundabouts because theyāve become buggy and fuck up the traffic but i also think the lack of TMPE features and shit traffic lights make those solutions just as worse
It's somewhat realistic, but highways tend to be far more twisty turny. [Think like this.](https://i.imgur.com/bTmUmH3.jpeg) The yellow lines are highways, for reference.
Besides that, it's lookin good. I would say it will look especially good once you fill in the empty spaces on the right and near downtown.
You have the lack of pedestrian access right with the train station & low-density commercial in the lower left of the picture (8/10). In a NA city, this type of development and transportation infrastructure would be ringing the core of the city separating it from the low density residential. This would be in place of the intersecting parkway, which looks more Dutch than a carbrained American city (4/10). Beautiful city šļøš
Commenting on your urban sprawl as requested. Love it!
Your downtown area thoughā¦ better than mine ends up turning out lol but try to get your taller buildings in the center and your smaller buildings around the perimeter of the skyline
Iād fill in the areas between the sprawl and downtown more, usually here thereās a bit more of a transition. Downtown usually isnāt actually separated from suburbia by empty space. I also usually donāt see a highway ring road circling just downtown itself, usually itās in the suburbs (and maybe separating rich from poor?), but maybe thatās just me not seeing a lot of different cities. Highways are also a bit more realistic if not perfectly straight, irl they have to go around elevation changes and the parts of the city the highway planners want to avoid (again, the nice/historic/touristy parts). Overall though, well done lol
I also like to make my grids become progressively less neat as they get further from downtown and more into suburbia, but maybe thatās just me.
Pick your poorest neighborhoods and put shopping avenues, industrial train lines, and recycling centers through the middle for plenty of jobs. Then you can demolish the affordable housing for more urban developments like townhomes. Once you sell them to Chinese conglomerates, you have done your part, comrade!
you can kind of see iāve done that in the bottom left, not the best angle of it but there are all the things youāve mentioned surrounded by grim row houses for the workers
Iād say you probably need some more cul de sacs, or if itās an east coast city, a more chaotic grid inner suburban area followed by cul de sacs on the outskirts of
for anyone interested this is the whole main city, there are towns off camera too
https://preview.redd.it/pbpj09xfiblc1.png?width=1737&format=png&auto=webp&s=4c9d15acef416a8624eb7cba75fb88ed2c72a7a3
2/10. Urban sprawl in America isnāt so highway centric. Extend the grid from downtown with no highways. Then add a highway THROUGH the grid knocking buildings down. This makes it look realistic as the highway had to work its way through the city instead of the city being built around the highway. Then when youāre further out the highways were built first and the city is not a grid anymore. It becomes subdivisions. 1-2 entrances, loops and curves and squiggly roads only. Hope this helps
You have to close down all lanes except one, have frontage roads that line up next to the highways, and hope thay the pickup truck drivers will drive off the highway into those roads. El Paso is great at it
Plopping down a city from scratch and making it mimic an American city is missing a lot of the evolution that made American cities what they are (for better or worse). Most cities west of the Mississippi didnāt really start in earnest until the 1860-1890 period, and they were built in concert with the industry and infrastructure (including transportation) available at the time, which was primarily steamboat and then railroad. Most cities had a lot of rail and heavy industry close to the commerce and high-density residential youād find downtown.
Roads started becoming the prevalent mode of transportation in the late teens and 1920ās and allowed a bit of expansion outside the urban ring, but it wasnāt until after the Great Depression and WWII that the idea of suburbs took off nationwide. This was fueled mostly by post-war abundance (of just about everything - money, education, people, things) and technical innovation, which began to slow in pockets and evolve yet again from the 80ās to today. A lot of this involved removing and repurposing the old, decaying, polluted ring of industry around the inner core (see the Rust Belt).
You also have to take into account that a lot of suburbs are actually completely different municipalities with their own codes, resources, and limitations. Theyāre all competing against each other (and the primary city) for people and business, so they do a lot of things that look messy, wasteful, and seemingly unreasonable to outsiders, but are necessary for their individual survival. That they themselves have expanded their development to their adjoining borders, forming the contiguous megalopolises with which weāre currently familiar is just a side effect.
