Truna's Avenues and Highways

When I began to play with SimCity4 I realized that the metropolitan areas where somehow very sectioned because of the different street distribution and few linking points among cities. Then I took some time thinking in possible distributions of streets to create a more intelligent distribution that could enhance the road communication of cities.

Posted on May 2nd 2008 I showed the street distribution I was setting as an ideal, then I followed that distribution on al blocks of Truna’s areas.

In the previous image you can see that the web of highways spreads uniformly over all the small cities of Truna, giving it more mobility.

Diesinueve’s transportation

Diesineve has moved from car to public transport use, it is very expensive however to keep routs out of congestion in subway, though streets are easy. The most used transport is car, then bus and finally subway but buses and subway together are more important than car, you can verify it in pedestrians data.

I am working to diminish the air pollution by increasing the number of subway lines available and the number of bus stations.

Diesinueve

Diesinueve is the most populated district of Truna, however it lacks of industrial areas, it is growing based on commercial services and offices.

I have spread services such as large elementary schools, high schools and hospitals, churches are also spread almost uniformly over the district and police stations and fire fighters are the same.

Truna; the experimental City

After I have shown the principles I am using for designing an ordered city, I want to show you some pictures of Truna,my experimental city, and the highest density district of it.

The first image is the general view of Truna.

Truna is a 1.5 million people city, spread over a large surface without hills, rivers or lakes, this makes a bit hard to densify this city because of the lack of natural sights that are attractive to sims.

The crowded portion of this city is “Diesinueve” in english Nineteen. I realize that when having strong industrious neighbors, cities do not need to create new industrial emplacements, but have good communication systems to them.

Street distribution in some of my Simcities

Something that was very usual in cities of Renaissance is the use of square block distribution oriented east-west and north-south. This kind of distribution is quite clear in Guadalajara’s México downtown, founded in 1542, the years of Charles 5th of Germany and 1st of Spain.

Though Spanish people also had arbitrary twisted streets in many of their medieval cities, they found that in Atemajac’s valley, where Guadalajara was founded, there was no need of saving space or avoiding cliffs or big hills, there was no big river that challenged the trajectory of streets. So most of streets of down town where quite straight and parallel between them.

Many urbanism specialists have seen this special characteristic of Guadalajara very interesting if we realize that it was founded in times when no car motor was already invented with all the needs it carried with for cities infrastructure.

So, even these days after more than 450 years same streets keep giving good service to city needs.

That is why I have decided to make square blocks with long straight streets.

In SimCity 4 game we can see that there are 3 different sizes of squares, the smallest one has a dimension of 64 units of construction by side, the medium one has 128 units by side, and the biggest one is 256 units by side.

I struggled to find an arrangement that could fit accurately in all 3 sizes and that could give me the opportunity to have all kind of avenues and elevated freeways. Next picture shows the model of arrangement for a 64X64 area:

This image contain an Excel worksheet where small cells contain a letter and color that calls for a use, for example, gray cells with a letter “a” mean “Avenue”, “f” mean Freeway, “r” mean Road, “h” mean residential, “c” mean commercial.

So if you can see I have provided this small portion of land of many ways. It is easy to see that this kind of distribution will be very expensive in the big regions, that is way it is necessary to have a plan of the hole map in order to avoid improvisation and patches everywhere, because you can start in small portions of the hole region with a plan for the hole area that will be set as resources get higher with time.

Some cities that I have done with simcity 4

Hi, my name is Jorge Carrillo, I am from Guadalajara México.

Today May 2nd 2008 I am starting this space to share with you all my own experience with Simcity 4.

I will be publishing images of my cities and explaining what decisions have I taken to place buildings, zones, streets, avenues and services.

To me, the most ordered city I have met is Toronto, I see that people form that city took very seriously the need of good services and good trace of streets and avenues,

They also have taken advantage of the place and its flatness making a very orthogonal mesh of middle size avenues that spreads for miles and miles.

In the left picture I am in the sky-pod of CN Tower, this picture was taken when Burj Dubay was achieving CN tower record as the highest structure built by human race.