A City Planner Plays Cities Skylines: Suburban Sprawl | BC Ep. 57

well everything has to come to an end at some point including bluffside crossing [Music] hello and welcome back to a city planner place where we are building the city of bluffside crossing for the last time i started this city uh on august 16th of 2020 and that's a little over 200 days ago at this point and i didn't think that anyone was going to want to watch me build this and i i want to start this episode by thanking all of you um without your support especially in those early episodes and i was really struggling with audio and video before i had my gaming desktop and i was building this city on a dell xps two in one laptop you guys stuck with me and let me learn how to become a content creator with you and for that i am i'm very very very appreciative uh but with that said i feel like it's time to end this and you know it's it's it's bittersweet i mean the reason why it's time to end this is i wasn't as organized with this build as i want to be and that's because at the time i didn't even think about it it wasn't something that i really um thought would be important but i know that many of you like to build along with me and i have some big plans for the next series and in this one it would be very difficult to implement those plans so um then there there are some things i would i think i would certainly change if i were to start over and uh i want to take those lessons that i've learned and implement them in my in my next build so this is going to be it for bluffside crossing and what we're going to do today is there there's one thing in particular that i didn't take care of uh probably in episode 15 i said we were going to do it we named these two suburban neighborhoods over here never did anything with it so today we're gonna finish these areas up then we're gonna have uh a couple of city tours and really dig into bluffside crossing and then at the very end of that if you if you still want more i'm going to upload this save file and you can take a look i'm going to be completely honest with you guys up front and say that there are a lot of assets and mods in here and it's not organized in a way that is necessarily easy for someone who doesn't have a lot of mods and assets but if you do a lot of them are fairly common and you can feel free to to grab it and and do what you please to the city so today we are going to work on this build i thought it would be neat to start out looking at the skyline because it's really you know it's it's it's really impressive when you when you actually consider how much we've built whoa how much we've built uh over the last 56 episodes we've uh we started out what what we start out by just thinking about where the city started so one of the very first roads that we built was actually this road right here and our interstate used to actually come to here kind of loop down and connect into this and then we had a road coming up here and we up zoned everything into the in this area to be what it is this area kind of remained the same built down towards our tram depot and we built this oil industry that we eventually redeveloped into this suburban neighborhood you know and a lot of other things along the way we obviously built along the river and all of this has changed this was our initial uh public works facility and it was all industrial right here so a lot has changed and evolved over time in a way that i think is logical and and uh makes sense but there are certainly some things i would change about this build um i think that i've evolved as a player you know i mentioned early on that i have a lot of hours playing this game but before becoming a content creator i never really used a ton of mods or assets i used basic mods move it you know traffic manager but i didn't really go into a lot of depth i had growables but not much beyond that so uh through this series i was able to to really dig into mods in a way that i hadn't before and now that i'm much more well versed in some of these mods i think i would do it a little bit more cleanly than last time so anyway i know that's a little bit of a walk down memory lane and uh this is one of the reasons that i've kind of struggled to create this episode is that i've been you know it's a bittersweet thing for me this launched the channel i do like left side crossing i know how many of you stuck with me through all of these episodes the hours and hours and hours of building and uh it's it's sad to leave it but you know all good things come to them but not the channel just the city so we are going to build these suburban neighborhoods and what i want to take a look at right off the bat is the grades that we see here and they are significant and they um they're going to make building anything here a challenge similar to this neighborhood so there's something to consider with this neighborhood as i said this is going to be suburban in character and what makes a suburban area a suburban area and i don't mean this in a in a derogatory way it's just kind of the way it is suburban streets collect traffic and bring people to a place for it to stop and urban streets are interconnected and they're meant to give people a variety of routes to get places and you can see that with these suburban roads here we've got this road that is really meant just to funnel all this traffic to these these houses and these residential streets don't really go anywhere it's not meant to take you anyplace significant now if we look in the downtown area you'll see that there are all these different streets and if you were a pedestrian or a cyclist or a motorist you would have multiple different ways to get to every single destination and that's really one of the core differences between an urban and a suburban area so density is also another thing but not all urban areas are dense and not all suburban areas aren't i think i might have said that poorly but i think you get the picture right here this is a fairly urban neighborhood there again are multiple paths to get else to different places i think we could have improved this um but it's low density in in an urban setting over here over in hillcrest we have a dense area in a suburban setting it's certainly more urban than suburban but it goes to show that there are multiple different contexts within these areas that said in this area we're going to pretty much focus on a residential demand have low density maybe target a couple of areas with density and a town center and really think about this as a subdivision so when i say that this right here is a subdivision this would have been developed by one developer they would have come in presumably i mean it could be multiple developers but maybe one developer came in platted the neighborhood they could have sold off lots to individual home builders or they could have decided to build all the homes themselves and as a result you end up in a situation where there is nowhere to connect into here so they didn't leave a path for another street so rather than my next neighborhood connecting into here um the best i could do is probably a pedestrian connection and i'm gonna have to go off this arterial for another collector so we have two different names here and i'm thinking that these are two different subdivisions so there i could be forward thinking about this and leave in a street i think what i'm going to do is a local street not a collector i will have collectors only in this area and are only in each of the subdivisions to really drive home that these subdivisions were developed independently of one another so let's let's come up with our basic roadway network through here we're going to try to use the topography at least for the collectors