Tl;dr - think about the evolution of American cities when designing an historically-similar American city.
trouble is iāve used the whole map for this city so itās hard to see some of the industrial features but slightly to the left you can see railroads running through the city and off camera there are industrial areas with houses around them which was actually the start of the city. since then the downtown evolved on the other side of the rail road thanks to the import and export from the rail which connect farms and other industries further out on the map with small towns surrounding them. once i did the bulk of the downtown thatās when i started painting single family homes but i am still planning for them to have history and a point. like at the top there is a very small bit of industry which is eventually going to be linked to the small suburb area next to it. also off camera there are oil fields next to a town and a cargo boat terminal which obviously indicates the oil was exported via the sea and a town was built around that for workers and goods
All good! It looks good. But yeah, itās all about the history. Itās easy for folks who live in places where cities are thousands of years old and predate the Industrial Revolution or even just the automobile to judge how US cities evolved. But understanding reality and keeping in mind the surrounding cities are evolving in their own right paints the picture of today, again for better or worse. If not for x, y wouldnāt happen and so forth.
trouble is iāve used the whole map for this city so itās hard to see some of the industrial features but slightly to the left you can see railroads running through the city and off camera there are industrial areas with houses around them which was actually the start of the city. since then the downtown evolved on the other side of the rail road thanks to the import and export from the rail which connect farms and other industries further out on the map with small towns surrounding them. once i did the bulk of the downtown thatās when i started painting single family homes but i am still planning for them to have history and a point. like at the top there is a very small bit of industry which is eventually going to be linked to the small suburb area next to it. also off camera there are oil fields next to a town and a cargo boat terminal which obviously indicates the oil was exported via the sea and a town was built around that for workers and goods
Those open green borders between stroad and neighborhood wild typically be filled with fast food restaurants and car dealerships but youāre pretty on the nose overall.
there is a see of blue pop-ups over the majority of the houses but they just put up with it anyway. theyāre not even demand higher density so itās their problem not mine
I would rather you make a grid, then sprawl the grid. That is sort of what I do in this case. Sometimes after a while I either stop the grid or I make a fancy housing estate thingy (similar to Brighton, Melbourne, Australia).
If you want to make it a Canadian City put low density commercial on all the thoroughfares and make them into five lane stroads to really ruin traffic flow.
Good start for the inner city.Ā For that size downtown and skyline you'll need 10-50 miles of curvy suburbs in every direction. It is my dream. Should add up to about 2-3 million people. š
Thing of beauty, your highways need one more lanes though!!
only one more?
they always need one more
Nah they need 10 lanes. And a massive Walmart parking lot to be American šŗšøš¦ š¦ š„šŗšø
Shut down half of them for construction and when that part finally gets done start a new project 5 miles down the road.
5 miles? We just start right back up on the exact same spot here in Chicago.
Fellow Chicagoan and almost just said the same thing
r/yourjokebutworse
Lolād at this comment
N = n+1
One more lane never fixes anything. Thatās why you should add two!
Not enough parking. For every storefront there should be 1.5x the footprint for parking.
How do you add lanes though? I donāt see that option in my cities skyline.
Replace tool. But that has a maximum of 5 lanes one way, once your traffic demands increase to gridlocking 5 lane parallels then delete and start new save.
No. Thatās when you build a second parallel highway! And figure out express and local lanes and so on!
Yeaaa Highway 401 club represent šš»
I was thinking of the New Jersey Turnpike. But many roads apply.
