Traffic - Solutions please?

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@BlackjackWidow wrote:

 

The ratio is a good starting point to use. Think of it as a way to zone space; you'll want to zone about 3x as much residential as your commercial, and about the same amount of industrial. For example, if I were starting out a new city I might have a couple of roads where the zoning looks like this: RRRRRRCCCCRRRRRR (upwind) and this: IIII (downwind - those are "i's" for Industrial). Think of each letter as a click of the zoning tool - or a couple of clicks, depending. I'm honestly so used to it now it's kind of second nature - don't get too Type A like I am or you'll drive yourself crazy lol.

I went in to see if I could find the max number of shoppers a commercial building can hold; most of my cities have high density buildings atm, so didn't get a full sampling. fwiw: Low Wealth High Density (LW HD) 582; MW HD 502; HW HD 465. Also, LW MD 47-57; LW LD 10; LD HW 7.  Wealth class and density affect both capacity for shoppers/tourists and workers.

A couple of other things you may notice: there are 24 hour commercial buildings and 12 hour commercial buildings. The ones that are only open during the day employ less Sims and support less shoppers than the ones that are open 24 hours. When I get into my over-managing mode, I bulldoze anything that doesn't stay open overnight to help with my number crunching. 🙂 

Here are a couple of screenshots of one of my cities, to show the zoning. (Not my best-running city, was tweaking it a while ago and kind of forgot about it - but good for layout purposes) The commercial is difficult to see, but is in the center of the residential.

As far as freight goes - I rarely even worry about freight. In the extremely rare cases that I have a message about not enough freight being delivered, it's usually due to traffic/transportation issues, or I accidentally left a freight warehouse in one of the trade ports. Other than that, balance the jobs and shopping, and freight is not an issue. 

Hey! Thanks again for such a detailed response. It's really really helpful!

So, I had enough of the traffic in my City and decided to almost start over...I closed all services and allowed the service vehicles to return and then completely demolished both Residential and Commercial areas, removing a few service buildings as well.

I have now re-zoned using your method described and I am absolutely amazed at the difference it has made. I assume because I am playing an already aged City, the Sims immediately started constructing high density buildings and three low income HD residential buildings next to two low income HD commercial buildings provides enough jobs and shopping and ALL the Sims walk!!

I already have 56 thousand Sims living there (a third of my previous City) but almost nobody drives!

I just wanted to add a couple of things, perhaps I can help you slightly by return. I went through all of my Cities and demolished everything in each City except one building. I have learned that a low income HD commercial building sells 355 products, so will please 355 Sims. Low income MD sells 38 and low income LD sells 7.

The Mod you use correctly determines who lives at each type of Residential building, whether that be low income, med income or high income but the amount of work for Sims at Commercial and Industrial buildings aren't measured correctly, from the look of it. I noticed low income HD commercial buildings with anything from 425 - 725 Sim jobs, but actually the game offers a much more rounded and reliable figure of 600 low wealth jobs, 100 med wealth and 10 high wealth.

I plan on completing my research and publishing my findings on the forum for all to see. It might help those of us with a tendency to desire the perfect City 🙂