because we don't want too much grade change we already have a lot coming into the neighborhood okay so that is our first collector i figured i'd use a little bit of youtube magic and turn off the day night cycle okay and next we're going to want our collector for agnes banks so we have riverstone and agnes banks and we're going to to create these separately but still have some connectivity so that residents of these neighborhoods would be able to at least visit their friends presumably in the other neighborhoods okay so now we have two collector loops uh this is pretty terrible but this is uh kind of what i would expect to see develop in an area like this if there was very little planning influence and in some cases you can have communities that will go ahead and lay out all of the uh oh sadness lost the match you could have a community that will lay out all the all of the arterials and collectors in some cases they'll leave it all up to a developer or they'll lay out just the arterials and then you can end up in a situation like this which is unfortunate because the last thing you want is kind of a crazy disjointed roadway network that really serves no one well but that's what we're going to do here so we're going to the the core tenet of what we're going to try to do here is maximize our developable land and making the streets as absolutely quiet as possible so we're going to do that by meandering roads we will have cul-de-sacs and then we're gonna have lots of grading after the fact to make sure that these we have significant building pads you know for each of these areas so here we're gonna try to maximize some water views then we're gonna take this road and have a fairly steep curve up then what i'm thinking is it might be neat maybe neat's the wrong word maybe what we need to do is actually take a look at our roundabout builder actually we won't do a roundabout i've been i've got another idea [Music] [Music] okay so what i've done here is not create a cohe coherent roadway network i basically just tried to maximize the land use and privacy in this area so that's the main goal in this entire area right now it's not to make a nice place to a nice connected roadway network it is to make sure that everyone has their little piece of the pie and they are alone with just their neighbors so i'm just sloping things a little bit because we have some odd stuff going on and we'll need to do some grading to fix this all up at the end but what you can tell is if we take a look at our zonable land everything here is zonable is not and nothing is connected so we're going to want to do a couple of things to potentially make sure that we have as big a lots as we can have in certain areas so we have right here our toggle zoning it's not going to matter much there in fact it's making me think that maybe this round this this roundabout here cul-de-sac rather not roundabout isn't necessary [Music] actually we want to make sure that we have as much here as we as we absolutely can and i even used one ways here that's not necessary it's around it's a it's a it's just a cul-de-sac nobody cares and it looks well that's interesting interesting design that's the fun part of uh suburban layouts they can look like faces and madness so here i think we're going to do one worse and there is something ironic in my mind about going out with kind of a kind of a wonky crazy build so here i'm making a roadway network that is purely to benefit the developer so you can see here there's a little chunk that would be a big parcel but for the most part we've just made sure that we can develop every square inch of this area now another little area that's going to be similar to that will be right here we just want to make sure that we can develop along the problem along the waterfront there's a fairly flat area right here so we're gonna loop this around one gigantic cul-de-sac it is terrible and then they wouldn't let this go to waste either although i could see the city demanding a park so what i think we're going to do is we're going to we're going to say that there was some sort of negotiation between the developer and the city they didn't want to pay a park impact fee and the way to do to get around that would be to to donate land that's high and dry for development of a park so they developed hat they donated half this parcel and the city deemed that to be enough to satisfy the park needs for the park and recreational needs for this neighborhood so over here we have riverstone and in riverstone i think we're going to do another suburban style neighborhood we're going to try to do a little bit better or to at least try to have connectivity we're going to do better than this this again is you know it's there's some connection there's path connections i feel like that's pretty stereotypical in a suburban area we're going to build a town center here and that will be what separates this area from this other area which is just going to be completely residential one of the things that i think might be beneficial in an area like this might be some short sort of grocery store so one of the things that was mentioned was heb okay there we go it took me a little while to find it heb grocery store so i'm not familiar with this grocery store myself i know it's from texas not a place that i spent a lot of time in i sometime but not not a ton unfortunately that was a place the american planning association conference was supposed to take place in houston in uh april 2020 and i was going to go i actually had my flight booked and and all that good stuff and my wife and i were all set to go because she was going to come and we were in a vacation afterwards and it was canceled so i still have texas on my list of places i want to go uh but it's gonna be a little while longer so i think i am gonna break hierarchy at least temporarily temporarily to add in this road through here i might actually make this a service road which would kind of act as a collector in that way so what i'm trying to do is just make an area that i can designate as the area for this grocery store and i want to make sure that it's going to be wide enough clearly it's not this is going to have to be a consideration for me as i redo this this road so i'm just putting the road there temporarily i'm putting hcb there temporarily we're not going to face it that way but knowing that this other neighborhood really doesn't have much serving it i would think that this would be the most logical place for this and the city would certainly encourage in a comprehensive plan to develop this grocery store in a place where it would serve both neighborhoods now i need to turn off anarchy before i make some really truly crazy things happen because it's it's ah it's coming it's coming you can already feel the craziness it's already starting so this is not a very level level site so why don't we start out by just moving this unfortunately i can't move it so i will just oh that's probably not helping so let's start out we see let's get our topo lines on so we have a lot of we have a lot of topography challenges in this area so we'll make this a little bit bigger i think we're going to be very gentle with it though and i think we're going to decorate the side of this wall with some sort of decorative stone this is after all riverstone so we should have something to celebrate or commemorate that that name [Music] kind of kind of regretting removing that road only because i can create a guide across from here then delete this road then put it back level with this new area that's a lot easier than what i might have had to do otherwise so let's get rid of the trees in here we have a whole bunch of trees kind of in crazy spots we'll re-landscape after the fact i don't