A City Planner Plays Cities Skylines: The Start of a City - Bluffside Crossing Ep. 1

hey what's up everyone my name is phil and i'm a planner playing a planning game city skylines so i'm very excited to kick off this series uh so i've been a city planner for a number of years now i started out my career in a transit agency i worked for a consultant working on transportation plans worked at a department of transportation a regional transportation planning agency and now a suburban community so i'm well versed in transportation planning and becoming much more well versed in land use planning and i want to take that experience that i've had and incorporate it into my city skyline city i also have an undergrad and a master's degree in planning so this isn't uh you know just kind of a hypothetical like you know i i'd like to plan this city based on my experience i actually have a number of years and then a lot of it a lot of education in this but that doesn't mean i'm going to plan a perfect city but i'm going to use the tools and education and experience that had to try to make a city that's that's really good and i'm going to try to respect reality as much as i can because there are certain things in here that are just not realistic like for instance putting utilities underneath someone's house like we just would never do that um they'd have to have an easement through their house and we could theoretically demolish their house to uh to to maintain a water main not gonna happen so i'm gonna try to keep it realistic um and um just you guys know i'm not going to uh avoid mods i do have a number of mods on here and i have them on here because i think it really enhances the gameplay um and and in some cases makes it more realistic um that said i'm on a really interesting map uh one of the things i really enjoy about this map um take a look there's bluffs with uh rivers all the way around and more bluffs off in the distance we have a terrible name lakefield um let's call this bluff side crossing yeah left side crossing i like that um so due to the unique topography we're gonna need to make sure that we can get down from this bluff we don't get stuck up here and we also want to plan for what this roadway network is going to look like in the future obviously right now [Music] we really only have access to either my modded roads or the uh [Music] the basic default roads so because of that we're gonna want to be extra careful about uh these initial roads the funny thing is i find that these initial roads can really set the tone or the design of your city in in total and that's not all that far off from real life you'll see this when you look at cities that their original development pattern sets the tone for what happens in the future so i want to be cognizant of that generally when these older cities are developed you know that that won't be the case the original developers won't be sitting there thinking whoa boy if we get this wrong we're gonna be stuck with this for 200 years but that's the reality roads and right-of-way generally don't move unless something really exceptional happens or some program is established that really changes things so okay so we have that we have our way into the city we have our way down from the bluff i did a couple things here i made this tea so this in the future is going to be an arterial road that's going to be one of the bigger six lane roads oh we do have access to that right off the bat i'm not gonna spend the money now it's probably not the best use of our money but i do think it's important that we have a plan for what this will be in the future uh so let's see where the best place to put this will be so this is going to be the main drag in our community i'm going to put it at a place that makes some sense so i have a way down to the river and this is important because we're going to need both water treatment and a water pump now i want to avoid if at all possible having something that spews the water to waste water down in the water i always find that to be a funny option clearly that's something that you know in 2020 cities will try to avoid at any cost i can't imagine any u.s city dumping untreated water into the river at this point in time but i guess maybe there's some if you know one let me know in the comments um okay so we have this main road into the city i'm trying to think if i actually want to upgrade this right off the bat maybe maybe someone let's so i'm i'm debating this because ultimately i would like to follow a street hierarchy that makes sense and um one of the key things to think about with transportation is you have different classifications of road you're generally going from a road that is meant to move regional traffic to a road that's meant to to move traffic a long distance and then a road that's meant to disperse traffic within your community and then a road that is meant to actually uh get people to to their destinations within the community [Music] so i want to be cognizant of that as i as i develop the city i also want to make sure that my intersection lengths aren't too close which will mean that there'll be some weird gaps but i'd rather have a weird gap than a broken intersection i mentioned that i want this to stay true to reality so i'm gonna develop this old portion of the community while old we know it'll be old because this is the first part that we're developing i want this to have a grid like you see in many american cities the oldest portions of the community were developed on a grid with little attention paid to the topography and part of the reason for that is that uh cities were initially all lands in the midwest and west especially were surveyed um and broken up into squares and those squares were broken up into smaller square squares and rectangles and in some cases local communities decided that this would be the easiest way to uh to actually divide up the land oh shoot i did something here i don't love doing so one of the things i did here there's seven tiles there which means that we won't get full density i'm gonna at least mirror it so that it looks consistent because i do want this to be attractive i also want it to be interesting so i'm going to change a couple things here [Music] so it might seem weird that i'm spending so much time up front planning the grid one of the reasons that i'm doing this is this isn't something i can actually do with my real job planners are often facilitators and they do not get to actually uh design neighborhoods which is something that i think people don't realize we can give feedback we can uh assist a developer but ultimately that's that's kind of where our our line ends there are some really forward-thinking communities that do make accommodations for this upfront and will plan