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> SimCity games may be really fun to play but they seem to reinforce this problem and anyone who grows up playing them will not learn about alternatives for more livable cities.

That's because SimCity is not a tool for preaching your personal opinions of what makes "more livable cities" to people who more often than not want to design semi-realistic, typical cities in an entertaining strategy game.

If you want to make your perfect city builder, go ahead, it's easier than ever now for somebody to create a game. Just don't expect everybody else to share your view of "aspirational", more so if you actively punish traditional city structures.

> to people who more often than not want to design semi-realistic, typical cities in an entertaining strategy game.[...] more so if you actively punish traditional city structures.

What you call "typical" and "traditional" is not in any way universal.

Or you haven't travelled a lot.

OP must of hit a nerve here but In games like city skylines a big difficulty of large cities built in the game is handling car traffic. A lot of which is solved by public transport, walking paths and other "apirational" city structures that are hard to realize in real life. I've watched alot of fun videos on youTube of a certain youtuber apply these techniques to other people's saves to great success. It's honestly a fun challenge to solve.

There are plenty of “chill and peaceful” city and town builders that trade realism for prettier, more idealized places.

In more simulation-focused games, cycling and walking paths are often available, and you can use them, but they come with many of the same constraints they face in the real world. In practice, that means they are usually not efficient as the primary way to move large numbers of people across a large city.

Reading your comment, it sounds like you want a game that is realistic in most respects, but treats transportation differently, in a way that makes your preferred options the optimal strategy. That is going to be hard to find, since transportation is a core part of city-building sims, and developers tend to pick either realism or a more utopian/fantasy model rather than mixing both in a single game.

That's not what I want at all. I want a more realistic sim that deals with issues such as sprawl, food deserts, transportation elasticity of demand, mental health issues (and their impact on crime and productivity), and a network-flow theoretical model of transportation and commuting contributes to all this. Building a bunch of sprawling suburbs that feed into a dense downtown core should make your citizens' commute times shoot way up and lead to misery.

A well-built large city isn't just going to be 100% biking and walking paths, it's going to have streetcars, light rail transit, subways, and buses as well as roads with cars. The difference is that people shouldn't be forced to commute across the entire city to get to work because you decided to cram all of the commercial zoning into one downtown core.

> The difference is that people shouldn't be forced to commute across the entire city to get to work because you decided to cram all of the commercial zoning into one downtown core.

Isn't the point that they should be, if that's how I choose to build a city, and they don't have to be, if you choose to build it otherwise? The entire point of a sandbox city-builder is, I assume, that it's a sandbox, and not a dogmatic interpretation of a childish Reddit meme.

It was pointed out elsewhere in this thread that SimCity already distorts reality in an ideological way: it lets you have tons of traffic without worrying about parking. It just gives you magical free underground parking everywhere that you never have to think about, in order to avoid the usual suburban parking sprawl hellscape.

What, specifically, does this have to do with my comment? Aside from being another opportunity to abuse a tired, ill-conceived soapbox?

The point is to illustrate that SimCity isn't a blank-slate, value-free sandbox city-builder. It has rules and those rules have been made deliberately unrealistic in ways that favour North American style cities.

It's like a fluid dynamics sandbox that causes water to flow uphill rather than settling into the valleys.

Car-centric transportation is not efficient. Not remotely. They have absolutely terrible bandwidth, and they balloon the size of cities apart the more you try to increase the speed to bring them closer together.

If you think Simcity and Cities: Skylines are realistic depictions, then ask yourself why Simcity famously has no visible parking whatsoever (or don't: the devs are on record saying they excluded it because it made the cities look terrible, there's no need to speculate here), or ask yourself why Cities: Skyline added car pokeballs (where drivers get out of the car and put the car in their pocket) or straight-up delete cars when traffic gets too heavy.

> Reading your comment, it sounds like you want a game that is realistic in most respects, but treats transportation differently,

It's the opposite, no? Most city builders cheat to be able to be fun. Like, with the amount of roads one build in Sim City, half the map would have had to been parking lots to account for that amount of traffic. But that's boring gameplay, so they remove that constraint to make a fun game. Aka you never have to deal with the consequences of making your city car dependent.

Edit: See another comment from CalRobert about exactly this.

The original SimCity was perfection - you could build no roads and nothing but rail! ;)

Cities Skylines with all the DLC and the right transportation mods gets pretty “realistic” in that you can build a transit paradise but the car still exists.

You have a weird definition of "realism".

[citation needed] that some combination of "New Urbanism, traditional neighbourhood design, streetcar suburbs, one-way streets, bike paths, walking paths, mixed-zone walkable villages (light commercial with residential), smaller single-family houses and duplexes, triplexes, houses behind houses." is not in fact optimal! (For certain objective functions)

Do we really need to jump onto a tangent about evil cars and evil car infrastructure on a post about b-splines and curve sections?

Everything in the article applies equally to trains and rails.

We get enough complaining about evil car-centric city designs on the posts directly about cars thanks.

I think GP is simply identifying a potential popular niche that could be satisfied in a future city builder game, which seems quite on topic.

