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Plazas & Promenades Dev Diary #1: Pedestrian Areas

Greetings mayors, and welcome to another set of Dev Diaries! Are you excited about Cities: Skylines Plazas and Promenades? Over the course of the next two weeks, I will walk you through all the new content from pedestrian areas and streets to new specializations and service buildings - and plazas of course! And without further ado, let’s have a look at the announcement video:


At the center of Cities: Skylines Plazas and Promenades we have pedestrian areas and streets, which give you the tools to create neighborhoods focused on walkability. These will work to reduce traffic as well as noise pollution. To ensure you are able to create areas suited for your specific city, the pedestrian areas work with all existing zoned buildings!

Creating Pedestrian Areas
Pedestrian areas take advantage of the Area Tool, which you may be familiar with already. It can be found in the Districts and Areas menu and becomes available when you reach Milestone 3 - Tiny Town. Paint over empty land if you want to create a new pedestrian neighborhood, or over an existing part of your city if you wish to turn it into a pedestrian area. Like other areas and districts, it can be adjusted later as needed.

1-1 Pedestrian area.png

Paint a pedestrian area to unlock service points

Once you are satisfied with the area, it’s time to place a Service Point, which can be found in the Pedestrian Areas menu under Parks & Plazas. Service points are essential to pedestrian areas as most vehicles, including garbage and delivery trucks, are not allowed on pedestrian streets. Instead, garbage is automatically collected from buildings on pedestrian streets to be picked up at the service point. Similarly, resources, goods, and mail are all routed through the service point, so make sure it’s placed on a road that can handle increased truck traffic!

Service points come in two different sizes and three different types: The general Service Points, which cover all the listed needs, Garbage Service Points, which focus on waste management, and Cargo Service Points, which handle resources, goods, and mail.

1-2 Service points.png

Service points are vital for your pedestrian areas

The different service points are important as they each have a capacity and if the area exceeds this, some buildings on pedestrian streets will not have their needs taken care of. Large pedestrian areas will need more service points to provide for the buildings on pedestrian streets, and depending on the mix of buildings in an area, you may need a higher capacity for garbage collection or cargo delivery.

Pedestrian Streets
With the pedestrian area created and a service point placed, it’s time to place pedestrian streets! These paved roads can only be used by walking or biking citizens and, when necessary, emergency vehicles like ambulances, hearses, police cars, and fire trucks. As citizens are the main users of the pedestrian streets, vehicles have to obey slow speed limits unless responding to an emergency.

We have included a lot of variation in the pedestrian streets so that you can customize the look and feel of your areas. There are 3 styles: Sandstone, Bluestone, and Cobblestone, which come in two different widths. Each street also comes with 5 different variations with things like added grass, trees, and bus-only lanes. That’s a total of 30 different pedestrian streets for you to choose from!

1-3 Pedestrian streets.png

Bluestone on the left, Sandstone in the middle, and Cobblestone on the right

As you’re building your pedestrian streets, you may go outside the pedestrian area you defined earlier. If that happens, the streets will automatically extend the area to follow them. This option can be enabled or disabled when placing the streets. Pedestrian streets can also be placed outside pedestrian areas, but keep in mind that any buildings placed on these streets will need a pedestrian area and a service point to function.

Lastly, pedestrian streets come with a cool new little feature: Bollards automatically appear at the entrance to pedestrian streets to discourage vehicles from entering. When a vehicle needs to enter or exit the pedestrian street, they will stop and wait for the bollards to retract into the street before driving past. Isn’t that cool?

1-4 Bollards2.gif

Bollards retracting for a waiting police car

That’s all we have for you this time! In the next Dev Diary, we’ll cover the management and progression of pedestrian areas, so stay tuned for more information on Monday at 4PM CEST / 7AM PDT! And don’t forget to check out the video tutorial by Overcharged Egg below:


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Weyird said:
When parklife came out with the park area tool I thought it was a really good and unique way to deal with the problems of trash and services to buildings not on a road.... but now you just do that for everything and the number of areas is getting too much.
While it works gor C:S; I really hope that a more elegant solution is found for C:S2 when it gets made!
Click to expand...
That star thing makes me wonder just how much of the code is copy-pasted between DLCs...
 