their neighborhoods out and uh those those communities are kind of few and far between so i like to do this for my own gratification i think it's fun it's certainly not something that i get to do in my job so i made a huge mistake here and that mistake was spending all of my money on roads this is something i was worried about when i put down so many roads right off the bat oh oh shoot well we're gonna see how this works uh i made a mistake by putting down all these roads with without contemplating my budget that is a rookie mistake and i might need to rectify that because i don't know that we're going to grow so a great way to start your city would be to take a loan [Laughter] which we can't even do so we're gonna do something i really didn't want to do which was zone inappropriately so we will put some houses here house is here let's see oh i am a knucklehead the reason why it didn't do anything is because i did not zone off the bat so this is the main street um so we have commercial traffic coming off here i think i live in a neighborhood where there are little nodes of commercial activity and i find that generally that's something that people really enjoy it makes it so you can walk to things in your neighborhood whether that's a barber shop or you know a restaurant a bar so let's let's give some opportunities for that get people out of their cars make sure they can walk one of the things i love about this game is that it will actually simulate that sort of experience so we've got that going here [Music] and i'm not going to worry too much about all of this at this point i'm worried about money and something that's fairly unrealistic is that i'm going to demolish some of this stuff in the future there's no water serving half of this stuff we're going to solve all of that uh in the near future but let's at least get some revenue going right now right now we are broke super broke even though this is kind of a crap location for a house i wouldn't mind the view besides that and that uh the view is great wow i would definitely live in this house um the belmont residence is very nice okay so now we need some industrial activity and unfortunately we're still losing money so we're gonna have industrial activity next to houses so uh back in the day that was fairly normal actually you have some communities that are thinking about ways of getting industrial activity close to residency again um it makes sense in in in in a sense why you'd want to have industrial activity near residential activity clearly it makes it easier to get to your job if it's close by but there are in some cases some externalities that you might not want some noxious activities that make this a less than desirable neighbor you can see the smoke stacks there's probably noise um and then freight traffic you would you would see heavy freight traffic coming by that would be less than desirable to have as a neighbor so zoning became [Music] a bit more um segregated in terms of uses not in terms of people uh back uh back in the early 1900s when euclidean zoning became a thing and one of the reasons for that all right all right this is some money little hamlet we have twelve thousand dollars at at the very least not get some water pipes in so that we make some money from tax collections with these properties i'm gonna keep all of our water pipes underneath the road because that is where they go so that you can actually service them okay so back to euclidean zoning uh so the city of euclid ohio [Music] uh was one of the pioneers of this uh zoning where the uses were [Music] segregated from one another in an effort to improve quality of life for residents so that's where you had the separation of uses that's where mixed use became less and less of a thing and where you ended up with this is a commercial area and this is a residential area and you know there there's there's certain benefits to that i mean clearly in a residential area if there are no commercial areas next to you or industrial areas you're going to have less conflicts between those uses but at the same time you're likely going to be automobile dependent i like to think about this house right here like where are they going right now there's not a lot in the city um they might work at a retail store over here and they can walk to that job if they need to go shopping they can do it over here um have some unique mods this is [Music] jubilee big bite so they want a burger they can do that um or aldi they want to go grocery shopping but if they work at the factory there's no way to walk to that factory and i haven't provided it through a pedestrian path um so they're definitely for sure driving uh we don't have transit in the city yet and um that's one of the problems with separation of uses like that um so there are ways around it like i mentioned with paths and that those are things that we're going to need to consider in the future when the city is a little more well developed but for the time being i think we're in an okay spot except for electricity we are not in a good spot with electricity at all so as soon as we have enough money we will get in a better spot with electricity okay eight watts so all right we have electricity we have water we have people we have industries so one of the things i don't love to mention is that we have residents on a busy arterial we have industry next to residences and then we have this industry way or these residents way over here not near anyone that could be working in the industrial area all right unlock it more city's happy um so i think that we're gonna need to remedy that soon but for the time being let's just keep it going we did unlock fire departments and police stations so i do think that we're going to want to contemplate the placement of those soon i also think so if this is my north south roadway we're going to need a good east west collector through there as well so i'm probably going to use the terms collector arterial and local roads a lot so this right here the six lane road that is an arterial road connects into a collector and sometimes another collector and they dispersed traffic onto the local roadway network so now that we have that established i can use those terms hopefully without anyone questioning um so we have a little bit of a mess here on the freeway interchange so i'm going to fix that um i'm also noticing that some of our junctions are a little messy i don't like how city skylines throws um traffic signals everywhere in reality we look at whether traffic signals are warranted or not and on very few occasions will a side street connecting up with a collector warrant a traffic signal unless there's like a school or you know a user that really drives that sort of traffic um but since we are concentrating some