A problem is that most peoples' only knowledge of urban planning comes from looking around at their own town, and unfortunately most towns in North America are incredibly poorly designed. A SimCity player that bases their city on a typical North American one will often wind up with a dysfunctional and gridlocked town, just like real life.
Agreed. For instance, it takes a while to find out that the "right" way to build a successful city in SimCity (and not necessarily in reality) is to never build a single tile of roadway, and instead construct an exclusively rail-based grid.
On the other hand, some of its city planning lessons work very well: for instance, interleave residential and commercial every other 9x9 block (3x3 set of 3x3 zones, with a non-RCI zone in the middle), rather than separating residential and commercial, to avoid creating huge commutes. (Meanwhile, keep industrial far away from everything so it doesn't bother anyone.)
That's cool. I think it's perfectly reasonable to call efficient strategies 'right'. But calling something right means you know something is wrong, and the 'wrong' that comes with this 'right' includes strategies that survive. Clearly, there's room for more than one right.
I'd love to see a smaller scale game that really focuses on these details. SimCity 4 and other games went in the other direction, building systems around how a metropolitan region of multiple cities would interact.
Cities: Skylines, more than any other city simulator I've ever seen, drastically encourages public transit use. The game is made by developers that got their start designing european-style mass transit simulators - http://www.citiesinmotion2.com/ And with the exception of mixed-use zoning, everything your asking for they already have done / just finished, and heavily encourage, in the game.
>In these games public transportation options are limited
There's lots of public transit in the game (Busses, Trains, Subway). Each with custom tracks, bridges, tunnels, etc. And you can completely customize the exact lines and routes of busses and subways (literally down to how often each stop is hit, and in what order). There's also "unmanaged" / "privatized" mass transit (Ferries / Harbours and Airports).
The simulation is exceptionally forgiving about public transit too. People will always choose to take transit, if it's even remotely competitive with driving. People will wait for buses even if they are overwhelmingly overcrowded, etc.
> walkable public spaces such as pedestrian only streets and squares are not possible
This has existed since day one. Click "Parks/Greenery" -> "Paths". You can place paved pedestrian-only streets, or gravel pedestrian-only paths. You can elevate them over/under roads or build pedestrian-only bridges, for instance.
You could recreate nearly the entire Minneapolis walking/bicycle trail network with these tools. And the game rewards you for doing this. (Pedestrian-only walkways generate less noise than full roads do)
> Bike lanes do not exist
They're adding them this month (September, 2015) along with dedicated bus-only lanes - https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines-after-dark
I noticed when I was playing that you could build pedestrian paths, but it seemed like they were in the context of a park path, not a pedestrian only commercial district. From some Googling it seems that this is the case, that you can't really build for example a downtown commercial core that would be pedestrian only.
The bus system in Skylines is great, and I didn't play long enough to experiment with subways, but I noticed that there didn't seem to be streetcars. I've been to a lot of cities that mix pedestrian streets and street cars and it works very well. That's something I'd really like to see in the game.
I'm glad to see they are adding bike lanes. They're an essential part of the transportation system.
Even though I'm complaining about it, I do want to underline that Cities: Skylines is a great game and a big step forward for SimCity type games. I'm really glad Paradox is continuing to improve the game.
I spent way too many hours playing SimTower as a kid. It was pretty fun, especially if you took advantage of the infinite money cheat involving building a specific type of room in one certain place on the bottom of the level... Not bad for a game that was built around an elevator simulator http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130563/the_designers_n...
Incidentally, this is a motivation for why I'm playing a bit with statically recompiling x86-16 code to run on x86-32.
Neglecting it in any way is a sure way to cause traffic nightmares that are difficult toi rectify.
It's hard to play a game that approximates reality enough that instruction manuals aren't provided, but differs just slightly enough to foil expectations.