This is so true. Where I grew up the roads are rarely exactly parallel, and the coastline is hard to replicate. There's highways and flyovers that weren't like the ones in the games.

When I came to the US, particularly the towns that aren't by the coast, I thought SimCity! Apart from things being on a grid, there's also quite a lot of repetitive architecture. Schools look similar, utilities look similar, neighbourhoods are filled with the same houses. And all the big box stores are exact copies.

That is one of the first things my now-wife said to me when we picked her up from the airport the first time she came to the US. "It's just like SimCity!"

That was my exact thought when flying into Phoenix for the first time.

I really want to try out this radial city though!!

Which part of Europe? A lot of cities in Italy (and most of Europe) were Roman encampments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castra) and they have a very square, ordinary layout I have always found boring.

I have always been fascinated by other cities when a road starts to curve or a square pops out of nowhere. Walking through London is much more interesting than it was in Milan.

I've never been there, but I heard there's a lot of planning in medieval italian city layout.

In particular Siena, which has detailed squares for trade, politics, full of simbolic features (e.g. the City Hall tower was built much higher than the church's to assure the government is perceived as superior).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siena#/media/File:PiazzadelCam...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siena

which cities in Italy/Europe you consider to have a very square, ordinary layout?

Off the top of my head I cannot think of a single city with a square structure, or where castrum and decuman still exist[0].

[0] i.e. Manchester https://www.google.hu/maps/place/Manchester,+UK/@53.479099,-... does not look square at all, even though the "-chester" part derives from "castrum" and there is something resembling a cross in part of it.

I agree, it's the exception

Mannheim comes to mind: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/49.4877/8.4640

Karlsruhe is listed as an example in the Book, although considerably less regular than most US cities I've been to: http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/62518#map=15/49.0064/8...

Piacenza has the roman squared city center intact in layout[1], lots of other small towns as well, but the fact is the old town parts are likely too small to actually matter when you look at the whole city layout - hard to notice from just looking at the urban map!

then you have places like Turin that were built with a ruler [2]

https://www.google.it/maps/place/Via+Camillo+Benso+Cavour,+3...

https://www.google.it/maps/place/Turin,+Metropolitan+City+of...

edit: some more samples, with cardo/decumano marked when known

naples https://www.google.it/maps/place/Naples,+Metropolitan+City+o...

parma (barely visible, linked plaza was the old forum) https://www.google.it/maps/place/Piazza+Giuseppe+Garibaldi,+...

verona https://www.google.it/maps/place/Via+Rosa,+7,+37121+Verona+V...

firenze, you can even see the old walls

https://www.google.it/maps/place/Piazza+della+Repubblica,+10...

you are probably right, the old town parts probably get lost in the largest map.

But as far as I know naples is not even a roman city, so I don't know what is going on there :)

my bad, I mixed up generic squared block in cities (turin, naples) with old roman squared blocks arrangements that survived today (the others)

I'm not sure if it has anything to do with Romans, but look at La Valetta, Malta: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Valletta,+Malta/@35.899060...

La Valetta is a planned fortified city built by Francisco Laparelli[0] for the Order of St John in the 16th century.

Nothing to do with the romans, or with normal maltese city architecture (which is much more organic)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Laparelli

A dead straight road in Europe is either (i) really old and from the Romans or (ii) really new.

Well, New Town in Edinburgh was laid out on a grid in the 1760s. There are a few exceptions. :)

They probably call that "really new".

Architecturally, I'd say "really new" is since ~1970 (i.e., post-Brutalism), "new" is since ~1918 (i.e., post-WW1).

In terms of town planning, I'd probably call anything 20th century "really new", and "new" being anything from the Industrial Revolution onwards.

Therefore, I'd claim New Town isn't new, yet alone really new.

AFAIK, Romans built their cities with streets following the N-S and E-W axes (Cardus and Decumanus) but, after, no medieval city continued with this style. Specially, in walled cities, the streets were appearing in a chaotic way.

My home city is Barcelona where, actually, a big part is designed as an orthogonal grid.... but it's still not the same. I think I would have enjoyed the game more if I knew how my cities were supposed to look like.

Although Milan has a circular layout that gravitates around the Cathedral, and the streets - especially in the center of the city - sometimes start to curve randomly or a square pops out of nowhere, just like you described :)

Maybe you where referring to Turin? (that has this exact square layout that makes me mad and lost sometimes - because nearby streets all seem the same)

Having grown up in Vermont and lived only in big coastal cities thereafter, I always felt the cities didn't look right. Then I moved to China and realized the same!

Tangentially related at best, but when I first visited Miami I kept thinking I had been there before. I had, sort of, in GTA: Vice City.

The maximum tax rate is much below what many real world European places charge.

Our council tax in the UK, which would be the equivalent to SimCity town tax, is somewhere about 3-5%. It is actually a regressive tax, fixed based on almost made-up property prices, but you seem to be confusing national taxes with local taxes.

Although some of the national tax goes back to the councils and some of the national taxes pay for the infrastructure, so it's a bit more complicated than that.

Really? What is it?

I live in one of the high-tax places, earn well above average and do no tax planning. Yet, what the taxman actually charges me is only half the nominal maximum.