JenniferplusplusGood morning from Glacier Bay
So anyway, this is a big part of why, despite its flaws, I play cities skylines 2, not 1.
It was actually really pleasant to sit here and watch traffic go by for a few minutes while I set up that picture. I tried to record video, but my computer wasn't having it.
You may recall that I threatened you with maps earlier, and I was fully serious about that. Here's how you could get around.
For the curious, the photo above was taken from the red circle, facing south. This is the oldest part of the city
It sounds like the way cims insist on walking really extreme distances might be a bug? It does seem like people will walk much too far. I had thought that maybe I had somehow discouraged car ownership? But without providing adequate alternatives? I'm _pretty_ sure that some cims will decide not to own a car if they don't have to.
But maybe it's not my fault? ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ
https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/116200157349759406
Well, it is now June of 2028 in Glacier Bay. I've spent most of my last several game sessions doing beautification around the city, so the map-visible changes are pretty small. But as part of that, I did fill in zoning in areas where I think the land values can now justify more extensive grading. It turns out that just letting the simulation run while you're planting trees is a great way to build up a budget surplus. Who knew!?
And, more substantially, I built a cargo port in the south east corner of the city! Very exciting stuff. I'll bombard you with pictures later, after work.
I did a lot of that to leave the city in a stable position so I can move south across the bay to a _new_ project!
This as-yet unnamed town is going to be a tourist destination. Now that the harbor is open for business, some enterprising developers are bringing in a passenger port and attracting resorts and cruise lines. The plan is to build out an entertainment district all down the waterfront, with a small urban center at the top of the valley that's mostly housing for the workers and city services.
It's a little hard to see because I just sketched it out with dirt roads. But the basic idea is there, if you zoom in
I don't normally play with the day/night cycle on, but I feel like I'm missing a few light sources. Specifically, I feel like I'm missing vehicle headlights. Anyway, it is October 2028 in Aspen Cove, and it now has a proper skyline
That photo was taken facing almost due south from the corner of the port, which sadly doesn't render on the map. But you can kind of tell where it should be, because it's where the seaway ends.
ALSO, taking that photo is how I discovered that the battery backup built into the solar power plant does *nothing*
So, I take back all the nice things I said upthread, this game is trash /s
BTW, I got GPU Screen Recorder, so you can watch the ferris wheel go around
Mastodon didn't like the video, so here it is elsewhere
https://flic.kr/p/2s28SBJ
aspen_cove_202810
Well, by almost every measure, the newly developed city of Aspen (I renamed it, just Aspen, no cove) has been a huge success.The streets are lively, the shops are busy, and the attractions are attracting.
There's just one problem: None of these people got here by boat. Which means they all drove here ๐ฑ
What is a girl to do?
Obviously, draw and redraw the lines on the one road coming into town, over and over.
Also obviously, that did not work. Meanwhile, traffic is backing up on the highways halfway around the entire map. So, I imagine some other governments step in.
First, Glacier Bay, which is run by responsible adults, not property developers/real estate speculators/gamblers, starts operating a ferry line to try to relieve driving demand. It immediately hits like 400% capacity. So, they switch to running 2 lines, with as many boats as they can put in the water. I didn't think to get a screenshot at the time, but for a while the line for that ferry stop went out to the street, down the sidewalk, and across the crosswalk.
But, even with all that traffic off the roads, it still barely made a dent in the traffic jams.
So, next, I imagine the state steps in. Probably, the DOT and emergency management sue the government of Aspen, cuz this shit's hazardous.
I think they come to an agreement to do 3 things:
1. Aspen will establish a 2nd road corridor from the highway to the waterfront.
2. The state will build interchange access at another point on the highway, for safety as much as for capacity.
3. Aspen will operate a real local transit system, to reduce demand on the roads as much as possible. None of this starter city nonsense about "taxis are transit, right?"
The result:
this game is great
I got distracted by an ambulance that was stuck in traffic, so I had to stop and fix some interchanges. That means I mostly didn't get anything built today; just moved some roads around.
I might go through my process for that tomorrow
So yesterday, instead of building much of anything, I fixed a bunch of terrible traffic. I don't have a save from before I started, but I do have one from a couple of days ago. So, these are not exactly as things were, but it's pretty close.
First, was this intersection on the east side of glacier bay, near/connecting to the cargo port. The port wasn't actually functioning at this point, due to a mod that I had to remove. But once it did function, traffic here was *devastatingly* bad.