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Weyird said:
but now you just do that for everything and the number of areas is getting too much.
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I was gonna ask that question since Parklife came out, and probably someone else did (and I missed the answer).

Do Park/Industrial Areas count towards the district limit? Are they included in it?
If so, can we have the limit increased four-fold? at least ;) 128 is too few

The solution at the moment is to have one Park/Industrial/Pedestrian area extended - as in a current zone to a new seperate place where one wants to build new park (or whatever) and then cut it off from the rest by de-zoning the bit in between. Which is OK but not when you want to create different parks or industrial areas with different ideas behind them.
 
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co_avanya said:
With the pedestrian area created and a service point placed, it’s time to place pedestrian streets! These paved roads can only be used by walking or biking citizens and, when necessary, emergency vehicles like ambulances, hearses, police cars, and fire trucks.
Click to expand...
Wait, does this mean I can fulfill my super lock dreams by integrating regular roads into pedestrian areas?
 
Weyird said:
When parklife came out with the park area tool I thought it was a really good and unique way to deal with the problems of trash and services to buildings not on a road.... but now you just do that for everything and the number of areas is getting too much.
While it works gor C:S; I really hope that a more elegant solution is found for C:S2 when it gets made!
Click to expand...

How many DLCs has this 'main building and paint an area' function been used in?

Parklife, Industries, Campus, Airports.

I believe that's all of them. I don't believe Sunset Harbour used this idea at all.

The thing is that yes the functionality has been used a lot but that's because it works and works very well.

I think this is the first DLC where this functionality has been used and I'm questioning whether this is actually the best way to go about this. I feel like rather than force the player to use service point buildings it should be possible to use these roads outside of pedestrian buildings and zone buildings on them like normal and the vehicles go through the bollards to access the buildings like the emergency services. However there should be something to push the players to use the service point buildings when there are lots of buildings on the street e.g. pedestrians complaining about too many vehicles using the pedestrian street or something.
 
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Danbyization said:
How many DLCs has this 'main building and paint an area' function been used in?

Parklife, Industries, Campus, Airports.

I believe that's all of them. I don't believe Sunset Harbour used this idea at all.

The thing is that yes the functionality has been used a lot but that's because it works and works very well.

I think this is the first DLC where this functionality has been used and I'm questioning whether this is actually the best way to go about this. I feel like rather than force the player to use service point buildings it should be possible to use these roads outside of pedestrian buildings and zone buildings on them like normal and the vehicles go through the bollards to access the buildings like the emergency services. However there should be something to push the players to use the service point buildings when there are lots of buildings on the street e.g. pedestrians complaining about too many vehicles using the pedestrian street or something.
Click to expand...
I think going back to the Specialised districts (tourism, leisure, IT office) would have been the better route. But I suppose it doesn't allow for effective integration of pedestrian zones.
 
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Not too fond of how the service points are implemented. Looks like something that is highly exploitable. What's stopping the player from making the entire city a pedestrian district, thus removing the need for cargo and garbage trucks to enter the city at all? Also, if you were to build particularly small pedestrian zones, having to build one in each district would take up valuable space.

I think it would've been better if there were lightweight variations of cargo and garbage trucks that are allowed on pedestrian streets (e.g. cargo bikes and mini electric garbage trucks). In addition, service points can be built anywhere in the city, but preferably nearby pedestrian zones. The lightweight trucks will then spawn from the service point and service nearby pedestrian zones. The service point will of course have to be supplied with cargo from the industrial zones.
 
