The whole game of City Skylines is based around a grid-shaped city and clearly delineated zones for housing, commerce, and industry. It's never going to be able to model a European city (or an old east coast US for that matter).

Its not just the car centric hellscapes, but the assumption the only way a local authority exerts any control over building is zoning (for residential or commercial, never both), the grid, the assumption that high density means towers with parking lots in between, the lack of any social housing (and indeed the assumption low income workers are entirely unnecessary to a properly functioning city), the assumption that the best way to make your city really attractive is regressive taxation to attract the rich and scare away the poor etc etc...

I visited Amsterdam recently and instantly noticed something weird about the road layouts there. I did some research - they differentiate between streets (meant for short distances, or getting to a local destination) and roads (meant for long distance travel - or driving past a location). As a visitor, it seems brilliant. And it makes way more sense than what a lot of roads look like here - with cyclists trying to fit in with high speed traffic.

Novel approaches to urban planning seems like an obvious thing to put in to urban planning games. What a missed opportunity.

Urban planners have coined the word "stroad" for the hybrid monstrosities.

I’ve noticed this a number of times in recent travel— Kyoto, New Orleans, Quebec City, all very old places where the narrow side streets (often with little to no sidewalk and certainly no dedicated bike space) are in fact a paradise for non-car transportation.