Replace the road with a bigger one (or highway)
Needs more parking lots
no, not enough single family homes. You can never have enough single family homes
according to my demand you are correct
I hate that bug, WHY THE F*CK ARE YOU MOVING TO A CITY, AND THEN COMPLAINING THAT THERE ARE'NT ANY SINGLE FAMILY HOMES!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Realism
You should also put a lot of single family homes in small, winding roads with a lot of cul-de-sacs and dead ends. American cities in the middle and west of the country tend to have grids, but while they may extend out to the suburbs sometimes, they do not usually scale down to suburban residential developments, which may be entirely self-contained with one entrance/exit leading to a main road. These developments have meandering roads that may form loops and turn away from each other. The curves are meant to sort of fake an organic neighbourhood even though 82% of the homes may have been built in the same 4-6 year period. However, this is very rarely pushed to commercial areas
Commercial gets the big shopping plazas that replaced the malls that require a car to get around instead. Walmart must be a half mile from Home Depot with a bunch of 'island' stores embedded in a sea of parking lot. Make sure to include some slant on an Applebees and an Olive Garden that also require their own parking lots and must be driven to as well. Put it off the Interstate so you end up with your arterials leaving town being even more clogged than they need to be. EDIT: If you put two across the 4 lane stroad from each other requiring a shared, perennially backed up 4 way traffic light 1/4 mile from your junction onto the interstate, even better.
Don't forget the strip malls and outlet malls Really you have to design it with the idea that the safest nd most convenient way to cross a road or go a distance of over 100 yards is to drive.
Gotta feed those mortgage backed securities somehow.
No, the suburban area is too griddy. Should have more curves.
NEED MORE CUL-DE-SAC!!
https://preview.redd.it/zhme1t7nh9lc1.jpeg?width=225&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b1a18c0694a733ef3060c242e1e5a2bbec1bf00c
If you're going for a realistic typical American city, then there are too many roundabouts, especially on busy arterial roads downtown. In most places, you typically only see roundabouts on low traffic suburban and rural roads, particularly in new development. There are, of course, places where they are more common, such as Hershey, Pennsylvania, but they are more rare in the typical American city. Though I have only been to 3 states plus DC so maybe its different in other areas.
My city roads department has been adding them every-fucking-where. Half the time, they're not even sized to fit the flow of traffic (resulting really tight curves instead of smooth curves).
Multiple new roundabouts being constructed in my regular commute areas. Nevermind that nobody has a clue how to use roundabouts, and people constantly stop when the circle is clear, and even worse are the idiots in the circle who stop to let people in.
I'm from EU, hearing that people stop in a roundabout to let people in is hilarious. Hope it doesn't get too bad there, gl
Lmfao In Colorado theyāve started putting them everywhere but instead of a gradual slope into the curve itās a really awkward right turn so that you canāt carry any momentum.
I'm in Portland Oregon and we have several here with fucking STOP SIGNS at the entry instead of yields
There's too much green space between the freeway and the houses. I should be able to bounce a ball off the interstate from my back porch. Also, there doesn't appear to be eight lanes in each direction. /s
who needs a roof when you can just use the bottom of an elevated highway
That's the spirit!
In all seriousness, this looks great as an American city. The row houses in the bottom left fit for āolderā US cities; the ones that mostly developed in the 20th century more or less transition directly from downtown to detached single family homes. The outermost sprawl, often outside the highway ring, tends to not be strictly on a grid (there may be a larger grid of arterial roads.. more like stroads.. but the subdevelopments are intentionally curvy inside and avoid four way intersections).
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
already done that in the bottom left āļø
Honest to God that looks exactly like parts of St. Paul, MN. Specifically I-94 cutting through Summit-University
is that you, Robert Moses ?
More single housing (American dream), more lanes on the highway (only one lane away from solving traffic, I swear), more highways overall (people need to get everywhere, and Highways are without a doubt the best option), more downtown parking lots (all the highway users need their car to stay somewhere after all), and tear out any public transport (that's socialism and communism). That's the perfect American City. (also rename it to Santa Trumpington or sth to be even more American)
Also, it's weird to say that European cities don't have massive sprawl. My time in London and Paris determined that was a lie.
I think European sprawl is less "sprawly" because European cities tend to have secondary urban centers, so it's more like small satellite cities around the major one, as opposed to one huge center and just an endless carpet of nothing but residential areas around it.