love doing that part of the reason i don't love doing that is that oftentimes when i'm looking at a site plan where they have to identify particularly on a plat uh where the old and where the old trees are where historic buildings are where unique features are and we'll look at the the natural environment and want to to really make sure that if they can get away with saving something like a 100 year old tree that they they do to me that makes perfect sense that tree's not going to look like that again in any of our lifetimes so why wouldn't we want them to preserve that tree if they can but we're gonna go rogue so and it's interesting i'm looking at this and now because of where the slope is right there i can't get the store in which is fine that's a place for landscaping the more concerning thing is that i've actually placed this road in a place where i need to scoot the grocery store over which makes perfect sense but it still kind of stinks i don't know that short of having this road meander through here that i can do much more for it and that's what we're going to do we're just going to kind of bring this through [Music] there we go we will force that road to fit with anarchy good enough for me all right so now i just want to go through you can kind of see there's some lumpies and bumpies going on here i don't want any of that not in the parking lot if i can avoid it so i'm going to go through and just really take a a hard look at this and really flatten it out and we will need to do something to soften this after the fact but you know especially in a grocery store you you wouldn't imagine there being a very steep um a very steep parking lot that would never fly uh one of the main reasons you think about carts you really want carts rolling down a hill probably not [Music] okay so i had to use a little bit of anarchy here to get this to work but it's completely fine uh i would have preferred not to but sometimes you just gotta take some liberties to make this that make this stuff actually happen and i think it's turning out okay so one of the things that's going to be a little bit of a concern for me is the aisles going through to break these up i want to try to get these to have some sort of logical termination and right now these these are kind of weird in the back okay so i'm going to use move it take these nodes in the back and just kind of pull them forward a little bit because we're getting some weird stuff going on and honestly all of this is making me think that some of these lots that i'm creating just aren't all that good yeah i'm not excited about how this is turning out so what i'm going to do is try to make a smaller lot for that first one and eliminate this and that'll be just fine in fact what i might want to do is actually take a look at the length of one of the parking lot assets and just see how it fits in there maybe i will finagle this to fit appropriately so i like to like take a look at maybe the 4x2 [Music] so i could take this and make my job a lot easier here just drink that up it's not perfect by any means there's a lot of wasted space here i would be very curious about how this company would feel about the amount of parking at the site because truthfully it looks a little bit shallow a little bit a little bit small to me in fact the more i look at this the more i think we really need to make sure that this aisle is as long as the others as we're ideally hoping to get or i should say not we the store is hoping to get ideally probably twice as much parking area as the store itself thinking that on their busiest day of the year which you can figure for a grocery store it's going to be the day before thanksgiving most likely they're going to be completely packed all the way to the back of the lot and maybe then some people circling so that's the day that they're rightly or wrongly planning for and so they're going to come in with a plan that accommodates that day for better for worse [Music] so we are going to need more than one entry point into this development so i think that this might be our opportunity maybe we'll just move this over just a little bit [Music] and that's that's a lot better now i think that we want to flatten some of this yeah that's that's much better we can work with this okay so i'm gonna leave this for now we've got this in place we'll figure out the rest later do some detailing we need to figure out the rest of our neighborhood the rest of our zoning in this neighborhood actually a couple more things this is a shopping center let's add in a couple more uses so with this walgreens i'm giving them a drive aisle all the way around assuming that they would have a drive-through most likely not the most beautiful we can fix a little bit of that right now that's better much more beautiful and then they would want a significant sea of parking around them as well [Music] okay so we've got the parking we want and or walgreens wants and i will i will continue to clarify that because i don't think this is a good idea but i think it's what would be requested and approved so there we go we've given them their parking they are happy we didn't actually add any parking stalls to any of these so i'm going to quickly go through and do that so i just added a bank of parking in here thinking that this is probably where you would expect to see some of the accessible parking at this at this particular location and that would be very important to walgreens i will give them that i think that they would really want to make sure that the elderly and disabled people that might be accessing this this location have a sufficient amount of parking available to them [Music] oh we have two different walgreens i was wondering what this other walgreens was it didn't have a sign or that didn't have a picture two different assets oh green walls [Laughter] now we're gonna we're gonna stick with walgreens i like that a lot more okay so good enough there we'll also need some parking here so i will work on that now as well we have some issues here with our heights which is kind of why some of these areas are dipping below the ground let's actually get the store as well we're just aligning everything to this intersection here hopefully that will fix everything for us we want this these parking stalls to be as clean as we can to get them to be [Music] so i started on the wrong side and as a result the the accessible stalls are not necessarily where i would hope uh or not ending where i would necessarily hope that they would so i'm gonna need to think of a creative way to solve this because i don't want it just to have an empty gap let's see if i have a cart corral all right and that is way bigger than i was hoping for so that's not gonna work but this one so it's gonna be weird that these are right up front i could do a whole bunch of finagling to try to make it a little bit better i think that ideally maybe this would be in the center but clearly but i think that we're gonna just fudge this a little bit just to fill in the gap and i apologize to anyone out there offended by this so i know it's wrong i know it's not right [Music] okay so now we've got our shopping center we'll do some detailing when we do detailing with the rest of the neighborhood we do have more residential to develop and i think we'd see kind of a wall of commercial in our town center i think we'd also see some transit if we could it might only be a park and ride you know this is very a very low density area i don't know why anyone would want anything beyond that out here because i don't know that you're going to see the ridership that you'd need but you never know you could lobby for it i could certainly see it retrofitted and i just i should say that if it were planned as