I had it set up like this because I wanted to give the port direct access to the highway. But, it turns out that almost none of the truck traffic was headed for the highway. It was basically all turning right and heading into the industrial area up the hill. A fact you can ascertain thanks to the road inspector tools. So, one build out of a proper interchange later, and all now all the highway traffic is diffusing into the city, while all the port traffic gets direct access to the industrial area. The only real complicating factor in all of this is that this cliff is fully 30 meters tall. And that is most of the reason I hadn't built a real intersection before. I don't normally like these T interchanges because having the ramps cross over each other means you have to build much higher than is necessary. In this case, that height was happening no matter what. Compared to a trumpet interchange, which is my go-to for 3-way merges, this lets most of the sloping happen parallel to the highway. That minimizes how much it imposes on land I want to use for the port.
The other problem intersection was this one, right in the heart of the city. It has been perennially bad. I've fussed and fussed over the lanes here repeatedly. But, I think I've got it this time.
I had to sit and watch this for a while to figure out what was going on. But, basically, there was a lot of conflict happening in the queue, before anyone could even get to the intersection. It turns out a ton of traffic in the right lanes was turning left and heading to the central industrial district. And a bunch of the traffic in the left lanes was turning right, to head up to the shops and neighborhoods near this intersection.
There's no amount of paint that will solve this problem. The only thing for it was to take away some lanes. (gasp)
Specifically, I took away the ramp that connected the west-bound highway (up, in the pic) to this intersection. I also reversed the direction of the trumpet, which gave a much longer queuing distance, but it was really the lane that did it.
And I replaced that ramp with one a little further along the highway that exits directly into the main road serving the central industrial area.
TBH, I kind of feel silly now, because the local road between these two sections of the city now seems really overbuilt. But what are you gonna do? These things happen. And I'm sure I'll want that capacity for local traffic when I rezone downtown to increase the density
Now, any traffic untangling you attempt should begin with this view. This shows traffic volume. The game also has a traffic flow tool, which is hot garbage. But volume is super important. You want to see the highest volume of traffic gathered onto your highest volume roads. That's highways, and medium or large local roads. If people are bypassing those routes to take small local roads instead, that's going to cause major problems. You can't prioritize any of that traffic, it's just chaos.
If you find yourself in that situation, what you probably have to do is make those other routes less desirable. Or take them away entirely. You can try installing stop signs on every corner that shouldn't be a through route. Or you can turn them into one-way roads. You can even consider removing roads.
Or, if you catch it early, before you've gotten a bunch of development around it, you can pave the desire paths. Add capacity to the roads people already want to use.
Anywayyyy, this has been today's lesson on fixing traffic in cities skylines II
There's actually a big part of me that wants to do lets plays of this stuff. The problem is that listening to my own recorded voice makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. And I would have to do that, because unedited video gaming sessions are incredibly boring
soooo, not sure where to go with that
It is March, 2029 in Glacier Bay.
What we're looking at is the Glacier Bay central fire station, the main social services office, some commercial office space, and the parks department. What they all have in common is that the city's other administrative departments have been borrowing or leasing office and meeting space in these locations because the city lacks a primary municipal administrative building.
And this is Glacier Bay's historic central high school, which is significantly over capacity with nowhere to expand.
At the same time, Glacier Bay has had a housing shortage for years. Until now, the city has responded to housing demand by annexing and developing more of the surrounding land. However, there's not all that much accessible, developable land left to expand into. This parallels a rising unemployment rate in the city. These issues, if left unchecked, could spiral into a full blown cost of living crisis.
Glacier Bay does actually have a solid base of employers. While it could stand to have more, a simple read of the numbers would suggest that unemployment should not be as high as it is. Looking closer, unemployment is pretty low, except within the un- and poorly-educated portion of the population. That doesn't seem like it should be the case, because Glacier Bay has a significant manufacturing base, which is the best source of jobs with lower education requirements in the game, as far as I'm aware. But, there's also quite a lot of _under_ employment in the more highly educated population. So, I'm working on a theory that the problem is actually that we have too much industrial zoning, rather than not enough. So a bunch of well- and highly-educated cims are taking factory jobs and pushing out everyone else.
