Residential Services, distributed or concentrated

[Tomnoddy]

OK, I built my city with a one way road system. These are laid out like the pipes on a radiator, though with shortcuts for pedestrians and cyclists. At the entrance and exit of each district is a fiendishly complex system of flyovers to take the traffic where it is most likely to want to go

Specialist Zone has links to

1. to import/export (highway, freight terminal)
2. to industrial zone (raw materials being worked into finished goods)
3. to residential zone - workers coming home

Industrial Zone links to

1. to import/export)
2. to specialist zone (raw material trucks returning empty)
3. to commercial zone (finished goods to shops)
4. to residential zone (workers going home)

commercial zone exit

1. to import/export
2. industrial zone (trucks from industry zone going back empty)
3. residential zone (workers/shoppers going home)


However, I recently added an office zone, which is going to have negligible traffic to anything but the residential zone for commuters. I then decided to try moving the other "residential service" stuff over to there as well - schools, undertakers, and parks. However this lowers the land value in most of the residential area vs a distributed model, and these residential areas are not exactly over trafficked to begin with (the problem areas are the "collector" manifolds where all the traffic merges onto the highways entering the commercial and industrial areas. There's a lot of slip roads joining the main highway in too short a space)


I was wondering how the traffic model in this game actually works. When a Cim goes to an industrial building to work, i presume they can potentially decide to travel to any on the map, so there could be consequences if they can't reach their target - which is why my city is designed to make any C or I tile accesible from any R tile.

Does it work the same way with parks? I've followed my Cims after work and noticed they otten visit parks, and often not their nearest?

Perhaps a compromise plan is to make circular residential districts, with an outer one way loop of housing, but create a kernel of schools and parks in the middle of each zone. That way school/park traffic is kept segregated but the residential buildings get the land value boost from nearby amenities.

 

[Czardus]

I feel like you're overthinking it. In my experience traffic management is more about (1) efficient public transportation, (2) good road heirarchy, and (3) limited cargo trucks on the roads.

In terms of (2), you want to have this system of roads:
- Highway (very limited access to the highway)
- Arteries (first road off highway, with limited intersections)
- Collector streets (intersects the arteries and has more intersections itself)
- Local streets (very small streets that feed into the collectors)

In CS, cims will always take whatever is the shortest route to their destination. So if you want to force the use of public transportation, then make the route that takes public transit shorter than driving. If you want to force cargo to go on trains rather than roads, then make it so that the cargo rail to its destination is a shorter path than the road.

Also, these cim trips exist:
Residential --> Commercial --> Residential
Residential --> Industrial --> Residential
Residential --> Industrial --> Commercial --> Residential
Residential --> Leisure --> Residential

These cargo trips exist:
Specialized Industrial --> Generic Industrial
Generic Industrial --> Commercial