a as a greenfield tod it's not unheard of that it could it could happen but out here the type of transit we'd have available to us anyway would be rail so we're not gonna get rail out here unfortunately and i have prop anarchy on so uh that is awesome i will make sure that's off okay fun trick upgrade the roads trees leave perfect we don't need these roads to necessarily perfectly mirror but i thought it might be nice to try to kind of kind of mimic that roadway pattern that's out here at least in this town center type of area and i could see this being a mix of town homes or other sorts of development that is more dense but still in a suburban context or apartments that would be the other thing that would make a ton of sense to me in an area like this now one of the challenges in an area like this because i don't have things perfectly spaced you end up with kind of wonky street networks where you know the developer's not going to want to pay for any more roads than they want to pick than they need so right here there's connectivity all the way through it loops back around you can get different places they'd probably offer a path here because that would be significantly cheaper and the city might take it for better or worse they'd find a way to sell it you know privacy maximizing the number of saleable lots we have connectivity in other ways and you know it's better than the last neighborhood which you can tell the plan was not put together very well because it really wasn't a plan it was just freestyling to maximize saleable lots that's not planning now this is one of our traditional bluff side crossing crazy topographic topographically mind-bending road connections we'll try to do a little bit to make it a little better but i don't know how much we're going to be able to do here that's just kind of the nature of some of these roads we do have our mods and that's one of the things that is tough for me after i so i play in in verde beach we're not using any of these mods like node controller which by the way is a fantastic mod and it's probably one of those that i miss more than others just because of the appearance it can give some of these slopes i mean it just huge huge difference okay so we're gonna mirror this we're gonna make another connection and mirror it over here and loop back into this collector again remembering that these are two subdivisions we have our one road connection that i promised we we would add in here and that's about all we're going to do now typical to these subdivisions we're going to want to maximize the distance between these connections and then we'll go back to maximize our saleable lots and design our neighborhood still with saleability in mind but we will have some connectivity as well and then we'll have a road coming through here just to make sure that we can sell all these lots in the middle they would have good views so i could see these are bigger lots but we're still going to be able to sell a lot of them and now here i would imagine that either this developer would want to develop a long here or you would have this developer come in and attempt to kind of snake in something crazy now this would be limited by distance um you can't have without a plan for an ultimate connection you're gonna you're gonna be limited in the distance of this cul-de-sac and even though they might say we're willing to build a road way over here doesn't matter that's a cul-de-sac and if there's a fire there's no way to serve this there's just it's it's unsafe so put a cul-de-sac there it still stinks but it stinks less than a neighborhood that's dangerous so i'd rather have a neighborhood that's poorly designed but we can serve it with this fire and police department we have here then a neighborhood that is completely unsafe and designed like this so this is a critique of some suburban planning absolutely i think there are really great examples of suburban planning that you know is considerate of the built environment that is focused on connectivity and a build environment that you know is really good that really makes sense that will be able to evolve over time but you can end up with environments like this too in these environments getting feisty in the last episode not keeping the water pipes that's too much i need to turn this off that's the problem you know what i can't leave that either [Laughter] the main problem with this neighborhood is that you you'll never be able to reuse any of this property in any significant way without acquiring a whole bunch of it and demolishing everything so what i mean by that is if you think of an urban block or even a you know an older suburban neighborhood they are built in ways that the lots can be reused to be other things so that's why you know an old industrial area can become lofts in the future because the lot sizes and configurations allow flexibility and for uses to change over time but a suburban residential neighborhood doesn't allow for much more than a suburban residential neighborhood and that's a real tragedy in my mind because it means that at at some point in time when this land is redeveloped well it has it has two fates fate number one is that it becomes a neighborhood that that kind of spirals that eventually for whatever reason this investment in the neighborhood becomes a thing and as that occurs there's no way to improve the use sort of demolishing everything that's in there which is a real tragedy because you can't develop a history in an area if you are demolishing everything every 50 to 100 years or it just kind of it kind of becomes blight and that is not good either that said what we're going to do is make this neighborhood because they're ubiquitous at least here in the u.s you'll have these neighborhoods that you know it's just you know that it's going to be difficult to do anything more with them than what they are but there's a market for them people love them that's why they still get built they're profitable for better for worse and all that communities can do is really try to disincentivize that sort of development or outright ban it with their zoning codes but we don't really have a zoning code in city skylines so to speak we can fib a zoning code as i've shown in some of my tutorial videos but we don't we don't we don't actually have a zoning code and we don't have the ability to adopt a form based zoning code for certain that would change this and the best we could do is bluff side crossing would be to to actually go through and develop neighborhood plans and tell developers you develop this you'll get approved no problem you can you can propose whatever you want but you're only going to get a guarantee of approval if your development looks like this okay so i'm just going through and i want to clean some of this up it's lumpy and bumpy to the extreme so we're going to feather things out here so this is by no means perfect but it's significantly better we're going to take this we will try to make this slope a little more gradual this has been here for a while but i don't like it so and i'm not coming back to this city so here we go just back it out smooth it out you get lots uh or a significantly better outcome so i don't want any zoning along this arterial so i do think that we're going to take care of this right now this will maximize our lot size in our neighborhood and it'll just make sure that i don't make any mistakes here so that's that that's the main thing i could i could go ahead and do it myself it's just not what i'm hoping to do i'd over here i didn't have this mod and you can see that i you know didn't as a result i didn't zone in that area but it was really painstaking okay and for the time being i'm gonna pause this so actually no i'm not we'll