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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.

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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.

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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!

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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?

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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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The new roads look marvelous, really really nice job making them.
Just a question:
- I think the park-like painting mechanic has been kind of overused recently. Will we have to deal with pedestrian areas upgrading until level 5 too or is it more like a district thing?
 
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The new roads look marvelous, really really nice job making them.
Just a question:
- I think the park-like painting mechanic has been kind of overused recently. Will we have to deal with pedestrian areas upgrading until level 5 too or is it more like a district thing?
We cover this properly in the next dev diary on Monday, but pedestrian areas do not have levels no :)
 
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But it did have a star rating shown at 1:56 in the video?
Shhhh! No one saw that! :oops: The star stuck around for the build used in the recording, it's no longer there when you get your hands on the game. Sorry for the confusion!

Do pedestrian areas permit busses and trams, and do they have bicycle road variants?
The pedestrian streets with dedicated bus-only lanes allow for buses, but I'm afraid we don't have any pedestrian tram roads in Plazas & Promenades. However, you can use the tram-only tracks and incorporate those into your pedestrian areas. Bikes will use the pedestrian streets like they use sidewalks when bike lanes aren't available.
 
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"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?"
More traffic jams... Cool :D:D:);):):):D
 
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Question:

Can these areas be used in conjunction with other areas? I was really looking forward to using them with university campuses and parks, so I would be disappointed if the areas cancelled each other out.
 
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The pedestrian streets with dedicated bus-only lanes allow for buses, but I'm afraid we don't have any pedestrian tram roads in Plazas & Promenades. However, you can use the tram-only tracks and incorporate those into your pedestrian areas. Bikes will use the pedestrian streets like they use sidewalks when bike lanes aren't available.
in this case - can we use those dedicated bus lanes anywhere outside of the pedestrian zones? :)
 
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Question:

Can these areas be used in conjunction with other areas? I was really looking forward to using them with university campuses and parks, so I would be disappointed if the areas cancelled each other out.

No, just like Campus and Park Areas can't overlap, Pedestrian Areas can't overlap with other areas.

in this case - can we use those dedicated bus lanes anywhere outside of the pedestrian zones? :)

Pedestrian streets can be used anywhere, but if buildings are zoned/placed on them, you will need a service point to take care of them.
 
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I love the look of those new pedestrian streets and the bollards being able to move. That is just so cool.

A little bit dissapointed to see the bus only roads being classed as pedestrian streets. Its good that we can use them out of pedestrian areas though but unfortunately this can only happen if we don't zone any buildings on them.

Also a little dissapointed to see the 'paint an area' feature being used again. Whilst I understand the need that buildings need to still be able to be reached by service vehicles and so the need for the area and service points mechanic. I feel like it would have been better to simply allow all service vehicles to go through the bollards to access the building if there is no pedestrian area or service point. However this is something that we can most likely learn to live with.

However at least this means that the pedestrian roads will be able to be used in park areas. That will be very handy I think.

Let's see what details the next dev diary brings us.
 
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Looks great! Glad to have more dedicated active mobility features.

Are there any plans for service points that utilize rail or if not is there anything preventing such to be modded?
 
As soon as first solutions to the pandemic have appeared I wondered when would Cities Skylines catch up with making the cities finally citizen-friendly... unlike most of real cities is
I don't quite like the solution that pedestrian roads still require service points if they're placed outside the pedestrian zones (and im assuming pedestrianzone will follow which is a bugger cos i don'twant buldings changing to those special ones for the zone)... but what do we have modders for

Also, but I guess that's gonna be subject of one of the next devs, if there are going to be 3 specialisation zones for pedestrian area, each for one of the zones (residential, office and commercial), how on earth we gonna zone it that pedestrian area with new commercial are and residential and so on, especially that one will zone 2x3 commercial, next to it 1x4 residential and followed by say 3x3 office and so on. What am I missing here now? Or shall I be patient and learn it on the 7th?
 
Presumably a one square gap would avoid a pedestrian road affecting a building?

pretty optimistic about this dlc unlike other recent ones. I’m sure it won’t be perfect but squares next to roads was sim city i played 30 years ago and game really needed this.
 
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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!
 
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