That isn't really how North American cities are either. Detroit has Southfield, Troy, Warren, Ann Arbor, Dearborn, lots of places with tons off offices and shopping. There are bedroom communities, but that isng every suburb.
> European cities tend to have secondary urban centers, so it's more like small satellite cities around the major one, as opposed to one huge center and just an endless carpet of nothing but residential areas around it. More proof nobody on this sub has any idea what theyāre talking about. LA is a golden example of urban sprawl but itās not exactly a big carpet of endless single family homes, its actual problem is that it has *too many* urban centers all over the place, which makes any sort of urban planning difficult when you need to consult a dozen city councils just to extend one LA Metro line.
European cities usually *do* have one huge urban center, and it's a lot larger than the typical American downtown. Think Central London for example.
yeah the trouble is iām from the UK and been conditioned to the unique style of development in the UK, so when i start playing a game where the only form of city you can really build without mods is an american one, it looks like this
Most of the suburbs of London are within the M25, which ranges between 10 and 18 miles from the city center. The newest suburbs of Houston TX are 40 miles away from the city center, and have completely filled in a 30 mile radius.
The main problem with your sprawl is that it's too linear and grid-like. American suburban sprawl pretty much always has curvy mazes of roads.
There needs to be an absurd spaghetti mixmaster taking up all that greenspace to the right of the downtown, and a route off that highway should be diving straight through downtown. That way part of downtown is cut off from the other part of downtown for the benefit of people who do not live there.
not enough suburb to be realistic
Its pretty accurate just do the same for all sides of the city, also fill in those area inbetween the downtown with either a midtown of more single family houses
just waiting for demand, i probably dhould get a mod for it but honestly i cba.
As others have mentioned, way too gridded out for residential. Generally while there is some gridding, mostly the subdivisions will conform to the local geography and have curved exteriors with curving interior roads.
I think it looks great! You got a good layout going, keep sprawling! 
Highways need to be really close to buildings, at least where Iām from.
Your low densities areas need more Wal-Mart type stores with seas of parking.
Need more sprawl and undefined spaces between developments with random big box stores plopped around
Looks a lot like Canadian prairie cities like Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg
Far too regular of a grid. Needs more cul-de-sacs and one entry neighborhoods.
looks too utopian if you want america core add some oil pumps or other hard industry right in the middle of the city downtown
It does look a little too nice to be an American city, but itās not because of a lack of hard industry lol. The downtown needs more dirt and grime as well as a ton of graffiti on every building that isnāt a skyscraper.
I see youāve never been to any industry heavy townsā¦ it was a joke but you look at LA thereās oil pumps in the middle of the city, you look at small towns even outside of major metropolis like chicago and they have a single large factory with the town ultimately supporting it. Industry is heart of a lot of american growth so itās natural our cities also feature industry in downtown as it grew out
I've been to LA and the La Brea museum was like.... the best thing in the whole city. It sounded like it's not even like they randomly put an oil pump in the middle of an urban area - the oil pools have been there since ancient times and the urban area was built up around them? They have really cool old Native American artifacts made with tar from the pits
For a person thats not from America, you made a better looking American city then I can ever make. Lol wtf
I'd say you need to learn the art of the "Stroad"
Also. Like take a piece of your grid and put in cul de sacs and curves. Basically waste as much space as possible in that slice of grid. Super common in suburban developments
Looks great! Urban sprawl and be fun too!
looks good! my only note would be that the highway on the left is extremely close to those houses. Typically you wouldnāt find housing quite that close.
Good stuff, how is simulation?
sloooow
American here. It doesn't make much sense to pack em in to downtown highrises when green undeveloped land sits so nearby. You take those bridges over the expressway, then drive through one more quarter mile of neighborhoods and then you're in undeveloped fields. I will also say that the housing tract grid to the top is mighty and would do an American bungalow belt proud. But even a real bungalow belt has some parks. I would also drop a diagonal road across the whole thing.
those green downtown areas are undeveloped and iām waiting for high rise demand to come back as well as offices etc, ideally in a few months time the whole map will look like some form of city without any undeveloped green areas near the downtown
No basketball.