just let this go for a second i just want to take a look at the city services and see what we might need we have a huge amount of elementary capacity high school capacity we could use one our elementary our university capacity is terrible interesting library usage not good either we might need to put a maybe we'll put a college somewhere there's just not really we'd want to make a a separate campus so maybe not a college we definitely need a high school though it's interesting though that we are that far behind so i think we're gonna we're gonna have an institute of creative arts high school we're gonna put that right on this local road now like i mentioned this area is going to be a park now i think that we can work in some of our high school amenities over here and create a really unique park space that said we're going to want this to be a level road and we're going to level all of these to this intersection and then we'll slope down from here wow that is a significant grade chain so again i've mentioned the plaiting process repeatedly today this is the kind of thing we'd want to see these slopes up front so that when we're looking at uses like this we would know that they would work so it certainly doesn't take this form terraform here but it's certainly um this these are considerations so interestingly i think at this roundabout or this cul-de-sac was a little bit higher some of our issues here would be resolved yeah i don't know that that was better so i might yeah just yeah i'll take that down no need to to get overly crazy and make perfect the enemy a good this is a fine area it's it's good enough i should say it's fine for what it is maybe that's a judgy way of putting it but i don't love that there's some interesting terrain stuff going on here might hop out of here [Music] so i'm adding some pedestrian crossings in anticipation of the high school that we're going to add there's some interesting stuff going on here i don't know why half of my crossing is missing but it is so this is uh you know part of part of the reason i'm looking to purge some of my mods okay so we don't we don't need to get fancy and make this a park area but we do want to have parks in here so let's go ahead and add a couple of parks so one of the things i like to think about with parks in general this is something you might think about yourself when you're designing your next part is when you're when you're designing up a place like this you could mirror the path network on the outside so i was actually reading this book and uh it was talking about park design theory and so you could go through and mirror a connection here and now you've made an uncomfortable connection to walk to or you could make a desire path or a likely desire path a diagonal something that would be difficult for people to otherwise do and it's just it was an interesting thought because i know that i've designed parks in the game where i'm not making a shorter path a path that people would want to choose over just using the sidewalk but i know that i've certainly i've certainly been guilty of that so i'm gonna do this right and create some some more interesting so interestingly this basketball court has to be within a park or along a road and i kind of want to use them maybe not that bad so [Music] yeah we're going to have to make this a park area if i want it to be significant enough we'll have to make it a park area not the end of the world [Music] i must have a main gate so i'm going to add a main gate and delete it because that is the part that i'm most reluctant about [Music] so all of that stuff i just said about parks we're gonna throw that right out the window because we want to get baseball in here so i want to think about the orientation of the baseball diamond clearly we're not going to want to hit it and hit balls in the traffic we also this is going to be a challenge because we have topography this might be the most acceptable way of going that said i don't know how we make this work topographically so maybe we won't i don't think that we would have something yeah that's a major no we're not gonna do that so instead maybe we'll have a community pool over here that could be something that i could see being rational in this kind of an area now these buildings are all crying for that main park gate that i demolished i was really hoping i could get away with not including it but we have to have one we'll just make sure that there's no fee to get in here and truthfully we'll try to make sure that it is something that feels like an amenity in this area and i was going to put some side gates but truthfully i don't even want them i didn't want the main gate and i'm not going to put in a side gate i was also gonna get cute with the uh with the angle there but we end up with these really in my mind off-putting uh angles uh and then turns and i just i don't like them so we're gonna we're gonna get rid of those as well we'll come through here and just add in these pads that we had again and truthfully i don't think we need a ton here maybe a playground and then some grating and then i think we're gonna call it a day in the park and get to our zoning and then our detailing ultimately so in light of getting some weird bumpiness going on here i thought maybe it'd be nice to curve this path and make some some a connection that i guess is at least a little more interesting if it's going to be wonky it should be interesting i think it's a park so having a meandering path isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world you'd expect and anticipated so we can cover up some of this stuff with landscaping oh palm trees lovely [Laughter] looks like we've we're going to verde beach it here a little bit all right so we're good there i think we need to get some homes in this area and some commercial in a targeted way along this main entrance so let's do that now [Music] so i'd love to make another connection through this parking lot to this collector for connectivity's sake but i know that walgreens would likely battle about it being a cut through and i would agree with them it would be i do want to get some commercial activity in this area though give the high schoolers something to walk to because you figure for lunch time i don't know if this place would be open campus but if it were they would absolutely want to be able to walk places at lunch so now we have a whole bunch of stuff going on here absolutely no utilities maybe we should consider putting utilities in so we have this nice suburban power line i guess i say nice power line in it's as nice as a power line is gonna be i would say that it's always preferable to have or almost always preferable to have underground power if you can get it but it's not always possible and you just have to understand the limitations of what you can do so for the most part now i think that we are just like like i mentioned the entire time we were planning this we were planning this to absolutely maximize the amount of land that we could zone and that is what we're gonna do so i do i didn't want to put a fence in here necessarily i just need to be very careful zoning in this area because i am going to just kind of go through and put in a swath of zoning so this is another thing in my mind that and as i say that i still zone it anyway another thing that kind of separates suburban zoning from suburban planning from i guess not even planning suburban design versus uh urban design is i think in a you're not really thinking at the block scale anymore in an urban area you're thinking more at the street scale and in a suburban context you're still kind of at that block level you're thinking about blocks or sub development level it's just a different way of looking at