Roads: A few tips on layout and upgrading cheaply.
First of all, I noticed that residential buildings only care about and affect the two blocks of road they're connected to but if they put too much traffic on the road they're touching, they'll affect the whole road up to the nearest intersection on either side. As far as I can tell, only residential lots will cause traffic complaints. The layout of your road system doesn't seem to matter (this means adding more roads to your city will only take up space) The way I layed mine out is parallel single roads, 4 squares apart, the length of the map with only one road that connects them all at one end (so it's kind of like a fork) This leaves plenty of room for single square buildings like clinics to go where the perpendicular roads would normally go.
If you've upgraded a residential and suddenly have too much traffic on that road but not enough money to upgrade the whole strip of road it's connected to, there's a couple things you can do.
1. Move the building to a different road with less traffic. Shuffling them around can cut down on total traffic.
2. The goal of this one is to put an intersection at either side of the upgraded building by adding a road so if you have buildings on either side of it and across the road from it, temporarily move them until you can get the intersection in there. Once this is done, you should only have to upgrade the two blocks of road right in front of the upgraded building. When that's done, just 'doze the roads and put the temporarily moved buildings back.
The layout of your road system doesn't seem to matter (this means adding more roads to your city will only take up space) The way I layed mine out is parallel single roads, 4 squares apart, the length of the map with only one road that connects them all at one end (so it's kind of like a fork) This leaves plenty of room for single square buildings like clinics to go where the perpendicular roads would normally go.