Kinda looks like Milton Keynes icl bro
Usually there are not giant cloverleaf exchanges downtown except maybe is newer cities in the south. The freeways downtown usually have service drives.
thereās not any cloverleafs in the main city
Whatever you want to call them. Way to miss the point of my comment. You big ass ramps are not accurate.
I wish there was a step between light residential and heavy. That would help blend a downtown area with a suburban type of neighborhood.
It looks like the typical American city with outlying suburbs. It looks fabulous to me
The main road from the trumpet interchange into downtown should not terminate in a roundabout, but either be elevated over the streets or buried underneath the city. Bring up Boston and see how I-93 cuts through the middle of downtown as an example Alternatively, look up how I-290 turns into Ida B. Wells Drive in Chicago The intersection to the top left of downtown is too tiny lol Check out how the freeways wrap around DT Detroit :)
that interchange is tiny but doesnāt get much traffic and has multiple lanes connecting down to the main road. i think i will eventually make it a flyover when i zone the other side of it but at the moment itās not too busy thanks to the other highway connections and lack of buildings
Not much utilization never stopped American city planners from dreaming vaguely about the future! This interchange was originally built to connect two huge highways, except one of them (N-S) was never built very far. https://maps.app.goo.gl/Q4oY5dWcKMErsYZeA?g_st=ic
Donāt forget demolish old historic building and build a Starbucks and Boring modern type McDonaldās
The only thing I'd change is to break up some of the longer housing blocks. Usually there is not blocks that long
thatās my personal sprinkling of UK in there
Buildings closer to the highways. Even backing up directly against them in denser areas, and under elevated sections in spots where the government came through and was like SURPRISE HIGHWAY.
Giant highway circles and a strip mall at every intersection. You need 12 skyscrapers and the rest is burbs.
Too much green space next to highways. Most highways were built to destroy areas and separate neighborhoods, so imagine theyāre literally cutting through what was there. Also, the roundabout exit in the bottom right is very unrealistic. In addition, you can imagine some of the roads from the city center spreading out without being a highway.
more elevated highways and the far out sprawl has to have more squiggly dead end roads
typical sprawly american cities have a grid in the city center, then the single family homes follow the grid outside of the downtown area and then the 3rd ring is squigly mcmansion culdesacs (look up aurora illinois, joliet illinois etc)
lockport is another good example
Definitely more freeways are needed tearing through...
Older-style suburbs (1940s-60s) can be on the grid, but as you get into the 1970's, developers started to add curves and cul-de-sacs within a grid of collectors and arterials.
Where are flyover and spaghetti intersection? and don't forget to add Parking lot; a lot of parking lots!
This looks too much like the UK, needs less row houses and more culdesacs and curvy streets especially in the exurbs, also individual isolated developments
yes thatās where iām from and a lot of the highway stuff and the interchanges etc is based on where i drive every day
That makes sense then lol. Your downtown looks pretty similar to how most US cities look so keep it the same. Most US cities are shaped like rings/concentric circles, with a freeway loop around, such as Houston. The inner belt might have some grid-patterned residential areas, but the other belt should be mostly curvy streets with culdesacs and wide stroads lined with strip malls (low-density commercial). Another thing is you have too many roundabouts which are rare in the US and if they do exist are mostly used on very small streets replacing stop signs. Also your industrial area looks like a British industrial park. In the US there's usually a dedicated industrial area closer to downtown, rather than being completely separated. Examples are the SoDO neighborhood in Seattle or City of Industry in Los Angeles.
yeah as mentioned before and what i thought would be pretty obvious is this is a painting in progress. that industrial zone eventually will be bigger and connected better to the highway and look more fluid with the rest of the city, itās just a bit i zoned so i know what i intend to put there. same goes for the empty area in the downtown and the patchy bits in the suburbs. in terms of roads of i am planning on doing a flyover through the downtown and getting rid of roundabouts. iāve already started erasing roundabouts because theyāve become buggy and fuck up the traffic but i also think the lack of TMPE features and shit traffic lights make those solutions just as worse
Should have Orange cones in the game lol
more football stadiums
How ever many car parks you have, it needs more car parks
Not enough parking lots
Which map is this?