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dj97 said:
Not too fond of how the service points are implemented. Looks like something that is highly exploitable. What's stopping the player from making the entire city a pedestrian district, thus removing the need for cargo and garbage trucks to enter the city at all? Also, if you were to build particularly small pedestrian zones, having to build one in each district would take up valuable space.

I think it would've been better if there were lightweight variations of cargo and garbage trucks that are allowed on pedestrian streets (e.g. cargo bikes and mini electric garbage trucks). In addition, service points can be built anywhere in the city, but preferably nearby pedestrian zones. The lightweight trucks will then spawn from the service point and service nearby pedestrian zones. The service point will of course have to be supplied with cargo from the industrial zones.
Click to expand...
I'd have just allowed the garbage trucks and cargo lorries to go through the bollards myself.
 
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I assumed the DLC will only add new pedestrian networks without changing much in the game's behavior. What I didn't expect that it uses the same mechanics as Parklife, now I understand why this is a major DLC and not just a simple CCP.

However, it is unusual to me that "pedestrian area" and "park area" are completely seperate instead of being in the same category? Parks also use pedestrian paths in them. I think this should have been at least merged with Parklife DLC.
 
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Beer Fiend said:
I'd have just allowed the garbage trucks and cargo lorries to go through the bollards myself.
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True, that too. I just figured the reason why they didn't allow that in the first place was because they didn't want big trucks driving through pedestrian zones, which I can understand. But I just don't like how buildings in pedestrian zones don't have to be serviced by trucks at all, and are being serviced altogether solely through the service points. Just sounds like a cop out to me.
 
Beer Fiend said:
I think going back to the Specialised districts (tourism, leisure, IT office) would have been the better route. But I suppose it doesn't allow for effective integration of pedestrian zones.
Click to expand...
I actually agree with this. This is how it should have been done in the first place in my opinion but now the mechanics required for this to function for all of the DLCs have all been added to the 'area' mechanic so they are too far down the rabbit hole to make any changes.

dj97 said:
I think it would've been better if there were lightweight variations of cargo and garbage trucks that are allowed on pedestrian streets (e.g. cargo bikes and mini electric garbage trucks). In addition, service points can be built anywhere in the city, but preferably nearby pedestrian zones. The lightweight trucks will then spawn from the service point and service nearby pedestrian zones. The service point will of course have to be supplied with cargo from the industrial zones.
Click to expand...
I love the sound of this idea. Would be really cool if the service point building could back on to the pedestrian Street then you see big trucks go in one side and out the other side comes small electric bikes/vans. But then you wouldn't see the vehicles use the bollards.

This is something that I've seen IRL in big pedestrianised city centres they have a sort of small electric maintenance that drives around slowly with its Amber beacons on emptying all the rubbish bins and picking up and litter dropped.

Beer Fiend said:
I'd have just allowed the garbage trucks and cargo lorries to go through the bollards myself.
Click to expand...
I think this would be fine for small pedestrian areas and if the amount of trucks is low but once it reaches a certain threshold it should have the cims complaining and sort of force the player to use a service point instead.
 
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Beer Fiend said:
I'd have just allowed the garbage trucks and cargo lorries to go through the bollards myself.
Click to expand...
Avanya would have to confirm this but they may have tried this approach initially. I agree with Danbyization, there's probably a balance issue with garbage accumulation and cargo delivery systems that requires the service point thing, especially when the areas are larger.
 
Will different style roads like cobblestone be available also for regular roads or only for pedestrian?
BTW get rid of current police car please, most cars look okay but you can see on that video that police car has attrocious proportions and doesn't look like an actual car. Something Ford Crown Vic inspired would be much better.
 
i understand one same area can be paint x time as pedestrian, RCI, park etc but I wonder, how does it work for areas with policies based on traffic ? :)
 
Here's a thought.

As the ped zones are utilising the Parklife mechanics, coupled with the acheivement, does this mean that each zone can only be resi, commercial or office, or are you able to mix them?
 
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