That's when you go subway. 
Normally I'd go to bikes too, but that's not in the game explicitly yet. I'd build lots of walking paths and plazas/parks/commercial/offices etc in that ten block zone, to take traffic off the streets. (That does require extra spacing between the buildings, useful destinations, and oddly sized blocks).
So, I'm pretty happy with my current city.
The traffic isn't broken at 45k pop.
The solution was basically highways everywhere and more on/off ramp intersections. That and lots of buses. With good routes I'm getting about 30k/44k pop users. Could still be better I reckon with more deliberate planning around transit hubs. But not quite time to start another city yet!
Also, not cramming in too many blocks of high density zoning.
Trains are good as well, because they help bring people moving in without the crush of cars that typically comes with a mass increase in housing.
I wish they'd balance the tile costs better. It limits the freedom to create more interesting pockets of development. Instead I'm kind of increasing the city like a lump of biomass to sustain ever increasing city costs. I could bump up taxes but it slows down building level ups.
Yeah, highways everywhere is one answer, but it creates a lot of noise and they don't have easy crossings for pedestrians. The 3 level road system is better.
For example, you don't want (or can't put) buildings adjacent to a highway. So already, you need a smaller frontage road for building access, and on/off ramps to get cars back to the highway.
Large roads are designed to move cars around once they are off the highway, but when you put building frontage right on the road, that will interfere with the traffic flow as vehicles change lanes and slow down to access buildings. This lessens throughput and, also, large roads will fill up during rush hours just like in real life, so your gain will only last as long as it takes growth to get you to that point. It's a false promise. Large roads are for traveling, for example, from your Industrial area to the highway, or setting up a commuter road that takes traffic from neighborhoods for relatively long-haul drives around the city.
Medium roads are great for dense areas, though, and small roads for less dense areas. Often small roads are not "through" roads, to prevent shortcut traffic from swamping them. This leads to the development of neighborhoods. Again, if you have a pair of high density buildings near each other, you can set up a small frontage road (like you'd use to take a school off of the main road) with a parking lot so that the cars don't just stop on the medium road and interfere with flow. (This requires laying out the buildings with frontages on the small road "U" or loop, leaving a strip of land on the medium road for, again, parking or parks or whatever).
Huge masses of buildings with no intervening area and little mass transit are going to dump so much surface traffic that your roads will be crushed under the pressure of the traffic, frustrating residents. Don't just dump five high density buildings on a road in a short area and not expect traffic problems.
If you break up dense developments with support infrastructure like paths (no cars needed to walk), parks, parking lots and some service buildings (schools especially, welfare office, etc) AND make sure that offices and commercial are mixed so a large percentage of people can walk to work, then you can put your high density areas on medium roads and just use the large roads to connect the mediums to each other and the highways. Citizens will walk to local shops (mixed use buildings are great), schools, parks and to visit neighbors.
Then, add in cheap or free busses, and a robust taxi system, and you're off to a good start reducing traffic. It's cool to see lots of people on the pathways that are laid across blocks (they connect to sidewalks and create their own crossings). As your population grows, get a subway going and remove even more traffic from the surface.
Traffic signalling is a whole 'nother thing.
Also, I'd argue strongly that if you find new areas too expensive, then you either need to raise taxes/fees (like bus fares and parking fees), or slow down your population growth so you're not putting out as much money to support all the people and the services they use.
There's another issue, and that is that you want some less than perfect housing for young and new residents. So max leveling every building actually means gentrifying your city, and problems will come with that as the wealthy crowd out lower income people (who do a lot of the work in the city). Build some affordable housing with cheap transit as well as the classic types of housing. (If you do this adjacent to a university, guess what? - students will move in lol).
City Planner Plays is doing some new tutorial videos on YouTube explaining the highway / arterial / collector / local road hierarchy thing and how it applies to CS2. He usually refers back to the real world and how to apply it in the game.
Don't just dump five high density buildings on a road in a short area and not expect traffic problems.
But but this is how I played Sim City
Jokes aside, it's a combination of things. I'm used to Sydney's core CBD (basically a continuous Wall Street / Manhattan with most of the rail infrastructure underground) where all street frontage is utilised. But as you say, this creates super traffic snarls. One thing I got better at was being more deliberate with high density commercial, isolating that from creating choke points within a high density cluster by not putting them deep inside the precinct.
I've only used the smaller laneways for loops sparingly (as you end up with 2 intersection points off the larger road and intersections kill traffic flow). For example to get a hospital off traffic so its ambulances can easily access multiple roads. I've been experimenting with longer blocks dissected with walking paths and raised pedestrian walks too.
I've never used this image sharing site but let's see if it works:
So here's the city I'm working on. You can see the stupidly high density core experiment with circular highway systems to get people in and out towards the foreground. It was to see how dense I could get without breaking the traffic - population 4,600 or so.
In the job breakdown for the city, you can see every position is just about filled EXCEPT for university graduates.
