You don't need 6 lane roads, just make sure you dont have residential buildings on both sides of the road and use 2 way streets like me, it will save you a lot of money.
Expensive road upgrades happen when your blocks are too long.
By "block" I mean any straight stretch of road between intersections (or corners). All the buildings facing that single section of road add their residents to the load of that section and the buildings are often packed tightly together (because there are no cross-streets consuming land). You get more buildings in the area, so good for you, but you suffer the need for better roads to allow all those residents to get around. Put in cross streets (make shorter blocks), so when you get the need to upgrade the road, you might be able to just turn a building to face the cross street so not all the buildings are using the same road. When you do finally have to upgrade a section of road, it is significantly cheaper to do a short section, so even if altogether it will cost about the same, it's easy to do short sections one at a time.
You're the Mayor. City planning is the hardest part of your job. Don't cram in as much as you can. Let some light in.
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KillingUGuy2 wrote:
Good suggestion but it didn't work for me. Really frustrating im only level 15 and had 54000 residents but now I have over $50,000 in 6 lane road upgrades that I can't obviously afford and lost half my population. Being hit with the need for 6 lane uogrades so early i the game is just wrong.
Make sure that residences are on only one side of the road, and they will not need to be higher than four lanes. I have a population well over 300,000 and not a single six lane road to be found anywhere in my city. Happiness is at 100%. The pattern I use for roads is a long snaking loop road that has almost no intersections. This would not be ideal in the real world, but Sims don't know that cross streets will shorten their commutes, so they don't complain. One block is wide enough for two residential buildings, the next long block is only half that width, except where I've widened it for specialty buildings (like the university). The blocks alternate, and only the wide blocks have residential buildings in them. There is only one actual intersection in my entire city, and that is near the freeway interchange.
Good luck.
XP is appreciated but not required.
The Long And Winding Road makes sense too. The main idea is that shorter road sections means cheaper road upgrades and with not so many buildings on any one section, it takes longer for a section to be overloaded. By orienting buildings so that only one side of the road services buildings the load is reduced substantially. But... using only one side of a road means the roads must consume more ground, and space out your buildings so that each Service area doesn't cover as many residences.
Regarding my previous suggestion to have more cross-streets, remember we don't have to connect a street on both ends. You can have a dead-end road, and a short one will at least split the long road into two (shorter & cheaper) sections and allow the residences beside the short block to be turned to face it, reducing the load on the main road.
Regarding the snaking layout, if the game allowed a complete and easy restart (as it should) I would enjoy challenges like making a city with only one intersection. Great idea, artistically. Too bad there's no easy way to share the view.
Can you all provide a pic of your cities? I'm not quite getting this snake road thing. My city is already laid out (380k population) with lots of intersections in a grid pattern.