of these things uh i can't really see that being a thing all right yeah we need the dump because we have problems all right so let's put our dump in unfortunately taking away some of that industrial land that we have so i did leave a one space gap in there that might look funky for now but i know that in the future this is going to be a major thoroughfare and it's going to cross across the river so i want to leave space to expand that road in the future reasonably i don't like garbage dumps altogether so i probably will eliminate this and this will probably be a collector to a certain point anyway because like i mentioned we want to follow street hierarchy we don't want any local roads if at all possible going into the arterials since those are meant to carry traffic and we want as few intersections as possible with this arterial so this right here not gonna fly unless it's a roundabout which is kind of the way to get around that we're also this is a pretty lengthy block length so i like to think about if you live here and you need to get here how long does it take you to get there now if your car it's probably not a big issue but if you are a pedestrian or a cyclist that is a heck of a length so i'll probably look in the future to add a pedestrian path connecting across here i don't want a road because i don't want the intersection too close to the intersection of this arterial and collector i would be concerned that the queuing would back into that back into that local road and cause issues all right so we have a tiny town and we're getting more tools at our disposal including pedestrian paths [Music] lots of stuff we're also getting park parks schools libraries um lots of good stuff one of the things we still don't have is the ability to bury our dead something we're going to need we're also probably going to want to get a clinic up in here because we don't have that yet okay it looks like our water system is a little deficient in meeting the needs of the citizens so we're going to fix that too [Music] so we have that mostly remedied i know that if you're playing city skylines you're probably like why is he doing all of this like i said i don't want to um [Music] i don't want the the underground utilities to cross lots at all generally those would need easements and i want this to be realistic so if i'm going to do that i'm going to probably leave a blank area with some fence to uh designate where that would be is to keep it realistic and make it interesting so one of the things we don't have right now our schools so clearly if this is another main road i don't want to put it there uh i'd like to make the school a little bit more pedestrian and accessible we've got our first elementary school we cannot afford a high school so um this'll have to be good enough and you see that there it's already filling up [Music] and we're running low on power again so maybe that should be one of our next concerns i don't love coal but we're probably going to need to replace some of our windmills with a more reliable source of energy for the time being and unfortunately coal is probably it so wait till we get enough money for this and then we'll probably get rid of some of those other plants that we have [Music] it'll be in just a second let's see almost there all right so we desperately needed that um so because i'm going to eliminate these i i don't want the maintenance cost at this point for all of the wind energy i do love wind energy but at this point i really don't love paying for infrastructure that is doing nothing um and i don't want to have to manage [Music] all of those uh utility costs which is something that i could do i could just go on the budget and modify that but that's not really a prudent use of my time in my mind all right let's try to make this even just slightly more realistic by eliminating those residents uh that are nearest [Music] also put a little bit of a separation in between the residential area and the uh industrial area [Music] okay so we have that now one of the things we don't have going on in this in this city right now is any food production and the reality is this is probably one of the first things that a community would have so i want to get that going right off the bat but i also know that i want to do this in the fertile lands which are near the railroad and knowing that in the future i'm going to want a railroad depot especially considering borough depots are one of the first things burley city's got it's not unrealistic for me to want to contemplate having a railroad depot so i want to make sure that i'm giving myself enough space to install that in the future got some farm roads i'm gonna need to give this the appropriate zoning district and specialization so we're gonna give it the farm specialization some farms going i need some water here again we will keep this under the road look at all of that beautiful agriculture starting right up [Music] so maybe this is early to be a snob about design but i'm going to do it anyway let's see what kind of tree do we want to put in here i want something substantial oh boom town all right so we got more buildings unlocked so a lot of times in rural areas you will see a row of trees to demonstrate where the property lines are now clearly this is not necessary with the game but i like it anyway so i'm gonna throw those in [Music] i think it gives it a nice aesthetic okay let's see what else have we unlocked ah we got our cemetery so it's funny in uh my hometown oh and maybe i shouldn't have eliminated what's going on with the power plant it's generating a lot less than it used to that is unfortunate so uh back in i lived in my hometown had a cemetery on the main drag and across the street they put another cemetery and this road became so highly traveled that [Music] they kept expanding it until it was an arterial and uh the problem with that was they ran out of space and uh that was because they put cemeteries on either side and it's difficult to move them and obviously in the game it's difficult to move a cemetery but not impossible in reality i boy moving is cemetery i can't even imagine so we want to be really thoughtful about where we're placed placing the cemetery because we're probably not going to move it ever um so i want to be i want to think about that as i'm adding onto a roadway network i want to try to not just demolish everything i don't have to i'm just gonna build up the grid some [Music] more it's got a nice grid going here [Music] get some flare on the edge i guess and uh i think we might give it even more flair over here maybe we will so one of the things if you look at certain cities you'll see that they have multiple grids so i think we want to do that here because it will make if you're going to do a grid