things but i do think that it's less intimate i wouldn't think that the developer is really giving much thought to what it feels like on this street what does this street feel like they might be thinking about the setbacks you know how usable is the space in between the house and the road they're certainly thinking about sidewalks but it's not the same as thinking about the character of a roadway and what the experience walking along that roadway is going to be like what the experience of parking on that roadway is going to be like what the experience of biking on that roadway is going to feel like it's just a different mindset in a different context i mean in this suburban area you would likely be more concerned about personal privacy you know space the ability to stretch out uh it's just a different different type of place it doesn't make it any worse necessarily it's just different [Music] and maybe i'll take that back it is it is certainly not there there are problems with this kind of design it's it's not sustainable okay so we have gone through and fixed our junctions we've gotten rid of any junctions that are likely unwarranted so we do have this local street that's connecting up to directly to the arterial i don't love this we could upgrade this to be a collector we're really deviating from hierarchy and you know what happens so as we're going through this i want to do a bit of detailing now and i know that one of the things that's been mentioned is i don't add enough rocks so this is riverstone so why don't we add some rocks along the side here [Music] okay so now we're gonna go through and add some landscaping to our parking lots i think that we would want to see all of these these uh islands to have some sort of landscaping in there it could be the same kind all the way through i think that's less concerning than than the fact that it would have landscaping at all okay that is a lot of landscaping they would certainly not be okay with that much let's let's take two here we'll call a mulligan if we're gonna call a mulligan i think landscaping is an okay place to do [Music] you can see here we just have you know relatively we don't have very good spacing [Music] 25 meters maybe that's still not great [Music] just using my eye dropper to go through and grab one more tree i noticed on the on the islands we need one more to kind of round it out on all of these the eyedropper is such a great tool because it gives you the ability to just quickly select something without needing to search through a bunch of menus when you have as many assets as i do at this point in time it's just so beneficial so i think there would be a retaining wall here you know i could try to force a key in there a key wall but i think understanding the the time limitations we're just going to make sure that we have enough landscaping in here that is nice i like it i like that a lot so i do think i want to watch this neighborhood build out so what i'm going to do is just set this here for a minute and let this run and watch it build so i've let this run for a while we've had some verde beach problems and what i'm noticing is that we're just not growing the way that i hope that we would so i want to do something about this so let's take a look at what our city needs what it needs is commercial zoning so what we might want to do so i know that i've gone through and i've added in a number of residential number of residential parcels in this area i think we're going to take whatever is not zoned for residential except for this little house right there and we are going to add in a little bit of commercial and this to me would make perfect sense this again is that collector but if we're gonna do it it probably should be everywhere so i might use a bit of eminent domain or call a mulligan on these residential homes here [Music] unfortunately okay so now with this i would assume that things will get better soon but assuming's never never a wise thing to do so we'll see one of the things that i regret right off the bat is i didn't set a building theme so i know that that's going to mean that trailers spawn up in this area if i don't do something about that okay so i have added in some themes and i've made sure that these neighborhoods are no longer are not historical because i do want if the buildings are going to redevelop into something i want to make sure that they redevelop into something better this is my concern we have trailers randomly coming up in here that is not what i wanted we have another trailer best view in the city so you come up here you step out and you see a wonderful view of the water that's perfect so it's just not a very cohesive style and you have these these apartments kind of springing up in randomly as well another trailer so i might go through here and just kind of eliminate a few of those sorry trailers okay so i've gone through and i've eliminated most of the out of theme buildings and what we've seen now is that most of the commercial has developed and we still do not have this residential filling in because we don't have enough workers so i think that that's an education mismatch and i want to take a look at that so one of the things i know is a problem as i mentioned before is if we take a look we have high school we have elementary we do not have university and there's no place to really head to the university over here so i think i'm going to add in a community college we will have that on kind of a frontage road over so we've got the star point community college that will work why don't we eliminate this road here we'll just extend this one out just a bit have this be the ending point i do think that we're gonna need a parking ramp so let's get one of those then we'll do a bit of grading to make this work this would not be the ideal location but at this point i'm just trying to fit this in this is me taking some liberties because i don't think that this would actually ever in a million years be placed here but we have the freedom of making unreasonable judgment calls here so we're going to take that free whoa whoa okay so i meant to be feathering instead i was leveling so not not a not a great thing to do and we are just bleeding money right now and we have prop anarchy on so that's awesome so again now i want to make a connection to the road and that is going to be steep and i understand that we have another path connection over here there's not really another suitable place to make a connection actually what we're going to do is going to be even better let's go ahead we'll make a connection here we'll eliminate this connection we'll add in kind of a meandering path from this road let that reach right here and then we'll go back into node control we'll make that crossing same thing right there so now we at least have a safe pedestrian crossing for all of the university students that are the victims the community college students that would be attending this college [Music] so there's 2 500 students that can attend this community college and it's it's a good start but it's certainly not the be-all and end-all and it's probably not going to get us to where we need to be to remedy all of our concerns over here but what you can see is that we are starting to fill in this area a little bit more our commercial demand is ticking down and our residential demand is starting to tick back up which is impressive when you consider how much residential we have zoned right now already because that's really suppressing our need so when you see that it tells you that we're doing something right so another thing i want to do is make a path up here there's a lot that is terrible that is not a very good connection i'm embarrassed but it is the connection that we have so