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I love SimCity 2000 and these roads look really cool but I'd really like to see a city-builder go in a different direction. One of the biggest problems with No
by chongli 8mo ago
I love SimCity 2000 and these roads look really cool but I'd really like to see a city-builder go in a different direction.
One of the biggest problems with North American cities is their endless, car-centric suburban sprawl. SimCity games may be really fun to play but they seem to reinforce this problem and anyone who grows up playing them will not learn about alternatives for more livable cities.
New Urbanism, traditional neighbourhood design, streetcar suburbs, one-way streets, bike paths, walking paths, mixed-zone walkable villages (light commercial with residential), smaller single-family houses and duplexes, triplexes, houses behind houses. Many of these are older and more traditional techniques to yield higher density neighbourhoods without building up to large apartment buildings.
It would be really cool to see a game that focused more on creating these kinds of realistic and aspirational living spaces instead of the usual cookie-cutter suburbs linked up by huge roads and a large downtown core.
- mh2266 8mo agothis is definitely doable in CS (+mods), search YouTube for "cities skylines European" or something like that. you need "plop the growables" and "move it" mods at minimum to nudge all the buildings close together.
- IMTDb 8mo agoThere are plenty of “chill and peaceful” city and town builders that trade realism for prettier, more idealized places. In more simulation-focused games, cycling and walking paths are often available, and you can use them, but they come with many of the same constraints they face in the real world. In practice, that means they are usually not efficient as the primary way to move large numbers of people across a large city. Reading your comment, it sounds like you want a game that is realistic in most respects, but treats transportation differently, in a way that makes your preferred options the optimal strategy. That is going to be hard to find, since transportation is a core part of city-building sims, and developers tend to pick either realism or a more utopian/fantasy model rather than mixing both in a single game.
- Tarrosion 8mo ago[citation needed] that some combination of "New Urbanism, traditional neighbourhood design, streetcar suburbs, one-way streets, bike paths, walking paths, mixed-zone walkable villages (light commercial with residential), smaller single-family houses and duplexes, triplexes, houses behind houses." is not in fact optimal! (For certain objective functions)
- chongli 8mo agoThat's not what I want at all. I want a more realistic sim that deals with issues such as sprawl, food deserts, transportation elasticity of demand, mental health issues (and their impact on crime and productivity), and a network-flow theoretical model of transportation and commuting contributes to all this. Building a bunch of sprawling suburbs that feed into a dense downtown core should make your citizens' commute times shoot way up and lead to misery. A well-built large city isn't just going to be 100% biking and walking paths, it's going to have streetcars, light rail transit, subways, and buses as well as roads with cars. The difference is that people shouldn't be forced to commute across the entire city to get to work because you decided to cram all of the commercial zoning into one downtown core.
- jmye 8mo ago> The difference is that people shouldn't be forced to commute across the entire city to get to work because you decided to cram all of the commercial zoning into one downtown core. Isn't the point that they should be, if that's how I choose to build a city, and they don't have to be, if you choose to build it otherwise? The entire point of a sandbox city-builder is, I assume, that it's a sandbox, and not a dogmatic interpretation of a childish Reddit meme.
- chongli 8mo agoIt was pointed out elsewhere in this thread that SimCity already distorts reality in an ideological way: it lets you have tons of traffic without worrying about parking. It just gives you magical free underground parking everywhere that you never have to think about, in order to avoid the usual suburban parking sprawl hellscape.
- GaryBluto 8mo ago> SimCity games may be really fun to play but they seem to reinforce this problem and anyone who grows up playing them will not learn about alternatives for more livable cities. That's because SimCity is not a tool for preaching your personal opinions of what makes "more livable cities" to people who more often than not want to design semi-realistic, typical cities in an entertaining strategy game. If you want to make your perfect city builder, go ahead, it's easier than ever now for somebody to create a game. Just don't expect everybody else to share your view of "aspirational", more so if you actively punish traditional city structures.
- cheschire 8mo ago[flagged]
- GaryBluto 8mo agoI live in the United Kingdom. I have never once stepped foot in North America.
- cheschire 8mo ago[flagged]
- GaryBluto 8mo agoMy sleep schedule varies from week to week depending on whatever miscellaneous project is sucking up all my attention (with some constants). It's hard to stay on a strict schedule once I've gotten into "the flow".
- cheschire 8mo agoOk so do you feel strongly then that simcity is representative of civil engineering in the UK?
- 8mo ago
- PlatoIsADisease 8mo ago[dead]
- nonethewiser 8mo ago[flagged]
- dang 8mo agoPlease don't post like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nonethewiser 8mo agoIm not sure which one of these applies. Snarky?
