Roadless Cities. Hey, it’s Possible!

There are several steps towards building a city without roads.
1) You can not (OK, it would be reallly hard to) build a roadless city without beginning with roads. Begin as you would begin any city, build it with roads between zones. You can replace these roads with rail or subway stations later when you have the funds to do so.
2) Build your city, without doing anything out of the ordinary except:
-You may, to increase land values slightly, place roads, with a space in between, thus creating three tiles between each zone. (Use a road along each zone so you can have their effectrange through the zone.)
-You WILL want to leave small parks between each 4x4 zone (or 5x5 for industrial) to place rail or sub-rail stations in later unless it is in the 3 space wide plot (see above exception).
3) Use the 14x14 method of building and place your industrial zones around the edge.
4) Once you are making money, and your population is about 25,000, check your health (life expectancy). If it is over 80, bulldoze enough hospitals so that there are about half as many beds as patients. This will decrease your LE, so that you will not have “Great Depressions” often, as roadless cities increase your LE to 88 or 89 because of the absence of pollution. See “We’ve Solved the Great Depression.”
5) Once your LE is around 60, you’re ready to build. This enables your city to grow quickly and easily. (If you want to post it at some point, simply build enough hospitals, leave the game on for a half hour, and Viola!, you can easily post it.)
6) There are various tactics for building a very good transport system in your city. Usually, to build a roadless city, you’ll want to combine an extensive railroad system with a large subway system. You can use railroad stations, but it is more effective to use sub-rail (which serve the same purpose as railroad stations and can connect to subways). See Is Subway-Rail better than train stations? There are two ways to do this:
-If you have left three spaces between zones, use train stations. Send your train track down the middle of the three tiles. When you neet a station, put the track around the station. Fill the rest of the land in with around the track with parks. These help raise land value. METHOD 1
-You can place the railroads as you would roads. If you choose to do this, you will want to use subway-rail stations. Put these in the end of each in place of one small park. METHOD 2


We find that using subway-rail is more effective unless you are creating a buffer zone between residential and industrial. You do not need to put tracks between each zone, all you have to do is put them often enough to have frequent sub-rail stations. Use subway stations to make all tiles within the necessary distance of transportation. (See # 7)
7) Make sure that all of your zones are within the proper distance from transportation. For the following zones, your transportation must be within the following distances of tranport, either diagonally or on a line, or a combination. In other words, sims will travel across tiles in any fashion, but will not travel more than the values below:
Industrial: 5 tiles.
Residential: 4 tiles
Commercial: 3 tiles
Or, use shuttle transport (see The Marvels of Shuttle Service)
The Marvels of Shuttle Service
See also How Far to put Transport from Tiles.
So, zoning 14x14, you should be able to use rail and subway to adequately supply all zones with transport. Note that if your zones are too far from transport, they will not develop or the buildings will abandon.

Strategy Home
Home