we're gonna run run with it and roll with it we should really be looking at our terrain here because we are cutting across some significant grades to the point that this is unreasonable okay so we have our path view again and there's a lot of stuff going on here this is not a fun place to add a path in fact i don't think we can until we fix some of this craziness around here oh whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa i whoa that was not what i wanted to do but i think it's redeemable [Music] i can at least take it back to where it was the challenge of this is some of these roads just shouldn't be here um i mean that this is so steep so you know if i could do this all over again i probably wouldn't have have come all the way down this far it's just a little bit much there's not a lot that i can do to make this better unfortunately sort of get a really wide brush and use that as the basis for my feathering we have unlimited soil so that certainly helps and the other thing that might work is just coming in at a lower angle [Music] and starting our our cut across here and we could we could have a switch back but i don't know we will we will see if i can yeah we're gonna have to switch back and that is a whoa that is a very steep path this to fix this would probably take some time uh we would need to go through and actually grab a pretty small brush i'd say 15 go through select our height and actually lower it and raise it on either side of the path that's the way that you would ideally fix this in the game in reality you would grade this first so that would prevent most of these sorts of issues from occurring as much as i want this to be fixed this is the very end of our time here so i think i'm going to leave it oh it's painful for me i need to be i need to be reasonable with the time and not spend it doing those things so at least we're seeing lots of activity here and that's going to get our community college filled up 900 kids more adults kids and adults lots of fires let's get our fire coverage it's pretty bad um we will sneak in a small fire department in this neighborhood not the best neighbor not the worst neighbor they love it it's helpful it's loud i'd love for it to be over here unfortunately all this land in this crazy design area filled in first which i find to be endlessly fascinating the service coverage is significantly worse yet still it's obviously deemed to be a more desirable area i'm not sure why but it is we are having death care issues i don't know that this is a great location let me move this over so at least serve this area a little bit better and you're starting to see that we're filling in now in fact there's not much more until our neighborhood is done i'm gonna just drop some landscaping in here quickly i'm going to avoid the park in fact what i'm thinking is i might just remove all of the landscaping in the park and then do that after the fact now i've been reading some park planning theory and one of the things i read is that rather than placing you know i i think i in particular have a certain i don't know that i call it an inclination but i guess my my natural thoughts almost always drift towards let's ring the outside of the park with trees and that creates a sense of place and it does but it makes the park feel smaller than it should so if we were actually planning this i think the more appropriate way would be to actually take these trees and put them on the other side and then back the houses out and what that would do is make the park make the roads feel like they're integrated into the park and then the park would feel bigger uh but we don't have that luxury what i am gonna do is just kind of leave some space open in here i think ideally we would have fit a baseball field or a soccer football or something like that in here we don't have that ability with the topography here we do have the ability to add a couple of interesting places for students to hang out with their friends and then some open spaces maybe toss a ball around in fact i'm gonna remove those trees over there just so that we ensure that we have some of those all right that's a lot better in my mind there is stuff to do here look at all these visitors see it's leveling up there is a price to get in we'll get rid of that fee no fee to enter the park by the high school and lastly i want to really pepper this area with trees we're going to go through and i like to we're going to take our brush strength down add some larger trees and then as we get to smaller trees we will add some more i'm not going to be whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa that was not what i wanted at all i added a significant number of large trees that was not my goal so i'll make sure that i'm using a brush that does not concentrate the trees like that and then as i work down to the smaller trees i'll increase my increase my brush strength so that you get more of these trees filling in and as i get all the way down to the smallest ones we'll go through even more really crank this up all right that's much better it's very flammable that's okay that's uh the flammability is not something we are concerned about in this particular city now this is neat i never noticed that i can click on this and see what the actual slope percentage or the slope is but i can actually do some interesting stuff very neat so this is this is filling in we are almost completely done here i do think that you know if we were going to go through and continue this i'd want to go through and really take a look at the at the views and maybe along the water we would want to remove some of these trees because you can imagine a world where the developer comes in completely removes the trees along the waterfront if the state would allow them to do that or whatever environmental agency would have jurisdiction in this area they would remove all of these so they could market those views and replace them all with trees that aren't quite as don't grow quite as tall so i can see lots of scrub bush in here and things of that name so we don't want no foliage but we certainly don't want that we you know you could also imagine seeing docs and things of that nature and if we were going to spend more time on this i think i would certainly add those over time one quick pass with trees just to get a couple of mixed in a couple of them mixed in down here but not many [Music] okay you see that that is it caused most of these homes they have a really good view of the water which is something that i think would be very very very much desired in here so the one nice thing we started today's build with the population around just just under 75 000. i was really hoping to crack that 75 000 before the end of the episode and we've done it i'm very pleased with that we we still have death and worker issues but our grocery store is working what kinds of jobs are we missing educated yeah so we are lacking high school educated workers interesting we have a whole bunch of over overeducated people working here or so this would be actually elementary so we would need a let's a school's out policy to make this building work interesting well that's not going to happen so that said we we've accomplished what i sought out to accomplish kind of curious what are these land values like not very good [Laughter] we could certainly improve that that said it's still filling in the buildings are still leveling leveling up um and that's going to take some time we also don't have many parks in here that would be the other thing that would really kind of kick this area into high gear why don't we use a little bit of eminent domain and place a couple apart everyone loves a dog park so actually we don't even need no we do we're