Yeah, I don't want my preferred playstyle to be favoured, just treated fairly:

* Add all of the non-car transport options: walking paths (including underground and raised paths for walking between large buildings in the winter, a la PATH in Toronto), bike paths, buses, streetcars, light rail, subways, inter-city trains, high speed rail, ferries

* Add parking lots as a feature to all commercial and residential construction, require every car to be parked somewhere when not in use, but allow residents/property owners to decide whether to build parking or not

* Allow land-value taxes as an alternative to property taxes, as well as the possibility for things like street parking and pollution ordinances to give you levers to incentivize/disincentivize the construction of parking lots

* Simulate emissions appropriately from all transport methods

* Parking lots and heavy traffic should lower property values, as citizens complain about the ugliness, pollution, noise, and danger of excessive traffic

There's a whole conversation to be had about the design of games like SimCity and how it affects future urban planners, but that may be going too far afield. Still, I think it would be nice to have a game that doesn't reward car-centric planning while burying the drawbacks.

When I played Sim City, I gladly built super-dense neighborhoods with high-rises facing parks, and mass transit, Le Corbusier style. One reason was that they brought in enormous income, another, that they looked cool.

> One of the biggest problems with North American cities is their endless, car-centric suburban sprawl.

Most people consider that a benefit. It's just as livable as anywhere else. Just different.

> It's just as livable as anywhere else

People are totally entitled to like what they like, and that's OK. Everyone has something that works for them, and this world has a great variety of options available but the "car-centric suburban sprawl" is linked to various negative mental and physical health consequences. Negative health consequences, IMO, isn't "just as livable".

As a simple example, when people walk more during commuting instead of drive, they tend to be healthier. There are other more nuance (but studied) impacts, such as increased car accidents, mental impacts from increased isolation, etc. In America, there is even a correlation between how car-centric a community is and how often individuals are willing to seek out healthcare (even when accounting for access and affordability).

If you like living and spending all your day in your car yes.

I don't spend anything close to "all my day" in a car - I'm not sure what the absolutely over-the-top and completely-detached-from-reality, snide hyperbole adds, here.

Well that is certainly how it feels when I am in a city in north america.

A small errand that takes me 5 to 10min in my hometown takes me 45min to 2h in suburbialand. Worse, mutualizing errands do not even reduce the overhead of a single trip because infrastructure is usually made in such a car centric way that it makes it super inconvenient if not downright dangerous to walk from one huge parking lot to another one a couple of blocks away so you are kind of pushed to move your car, sometimes navigate a stupidly long loop to simply turn around and go on the other side of a stroad.

By the end of the day you realize you have barely done anything.

Funnily it makes it worse for both drivers and non drivers.

At home I usually opt to not take the car, not because it would be slow but because in many cases it is silly. It would be too short for the engine to even warmup and I would not have the chance to enjoy some time outside and/or exercise at the same time.

I totally see the impact spending so much time in the car and traffic has on my in law family's stress level and they do complain a lot about it while being seemingly unable to envision a better way of living and push for it at political level. It is also super bad on the security side of things because they often opt to take/make calls while driving for it to not make it time totally lost and aren't just as focused as they should be on the road.

Most of this is either a function of you not knowing what you're talking about, or hyperbolizing things. I live in the far suburbs of a mid-major city and am within 2 miles of 3 grocery stores, multiple shops and parks. That you can Google Map some specific hellscape in Dallas or Houston hardly makes either of those situations the norm, and even where they are, suggesting a normal, daily errand takes 2 hours is absolute nonsense.

At some point, it's time to leave the memes on Reddit and just not having Big Opinions about things you know you don't know anything about.

Yeah it's strange how some people think that squeezing people like sardines without any space for personal gardens is supposed to be a good thing. Density in European cities is mostly a historical artifact and something objectively chosen.

Huh, wonder what takes up all the space that could've been parks and gardens (hint: it's made of asphalt)

The creators SimCity itself were aware of the problems you mention. Ever notice how there's no parking lots?

https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...

They were aware of the problem and they covered it up, rather than try to show better ways of living. It’s unintentional propaganda for the crappy ways we build our cities. It’s worse than if they’d just show things how they really are.

this is definitely doable in CS (+mods), search YouTube for "cities skylines European" or something like that.

you need "plop the growables" and "move it" mods at minimum to nudge all the buildings close together.

Those areas aren't better to live in. They're just older parts of older towns so they don't have much wiggle room. The wiggle room was amazing for the more modern countries, except now we wiggle in a different direction too. An equal middle can be seen in Asian cities in Korea and China. They mix high density with high quality of life and little self sacrificing.

Neither US or Europe do living areas well due to their historical constraints.

It's subjective but many of us strongly disagree.

And, of course, the fact that the areas you say "aren't better to live in" also tend to be extremely expensive doesn't make a lot of sense.

Except for gates communities, living cost is mostly a function of closeness to high paying jobs.

I don't think that counters what I wrote? One of the benefits of higher density is having more high paying jobs nearby.

I a world where you only live to work perhaps. I'd rather work only so that I can live.

Can you not understand that other people like different things from you?

It's not subjective. These are objective historical constraints. History isn't subjective.

Living quality is not subjective either. Though living pleasure is subjective. Unrelated here.