Guide to a successful road layout

Hello Mayors!

In this guide, I will explain some key concepts behind a successful road layout. I will also explain good ways to place your road when you first start a new city. Then tell you how to improve on that layout, as you earn more money and population.

The concept
Okay so, first of all. Lets think of what makes a successful road layout.

• Smooth, clean traffic
• Efficient bus system
• Roads placed so that you can accomplish everything you want in your city.

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So then, firstly : Smooth, clean traffic. How do we accomplish this? Well, there are a few things you can do to improve on this.

• Make multiple routes to certain places, so it spreads out the traffic more.
• Make sure not to place upgraded services (E.g fire stations) on: low-medium density roads.
• Have a high density streetcar avenue system.

- You will need the department of transportation and purchase a streetcar depot. Along with streetcar stops. This can be quite costly, but very effective 

• Spread out popular buildings, don't place schools, services or high traffic specialization close to each other. This can build up to many traffic jams on that one road.

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Next, an Efficient bus system. When making a bus system, I like to pick a street, then pick a building & just sit there for a moment and think about where there people living there would like to go. Once this is covered I think about how can I make the bus route faster. Well the solution to this is having MAIN ROADS. What I mean by MAIN ROADS, is basically - placed out high density roads that are designed specifically to get from point A, to POINT B. For example, a lot of people like to put one main road from the connection to the end of they're city.

Having a main road not only makes it easier to place bus stops, but makes sure that you don't waste your money on excess bus stops! I know I've done it in the past where you place bus stops until everywhere has that green shade of color on it. This is non-efficient and will result in higher waiting times due to people going to a needless bus stop, as well as needless expenses.

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Lastly, Roads placed so that you can accomplish everything you want in your city. Obviously it's not possible to do some things with your city. But I am talking about realistically here. Do you want a mining city? Electronics? High education? Etc.

If you DO, then you need a successful road layout in order to do so. It's best to plan sooner, than later. So before you start your city. You need to take into account everything you want to do in your city, before you
start building roads. I recommend writing on a note pad, what you want to do in your city. Then you can access it with ease in-game.

Once you know what you want to accomplish in your city, you can now think about HOW. This can be very tricky, but can also be very simple! It all depends on your approach. Just think about it in simple form. I'll give an example.

I want to build a city where the education is great and I specialize in mining lots of coal and sell it over the global market

- if so I'd need to:

• Layout roads, so that I can fit all of the educational buildings. I'd make sure there was enough space for excess classrooms too!
• Place the department of education in my city, therefore I'd need to make sure NOT to box-in my town hall.
• Have enough space for a coal mine and place the mine at the side of the city, to the direction of the wind. This way, the pollution would not harm my land value. But I'd need to make sure that I didn't box the coal mine in. So I'd have room for the three types of modules.
• Have efficient services. I'd need a good health clinic, as mining can result in quite a few injuries. So I'd need to place roads so that the health clinic can easily access the main road, to send off ambulances. Also I'd need to do the same with a fire station and fire trucks

That would be enough for me, to start building my city TOWARDS, the right direction. I'd know where I'd need to make sure something went, therefore I'd know how to layout the roads, in order to complete them four bullet points.

I would like to quote this member of the forum: GamefaceAA  , as he stated some good key things to remember.

"When you have things that have vehicles that come and go you need to try to understand where they need to go and the path they need to take to get there. For instance, I started a city that had a large blob of oil off to one side. There is ZERO residential on that side of the map. That entire half of the map was used to set up oil wells and to provide a clutter free path from the wells to the trade depot. The trade depots were set up so that the traffic from the wells and from out of city trucks didn't mingle with residential traffic. THAT IS CRUCIAL! There are a limited number of vehicles to transport goods within your city and there are also a limited number of vehicles that will come to haul those goods off. If they are stuck in traffic it will limit the productivity of the entire system as oil well storage fills up and the whole thing shuts down until it can get rid of the supply build up.  