gonna need some eminent domain to make this dog park happen everyone loves that unsurprising so i mentioned to marina or what are we going to do a floating cafe and it'll be a really high one some might say insanely high i'm not one of those people i will say that it's probably not whoa that's certainly ill-advised [Laughter] [Music] and it's certainly not great that the the uh cruise ships are going through them but and it's very the current here makes this kind of a rough ride but i think the neighbors are going to love it so i don't think that i have the mod where i can change the shipping routes that would certainly be helpful [Music] oh i can with movement alright so this is ugly however now they're not hitting my cafe [Music] [Laughter] wow that was a close call uh yeah that's not ideal all right so now they're not gonna hit the cafe that's something let's take a look at our land value it's actually not that bad uh it's it's certainly not great in certain areas let's just add a couple more parks maybe a small park over in this neighborhood it's in desperate need of some sort of park type amenity problem is the grades over here are really a challenge maybe we'll take some a very expensive waterfront property at a park to make the rest of the neighbors happy and what would make sense now that we have this park would be to have some sort of connection kind of a river path sort of deal [Music] okay now we're going to use eminent domain for the children uh i look at this as a very very very very important thing to do so the primary reason for that is we just it would be great to be able to get a connection from the elementary school to this path unfortunately it is hopping up on me rather than being flat with the ground which is always very frustrating part of this is that these paths do not level the ground they wait for you to do that so i think we might just have a bridge here not the worst thing in the world necessarily that's fine there is some unique topography here so i would see that as a rational thing to have in fact they'd probably turn it into some sort of amenity and our university sports team is obviously terrible because we're just losing every game everyone is sad all the time so it's the exact opposite of verde beach where everyone is continually happy because we have the best sports teams in the entire country they win every game [Music] okay so now we now have this nice riverwalk so having trees along here i think would be a very nice amenity because as you're walking you're absolutely okay to stop and look in between the trees and you know struggle in the water a bit here so let's tighten that up a bit i already see there are people that are taking this let's see emma crowley what is your path like emma looks like she is a child going from her house to the playground that is a long walk and if there are children taking this path we would certainly want to have some sort of fence huh well a little bit too far in the weeds for today most likely oh and look at this we're making sure emma gets calves oh emma's actually climbing through through the ground just so she can sit at a bench she's green or teal sit at a bench and watch this guy in his tablet at the park now she'll sit at this bench presumably with a stranger okay we're gonna get out of this we're we're entering into a really weird place so all right um you know you know things are moving in the right direction here and i think that i am okay to leave this see our land values are creeping up let's look at a couple of final stats so our traffic we're at 82 percent to end which i'm pretty pleased with we've got some areas of high traffic density you know obviously this area is still not ideal there are some issues with our heat heat pumps that's that's okay this district i'm surprised it never filled up our airports doing okay we probably could use an international airport but you know we're gonna be okay with it this area has always been kind of a challenge it's okay so is target very busy lots of death ikea is still empty for the most part that's okay it's uh it's uh completely unreasonable that it would be that empty and then we have this area which we never went back and fixed um but it's functioning okay so i think we're okay with traffic transit we've got a 5 380 riders a week most of our transit riders are on the bus which i think is is kind of a shame in a missed opportunity um i think one of the main reasons let's see this let's look at the best route so we'll turn off all but this blue route holy cow oh so we have our tram that's doing that kind of turn that off okay now we see our blue route and what you can see is it's kind of a feeder route it's going through the downtown area it's mirroring some of those tram lines and then it's dropping people off at the train so it's not surprising that this is a busy route there's also a subway stop there so this is really kind of a this is this is really just kind of a circulation route so that's it's interesting um so you know we're a good spot this is this has been a very fun city for me i hope you enjoyed this build um do look forward to the next build i think it's going to be outstanding i'm really excited for it i'm currently organizing so over the next little while you're going to see a lot of verde beach you're going to see a couple of special videos some starterville and then after that we're going to launch our new city and it's going to be outstanding um but i did want to reflect one more time on the city that launched the channel bluffside crossing and thank you for sticking with me uh thank you for your views thank you for commenting thank you for reaching out to me personally in emails thank you for joining on the discord server and for the nights that you've chatted with me thank you for uh reaching out to me on twitter and following me on there thank you for buying t-shirts and mugs you know all of this is really overwhelming for me and it means the world to me also a huge shout out to some of the other creators that have helped me along the way zardis biffa both of them have been very instrumental imperial jedi that to meister just great great people that i've met along this along this crazy youtube ride that have been on for about eight months not stopping anytime soon and i appreciate you i'm gonna see you in the next one but it won't be here so let's have one more city tour and take this city out in style but before that if you like this video please consider the like button if you aren't subscribed to my channel uh it it's probably the single most uh helpful thing you can do is is to like subscribe and comment uh and if you want to support me directly please hop on patreon i want to give a huge shout out to my patreon supporters they are directly supporting me and helping me to upgrade my equipment and make the channel better and i appreciate them their names are here and i want to take you through a brief city tour thank you so much and i will see you in another one [Music] bye-bye [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] my wow [Music] you

Channel: City Planner Plays

Views: 68,331

Rating: 4.9576201 out of 5

Keywords: cities skylines, city planner plays city builders, City planner plays cities skylines, city planner plays, cities:skylines, bluffside crossing, cities skylines suburbs, cities skylines suburbs layout, cities skylines subway tutorial, cities skylines suburban sprawl, cities skylines suburbs tutorial, cities skylines subdivision, cities skylines suburban, cities skylines suburbia, cities skylines suburban layout, cities skylines lets play, cities skylines realistic, city skylines

Id: ZKlsUv4j834

Length: 82min 32sec (4952 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021