This suggests I don't need to create more affordable housing (then I'd get an unemployment problem for the newcomers to the city). What I find works well is just zoning in industry and offices to absorb newcomers - each workplace has a range of job positions for the uneducated/educated/highly educated tiers and what ends up happening is you'll never completely fill the highly educated tier as occurred in this particular city.
The beginning tiles are still low density/row housing/medium density sprinkled with mixed commercial and a smattering of high density. Traffic flow is generally good in those areas.
If that was an experiment, then hey, do what you like. My advice was functional for general purpose scenarios.
The advice is solid, don't get me wrong.
Where it stops working is a density like HK/Manhattan/Sydney. At that point, every road functions like a collector due to sheer head count of people trying to move around from home to anywhere.
The high density cluster worked out ok up to 20k pop so far. Two things kept it functional - an extra exit highway ramp and an underground metro. Buses it seems are a problem beyond a certain number - even with huge numbers servicing a route they jam up loading/unloading passengers.
Okay, okay, okay! Patch 1.18 is very, very near, and contains the homelessness fix, and 8 new subcategories for the Decorations menu to dress up your city.
Frankly, the homelessness problem is why I have not played since July, so I'm very excited to see this. First, they used to have a random element that gave a percentage chance that homeless citizens would seek housing in the city. That's gone now. Also, since they will look for affordable housing, high-density residential demand will be increased - build those apartment buildings! And in order to make sure that new households moving in don't grab those apartments before the homeless do, it reduces the spawn rate for new households. (I believe this likely takes into account how many homeless there are, rather than slowing growth as a whole, but I don't know that for sure.)
They say it will take a while for the homeless to either find new housing or leave the city, and having robust external passenger connections will help this process along.
Woohoo! My city is back in business! Or... Maybe a new one. I haven't been happy with some choices I made... Hmmmm...
Just build a prison and arrest all the homeless! (jk)
Welp, I started a new game with the latest patch, homelessness not turned off, and with the French asset pack. It's huge and it seems to slow the first startup after you install.
However, it's gorgeous. I love the new buildings and assets. They are also in different sizes from the others, so there's potential for interesting new block layouts in terms of units used. Alleys or pathways behind buildings will definitely be possible for many of these.
I don't have a bus line set up yet but I do have taxis going in and out. I intend to have a free bus line to the outside connection, to let homeless who can't get back in a job get out. I've set up one park and someone immediately put up a tent; fair enough. I want to be sure the system works as intended over time. Everything else is solid and the game is great fun.
It is, however, childishly easy to get lots of cash by charging for parking. That does affect household spending, though, so don't go nuts with it. I use it to get my services going, start selling electricity, and then later, once the city has grown, I make the parking cheaper, and free in certain areas. And if you want to reduce the cars, just make busses cheaper than parking. Bearing in mind the round trip costs.
Man, I'd kill for bikes and the road lanes and paths for them. Can't wait. Also, pedestrian streets are fantastic, especially in mixed use neighborhoods. Taxis and busses can use them so you can make some interesting neighborhoods with those.
Thanks for the impressions, Robear!
For me, the game is fully playable now. I have not gone beyond about 50K pop but just the learning and experimenting and fiddling with design ideas has occupied my time very satisfyingly.
I no longer build huge blocks with no space between lots. I leave room for small parks behind houses, and paths through the middle of blocks leading to useful places, and pedestrians use them quite heavily! You can also put in alleys, so if you have enough space behind your French buildings, an alley can be used for even more interesting designs. Or parking, I think.
Don't forget that open space can be added to parks via the Surface menu, I think that's the one. So if your small park has space "behind it", you can open that space up by extending the park boundaries (like you do with the garbage dump or agricultural areas, etc), run paths through it to sidewalks, put in decorations and such. And people will use it! (I just always what menu allows the parks to be expanded lol.
For me, the game is fully playable now. I have not gone beyond about 50K pop but just the learning and experimenting and fiddling with design ideas has occupied my time very satisfyingly.
I haven't picked up CS2 yet, is it worth it now? Would you play it vanilla, or are there "must-have" mods?
I'm playing it vanilla, with one exception - the regional theme packs, the first of which was released a week or so ago (French). You might want a more modded experience.
For me, definitely worth it. I put a lot of time into CS1 so I'm a fan of the genre.
Thanks for the feedback! I played CS1 a lot and enjoyed it, but it was pretty heavily modded, to the point where if I went on hiatus and came back I was overwhelmed by the mods I'd have to reinstall and relearn.
I think it's always a good principle to start with vanilla and then mod. That's me, but the reason for me is that if you depend on so many different mods to enjoy the game, then you may find it hard putting together the right mix for a new one, and bounce off it.
Keen to get back into it at some stage with the new assets.
What I learnt from two 100k+ pop cities is that I need to plan integration of mass transit and leave space for transport infrastructure. That, and not to fill every map grid with high density Resi or commercial.
Exactly. That's different from CS1 - you won't get away with "one size fits all" planning. Which is a pretty cool difference between the two.
The third Region mod pack is out, the largest yet, about 7GB. UK Regional buildings and props. Also a patch will drop tomorrow. It will take a bit to retrofit the Region packs for that, so be prepared.
The UK buildings are amazing.
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