From that foundation of a functioning oil industry, with all the trading infrastructure and transportation layout I eventually converted through a multi-stage evolution to a TV and Computer producing empire that is generating over 8mil/day in profits. On days when delivery vehicles get hung up it can drop profits below 5mil. On days when everything is super smooth I can make over 10mil. That's how big a deal traffic is. If it was completely hosed I could have all the same electronics factories and all the same trade ports but all the resources needed to make it work would be stuck in traffic and the factories would shut down until the resources they needed would arrive. "

Thanks GamefaceAA for that helpful information, I'm sure many people - including myself find it very helpful. 

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Starting out - How do get money in to build your city

I'd also like to point out, that the beginning process of starting out a road layout can be difficult. Unless taking out a bond. But we want to avoid bonds if we can. So the best thing to do, to get money in at first, would be to go to the road connection to your city from the region and place standard to medium density road.
 Then zone it with residential and some commercial. This is just temporary.  Here's an example:

From this (click for larger image):

Once that is complete, build up a small community and place your town hall. This is all temporary and later on after this, you will probably demolish most of that mini-community. Once you have enough money, build a high density avenue (which can later be upgraded to a streetcar avenue) across and 'move' your community to that area.

To this:

This community would now be the central part of the city. You can then move your town hall there and build up a larger population. Which you can then upgrade to a city hall.

You can then expand from there and build up a huge population.

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More about roads
Before, I go into the methods used to design road layouts. I'll state some key facts about roads.

• There are 7 types of road

- Low density dirt road, 1 lane, costs $1, (low density shops, houses and industrial only)

- Low density street, 2 lanes, costs $2, (low density shops, houses and industrial only)

-Medium density street, 4 lanes, costs $4, (medium density shops, houses and industrial at max)

-High density street,4 lanes, costs $7 (high density shops, houses and industrial at max)

-Medium density avenue, 4 lanes (medium density shops, houses and industrial at max, it acts as a main street for established towns)

-High density avenue, 6 lanes, costs $9 (high density shops, houses and industrial at max, for high population central areas)

-High density streetcar avenue, 6 lanes, costs $12 (high density shops, houses and industrial at max, for high population central areas & supports streetcars to relieve some transport congestion)

• You can upgrade roads by pressing the upgrade button. Note: you cannot upgrade streets to avenues, you'd have to demolish the road and replace it.
• You need road to build zones upon
• The guides on the floor show you the maximum space between roads to achieve the maximum density of zones for that road type. If you don't lead enough space, no matter how high the land value, the zones cannot reach they're full capabilities for that road.
• You can toggle the guides on the floor, by checking/unchecking the checkbox next to 'Guides'.

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Methods
I will state the pros and cons of some common road methods used. As a guideline to help you choose what method you would like and what ones to avoid. I will be adding more as I learn.

The grid - method

I have seen this system used so many times, often in industrial cities.

Pros

• Compact and does not waste space
• Park advantage, the park's effective radius covers the grid system well

Cons

• Can produce terrible traffic
• Hard to maintain
• Limits the space available for modules
• Cheap

I personally think this system is good to avoid, but experiment with it yourself. You probably could build a pretty good city with it, if you just placed everything right. Including a good transport system.

Curved branches - method

Pros

• Easy to maintain
• Looks presentable
• Plenty of room for modules and upgrades
• Efficient traffic system as the roads are long and plenty of spaced-out routes. If done positioned correctly ( Have around 2-3 main roads ), there will be no traffic jams.

Cons

• Can become costly
• Takes up more space than the grid method
• Wider-spaced area to cover for parks Etc.

I myself, use this method a lot. But it takes quite a lot of work to cover areas with the services and parks, it's also pretty costly and very hard to use at the start of a new city with a budget of only $50,000.

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Thanks for reading mayors! As I learn more I will continue to upgrade this guide.

Feel free to post a comment and/or reply to this thread to allow others to discover this post:
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9353857.page