So, while these things all seems like separate problems, I think they share a common solution: redevelop downtown. As part of this plan, the city will rezone 6 blocks of the central district to significantly increase density and add some needed office jobs. It will acquire 2 more blocks to build a new central high school campus with multiple academic buildings, some sports facilities, and some space for future expansion. The historic highschool building will be renovated and repurposed as a dedicated city hall. And finally, in order to support higher density zoning, the city will build a new level 1 trauma center, and a network of tram lines connecting the city's major neighborhoods, which will necessitate acquiring the farm on the West side of town to build a tram depot. Most of the existing bus routes are express lines between 2 or more districts. The bus network will be reconfigured as primarily local routes with transfers to the tram system.
With all that said, this is the plan put forward by the city planner (me). Each of these phases will proceed roughly in order:
A - Low density housing that will be rezoned for medium density
B - Low density housing that will be the location of a new high school campus
C - The current high school, which will be repurposed as a city hall with completely new development down to the waterfront
D - Mostly parking lots in service of the highschool, which will be rezoned as high density residential and office space
E - Mostly city services built around some very difficult terrain (fire station, post office, police station, and emergency clinic), which will be fully graded and house a new hospital and skyscraper
F - Site where the fire station and water pumping station will be relocated
G - Farmland where the tram depot will be situated, with space reserved for future needs
H - Site of a bus/tram transit campus
The rumors that this transit plan is the result of new transit DLC we got this week are completely baseless, I assure you
As of June 2029, that plan is sort of complete. I say sort of because it worked, but not enough. So, I kept expanding the limits of what got rezoned to high density. It will need some more work, but it's better than it was. Unemployment and homelessness are both down and the population is up by about 7,000, city-wide.
I built a low density suburban shopping complex. It's every bit as bad as they are in real life. But these things happen
It's September 2029 in Glacier Bay, and the property developers are at it again. This time, two major factors conspired to give us this suburban sprawl. First, you may recall a couple of in-game years ago, the department of transportation had to urgently build a highway spur to relieve catastrophic traffic congestion in Aspen. They had to acquire a significant amount of land to make that happen, and they've been trying to sell it off ever since.
Second, 3 or 4 hundred people who lived in what is now downtown Glacier Bay were very unhappy with the city urbanizing like that. So some of them got together, hooked up with some property developers, and attracted some big box retailers to anchor a little monument to suburban shopping sprawl. Situated about halfway between the growing city of Glacier Bay and the up-and-coming resort town of Aspen, is now the city of Pleasant Hill. Home to a Costco, Ikea, and generic sporting goods store inspired by Bass Pro Shops
Nicolai von Neudeck@jenniferplusplus arenโt there vocoder like fake voice filters one can apply? You could maybe always speak with voice of the character you are playing?
@jenniferplusplus or you could do some voice acting and speak with the voice you think a mayor or city planner should have? Mamdani or so? If you would add his critical positivity it could be a real asset?
Ryan@jenniferplusplus no one likes their voice when they hear it recorded! It's a sort of dysphoria.
For what it's worth I'd watch the hell out of those videos!
@ryan @jenniferplusplus oh yes, that terrible feeling is universal and all the radio people talk about how they lost that after a while in the business. For most people it comes from the sound that goes through your bones when you hear yourself without a mic not being there.
Jonathan Hartley@jenniferplusplus your own voice probably sounds worse to you than to the rest of us, that's not uncommon.
Is it useful to record it and recruit someone to record a replacement voice track? I have no idea how that would work tho.
felix (grayscale) ๐บ@jenniferplusplus how about, trade with someone else: you edit theirs, they edit yours
@jenniferplusplus my favorite is when I have to start removing roads that were part of a grid to create subdivisions, so that people prioritize the right routes and avoid cut-throughs!
Really enjoy your updates!
@ryan I may need to revisit the new intersection I created. There was a little backing up on it. Hopefully it stays at just a little, and I can live with it
Nephrite@jenniferplusplus Reminds me of that time I placed a complete underground highway in a ring around my city just for the city services because I didn't want them stuck in traffic. XD
@Nephrite lollll ๐
did that work?
@jenniferplusplus It actually worked quite well. Occasionally a car would sneak in, but it helped the ambulances and firetrucks to skip a lot of traffic.
๐ ๐airchild ๐@jenniferplusplus For a moment I thought I had grossly misunderstood what you do for a living. ๐
@tankgrrl I mean, that's fair lol. You are the 2nd person today who had to double check on that ๐
tbh, I'm not mad about it
Netraven@jenniferplusplus wow that's cool shit.
@jenniferplusplus you see three lanes and I see deviated tramway tracks with Rasengleis and a boulevard with lush trees in the middle