This guide is to help you understand how to systematically reduce traffic, cars and parking needs in the game.
Based on the learnings of the problem, I come up with idea that to avoid having too many cars in the city, the only way is to solve the root cause, that is people moving into the city by car. So I opened a game with unlimited money, all land and technology are unlocked and started with high density areas with extensive public transportation. Specially, I deleted the highway entering the city, and all cargo or citizen entering the city must via railway or ferry.
As a result, there is 0 private car in the city after the population grow to 5000. Which provided my theory that if they didn't come in by car, there will be no car in the city.
However, I can not adapt the learning into my real game play, it is too expensive, and unrealistic. And I only want to control the amount of car rather than having 0 car city. But the learning inspired me how to governance the amount of car in my city, in realistic, and responsive way.
Principles on car governance
So far, everything works well. There was a bit financial challenge at the beginning because extensive public transportation setup. Which means you need to start education later and focus on wind energy at the beginning to ensure investment on priorities.
Hope this could help you
Understand the Problem
- High traffic will slow down the efficiency of your city and reduce profitability of all types of areas, as well as prevent public service vehicle reach to targets on time.
- Public transportation could reduce traffic, but citizens still need place to park cars. Many of citizens have car will continuous use their car even though public transportation is free.
- In order to have room for all cars, large amount of parking lot needs to be built. Charging for parking is never a good business, what ever type of parking lot we choose, it is either require too much land or too high maintenance.
- Public transformation can make parking lots worse because parking lots is charged every time a car coming in / out. If a citizen use public transformation and keep their car park in the parking house, we can only charge fee once and we need to pay for the cost every month.
- Even sometime we can get a profit from parking, it generate far less money than tax, if we can use the space for a medium+ density building.
Based on the learnings of the problem, I come up with idea that to avoid having too many cars in the city, the only way is to solve the root cause, that is people moving into the city by car. So I opened a game with unlimited money, all land and technology are unlocked and started with high density areas with extensive public transportation. Specially, I deleted the highway entering the city, and all cargo or citizen entering the city must via railway or ferry.
As a result, there is 0 private car in the city after the population grow to 5000. Which provided my theory that if they didn't come in by car, there will be no car in the city.
However, I can not adapt the learning into my real game play, it is too expensive, and unrealistic. And I only want to control the amount of car rather than having 0 car city. But the learning inspired me how to governance the amount of car in my city, in realistic, and responsive way.
Principles on car governance
- Right after your city reach to level 4, you need to build inter-city bus as first priority and ensure it connect to the inner-city bus system. This is the fastest way to give people an option to move in the city without a car as early as possible. You can fell the speed of car amount increase reduced a lot.
- Built extensive pedestrian road and bus system in your city, I normally ensure the walking distance between building and bus station within 300m.
- Don't build parking space in residential area, you can build roads with side parking, and charge to 50 when you reach to level 5.
- You can build expensive parking space in commercial area. In commercial area, people drive and go, that ensure a lot of people pay parking fees.
- Once you can afford train or ferry, setup passenger connection to all other cities as early as possible, then you will find majority of people moving in to your city will not by car.
- When you city have lots of population, setup lots of low density build area with cheap parking fees with a good distance around high density built up area, with very limited public transportation. That make the guys really want to drive able to park, and make sure them drive in and out to pay for parking again and again.
So far, everything works well. There was a bit financial challenge at the beginning because extensive public transportation setup. Which means you need to start education later and focus on wind energy at the beginning to ensure investment on priorities.
Hope this could help you