- dang 8mo agoYup! and thanks for getting as far as actually reading and considering this :)
- chongli 8mo agoRiverdale [1] is a neighbourhood in Toronto with the kind of higher-density mixed single-family and multi-family homes as well as a few small apartment buildings (but no large apartment buildings) that I had in mind with what I described above. It also happens to be one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the city which I take as an indication of high demand for the houses there. Compare that with the sprawl of Vaughan also shown in the video [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
- autoexec 8mo agoThe houses in Riverdale are way too close together. It looks like some of those people could literally open their window and reach into their neighbor's house!
- stronglikedan 8mo ago> One of the biggest problems with North American cities is their endless, car-centric suburban sprawl. Most people consider that a benefit. It's just as livable as anywhere else. Just different.
- vineyardmike 8mo ago> It's just as livable as anywhere else People are totally entitled to like what they like, and that's OK. Everyone has something that works for them, and this world has a great variety of options available but the "car-centric suburban sprawl" is linked to various negative mental and physical health consequences. Negative health consequences, IMO, isn't "just as livable". As a simple example, when people walk more during commuting instead of drive, they tend to be healthier. There are other more nuance (but studied) impacts, such as increased car accidents, mental impacts from increased isolation, etc. In America, there is even a correlation between how car-centric a community is and how often individuals are willing to seek out healthcare (even when accounting for access and affordability).
- account42 8mo agoYeah it's strange how some people think that squeezing people like sardines without any space for personal gardens is supposed to be a good thing. Density in European cities is mostly a historical artifact and something objectively chosen.
- matsemann 8mo agoHuh, wonder what takes up all the space that could've been parks and gardens (hint: it's made of asphalt)
- prmoustache 8mo agoIf you like living and spending all your day in your car yes.
- jmye 8mo agoI don't spend anything close to "all my day" in a car - I'm not sure what the absolutely over-the-top and completely-detached-from-reality, snide hyperbole adds, here.
- MindSpunk 8mo agoDo we really need to jump onto a tangent about evil cars and evil car infrastructure on a post about b-splines and curve sections? Everything in the article applies equally to trains and rails. We get enough complaining about evil car-centric city designs on the posts directly about cars thanks.
- dcsommer 8mo agoI think GP is simply identifying a potential popular niche that could be satisfied in a future city builder game, which seems quite on topic.
- chongli 8mo agoYeah, I don't want my preferred playstyle to be favoured, just treated fairly: * Add all of the non-car transport options: walking paths (including underground and raised paths for walking between large buildings in the winter, a la PATH in Toronto), bike paths, buses, streetcars, light rail, subways, inter-city trains, high speed rail, ferries * Add parking lots as a feature to all commercial and residential construction, require every car to be parked somewhere when not in use, but allow residents/property owners to decide whether to build parking or not * Allow land-value taxes as an alternative to property taxes, as well as the possibility for things like street parking and pollution ordinances to give you levers to incentivize/disincentivize the construction of parking lots * Simulate emissions appropriately from all transport methods * Parking lots and heavy traffic should lower property values, as citizens complain about the ugliness, pollution, noise, and danger of excessive traffic There's a whole conversation to be had about the design of games like SimCity and how it affects future urban planners, but that may be going too far afield. Still, I think it would be nice to have a game that doesn't reward car-centric planning while burying the drawbacks.
- throwerxyz 8mo agoThose areas aren't better to live in. They're just older parts of older towns so they don't have much wiggle room. The wiggle room was amazing for the more modern countries, except now we wiggle in a different direction too. An equal middle can be seen in Asian cities in Korea and China. They mix high density with high quality of life and little self sacrificing. Neither US or Europe do living areas well due to their historical constraints.
- CalRobert 8mo agoIt's subjective but many of us strongly disagree. And, of course, the fact that the areas you say "aren't better to live in" also tend to be extremely expensive doesn't make a lot of sense.
- account42 8mo agoExcept for gates communities, living cost is mostly a function of closeness to high paying jobs.
- CalRobert 8mo agoI don't think that counters what I wrote? One of the benefits of higher density is having more high paying jobs nearby.
- throwerxyz 8mo ago
- CalRobert 8mo agoThe creators SimCity itself were aware of the problems you mention. Ever notice how there's no parking lots? https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...
- chongli 8mo agoThey were aware of the problem and they covered it up, rather than try to show better ways of living. It’s unintentional propaganda for the crappy ways we build our cities. It’s worse than if they’d just show things how they really are.
- nine_k 8mo agoWhen I played Sim City, I gladly built super-dense neighborhoods with high-rises facing parks, and mass transit, Le Corbusier style. One reason was that they brought in enormous income, another, that they looked cool.