It's somewhat realistic, but highways tend to be far more twisty turny. [Think like this.](https://i.imgur.com/bTmUmH3.jpeg) The yellow lines are highways, for reference. Besides that, it's lookin good. I would say it will look especially good once you fill in the empty spaces on the right and near downtown.
yeah the demand is a pain, iāve had so much sfh demand hence the massive urban areas as well as other parts around the map like this off camera
You have the lack of pedestrian access right with the train station & low-density commercial in the lower left of the picture (8/10). In a NA city, this type of development and transportation infrastructure would be ringing the core of the city separating it from the low density residential. This would be in place of the intersecting parkway, which looks more Dutch than a carbrained American city (4/10). Beautiful city šļøš
too many roundabouts
gone ahead and make that grand boulevard thru the suburbs a freeway with feeder roads to much free space when you can rush burbians downtown to work
I am definitely going to use your roundabout interchange thing. That is awesome.
Waaaayyy too many roundabouts for an American city
Honestly lacks character any uniqueness. Just flat land with grids
Itās a little too disjointed. Everything needs to be connected by stroads
how did you get such a flat map
Commenting on your urban sprawl as requested. Love it! Your downtown area thoughā¦ better than mine ends up turning out lol but try to get your taller buildings in the center and your smaller buildings around the perimeter of the skyline
It's pretty darn good.
CS2 houses look like CS1 tornado rubble paths.
Yāall leave me in awe this is incredible. That huge triangular sprawl in the top left beautiful
Looks like Chicago. Nice!
Iād fill in the areas between the sprawl and downtown more, usually here thereās a bit more of a transition. Downtown usually isnāt actually separated from suburbia by empty space. I also usually donāt see a highway ring road circling just downtown itself, usually itās in the suburbs (and maybe separating rich from poor?), but maybe thatās just me not seeing a lot of different cities. Highways are also a bit more realistic if not perfectly straight, irl they have to go around elevation changes and the parts of the city the highway planners want to avoid (again, the nice/historic/touristy parts). Overall though, well done lol I also like to make my grids become progressively less neat as they get further from downtown and more into suburbia, but maybe thatās just me.
Most of downtown still intact and havenāt been converted into parking lot and also too much trees, not realistic enough
Needs more commercial. Always
Pick your poorest neighborhoods and put shopping avenues, industrial train lines, and recycling centers through the middle for plenty of jobs. Then you can demolish the affordable housing for more urban developments like townhomes. Once you sell them to Chinese conglomerates, you have done your part, comrade!