this is probably the most interesting way of doing it i'm going to be um frank with you guys i really like the grid uh it's it's a rational way of laying out a street network um it makes it easy to find things it also makes it easy to reuse property adaptive reuse in the future if redevelopment is going to occur but i do know that it can be monotonous and boring one way that you can remedy that is to actually break the grid up which you'll see sometimes in some communities where they have a grid like for instance i lived in denver for a while and one of the things they did there to break up the grid was they threw a park in the middle of it and that does a great job of uh you know giving visual interest and and modifying things a little bit so i'm doing that right here i'm changing the direction of the grid i'm gonna throw in a park um i could just break the grid too you know get rid of this segment of road let people disperse around it throw a park right here but i think this will be really interesting this will be a great city park triangular park it'll be a destination people to get to and go to see i like that i'm also going to try to find a way so right here one of the things that i have a problem with is we have lanes that aren't really being used for anything [Music] so you wouldn't normally have a two-lane road and have it connect up to a four-lane road [Music] so we're gonna try to remedy that somehow not sure how we're gonna do that yet maybe something like this and then just boom grid all right so we have some interesting things going on here [Music] a little more organic in the corner but we still have our grid going on and look at that demand things are starting to pick up [Music] and one of the things i see is that there's demand for death care down here one of the reasons for this is we still don't have our cemetery so that's the challenging thing with this game is i find it easy to meander and [Music] get stuck on other things that other than what i probably should be dealing with which i i suppose isn't unlike planning in real life um i don't get to design neighborhoods every day uh many days i'm just you know dealing with fence permits or things like that so it's a lot more routine kind of monotonous things as you have in basically any job which is fine um but that makes playing a game like this especially gratifying and fun oh sewage that i'm gonna pause it so when you have a sewage backup you can have a lot of problems people get sick because they're drinking waste water so that is certainly not something that we want to [Music] have become a thing [Music] so i'm actually going to eliminate the existing waste water plant and upgrade it with an eco plant because i see that there's a lot of ground pollution around here i've also installed a water storage reservoir to try to avoid the water issues that we were having now that i'm making this a little bit more industrial in character i'm going to eliminate some of these homes uh this will be something you see frequently from me kind of changing things on the fly i would not do this in real life the reality is when a building gets built it is very unlikely that you will see it go away [Music] so that makes it especially important as a planner to get things right the first time uh we are still in the water issue so i will unfortunately restore the sewage treatment plant so i just wasted a little bit of money there that's okay we will gain it back but at least we have our water and sewage problems resolved we still have problems with power i would really love to have a better power plant unfortunately we have not earned one yet so i'll put that next to the other one and i am gonna again try to balance everything so that's one of the really fun things about the start of one of these games is that you get to balance all of the competing needs of your of your city and so i work in a very very fast growing city and one of the most fun things about it is that similar to what's happening here there are a lot of things that you have to balance because city is growing so fast so you've got to think about utility infrastructure which might not be the sexiest of topic areas but it's certainly one of the more important ones because no one wants to live in a house without power at least not in 2020 especially when we're all working from home including myself it's all right we have our water system established um so at this point there are a couple different ways i could go i could continue to build the city and grow it or i could try to refine and improve it and i think that what i would like to do is refine and improve it but i think i'm going to save that for the next video because we already have a nice layout for a city here we've got a lot of infrastructure in place we're making money we have good water systems power systems and really a thriving community but what could really make this better would be making sure that education systems are correct um starting to think about the path network and maybe even encouraging biking and and walking and i don't think that with a population of about 3 500 it's too soon to start thinking about alternative transportation generally you can see that even with the population that we have we're seeing some backups in the roadway network and you know this is another one of those situations where i might be able to remedy it by eliminating frivolous traffic signals but still there's a lot of activity here so i like to assess what's going on and and make improvements on the fly so that's probably what we'll take care of next but i think i'm gonna end this here so thank you so much for watching please let me know how you uh feel about this content and if you want me to continue producing it i had a lot of fun today and i look forward to doing this again so thanks so much again this has been a planner playing cities skylines and i'll see in the next one bye

Channel: City Planner Plays

Views: 1,295,544

Rating: 4.90343 out of 5

Keywords: cities:skylines, city skylines, a city planner plays cities skylines, city skylines city planner, city planner plays city builders, city planner plays cities skylines, cities skylines city planner, real city planner plays cities skylines, city planner plays, bluffside crossing, city planning cities skylines, cities skylines ep 1, cities skylines lets play, cities skylines let's play, City builder, how to start a city in cities skylines, how to start a city in cities skylines 2021

Id: 2h-Qwh-yzO4

Length: 40min 8sec (2408 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/lechechico]

I'd recommend the series on his latest city Verde Beach.

There are a lot of learnings from this first series that he has taken on. I personally found the second series far more enjoyable