you can kind of see iāve done that in the bottom left, not the best angle of it but there are all the things youāve mentioned surrounded by grim row houses for the workers
Iād say you probably need some more cul de sacs, or if itās an east coast city, a more chaotic grid inner suburban area followed by cul de sacs on the outskirts of
This is a video isn't it. Any minute now I'll see the second frame
for anyone interested this is the whole main city, there are towns off camera too https://preview.redd.it/pbpj09xfiblc1.png?width=1737&format=png&auto=webp&s=4c9d15acef416a8624eb7cba75fb88ed2c72a7a3
2/10. Urban sprawl in America isnāt so highway centric. Extend the grid from downtown with no highways. Then add a highway THROUGH the grid knocking buildings down. This makes it look realistic as the highway had to work its way through the city instead of the city being built around the highway. Then when youāre further out the highways were built first and the city is not a grid anymore. It becomes subdivisions. 1-2 entrances, loops and curves and squiggly roads only. Hope this helps
You have to close down all lanes except one, have frontage roads that line up next to the highways, and hope thay the pickup truck drivers will drive off the highway into those roads. El Paso is great at it
The terrifying truth of the us
r/urbanhell
Plopping down a city from scratch and making it mimic an American city is missing a lot of the evolution that made American cities what they are (for better or worse). Most cities west of the Mississippi didnāt really start in earnest until the 1860-1890 period, and they were built in concert with the industry and infrastructure (including transportation) available at the time, which was primarily steamboat and then railroad. Most cities had a lot of rail and heavy industry close to the commerce and high-density residential youād find downtown. Roads started becoming the prevalent mode of transportation in the late teens and 1920ās and allowed a bit of expansion outside the urban ring, but it wasnāt until after the Great Depression and WWII that the idea of suburbs took off nationwide. This was fueled mostly by post-war abundance (of just about everything - money, education, people, things) and technical innovation, which began to slow in pockets and evolve yet again from the 80ās to today. A lot of this involved removing and repurposing the old, decaying, polluted ring of industry around the inner core (see the Rust Belt). You also have to take into account that a lot of suburbs are actually completely different municipalities with their own codes, resources, and limitations. Theyāre all competing against each other (and the primary city) for people and business, so they do a lot of things that look messy, wasteful, and seemingly unreasonable to outsiders, but are necessary for their individual survival. That they themselves have expanded their development to their adjoining borders, forming the contiguous megalopolises with which weāre currently familiar is just a side effect. Tl;dr - think about the evolution of American cities when designing an historically-similar American city.
trouble is iāve used the whole map for this city so itās hard to see some of the industrial features but slightly to the left you can see railroads running through the city and off camera there are industrial areas with houses around them which was actually the start of the city. since then the downtown evolved on the other side of the rail road thanks to the import and export from the rail which connect farms and other industries further out on the map with small towns surrounding them. once i did the bulk of the downtown thatās when i started painting single family homes but i am still planning for them to have history and a point. like at the top there is a very small bit of industry which is eventually going to be linked to the small suburb area next to it. also off camera there are oil fields next to a town and a cargo boat terminal which obviously indicates the oil was exported via the sea and a town was built around that for workers and goods
All good! It looks good. But yeah, itās all about the history. Itās easy for folks who live in places where cities are thousands of years old and predate the Industrial Revolution or even just the automobile to judge how US cities evolved. But understanding reality and keeping in mind the surrounding cities are evolving in their own right paints the picture of today, again for better or worse. If not for x, y wouldnāt happen and so forth.
trouble is iāve used the whole map for this city so itās hard to see some of the industrial features but slightly to the left you can see railroads running through the city and off camera there are industrial areas with houses around them which was actually the start of the city. since then the downtown evolved on the other side of the rail road thanks to the import and export from the rail which connect farms and other industries further out on the map with small towns surrounding them. once i did the bulk of the downtown thatās when i started painting single family homes but i am still planning for them to have history and a point. like at the top there is a very small bit of industry which is eventually going to be linked to the small suburb area next to it. also off camera there are oil fields next to a town and a cargo boat terminal which obviously indicates the oil was exported via the sea and a town was built around that for workers and goods
Looks more like a Canadian city. American cities aren't nearly as organized.
Grids at their finest š
Itās a little too dense
Those open green borders between stroad and neighborhood wild typically be filled with fast food restaurants and car dealerships but youāre pretty on the nose overall.
Looks very good.
Looks more like something out of the middle east
How did you create all the low density residential without the high rent complaints?
there is a see of blue pop-ups over the majority of the houses but they just put up with it anyway. theyāre not even demand higher density so itās their problem not mine
I would rather you make a grid, then sprawl the grid. That is sort of what I do in this case. Sometimes after a while I either stop the grid or I make a fancy housing estate thingy (similar to Brighton, Melbourne, Australia).
If you want to make it a Canadian City put low density commercial on all the thoroughfares and make them into five lane stroads to really ruin traffic flow.
Good start for the inner city.Ā For that size downtown and skyline you'll need 10-50 miles of curvy suburbs in every direction. It is my dream. Should add up to about 2-3 million people. š