CITY TIPS: Reviewing an Architect's MASSIVE City - Cities Skylines City Reviews

[Music] hello welcome to city planner plays city tips where i review your cities and give you tips on how to improve them and at the end i give you a city planner city score now i just a reminder this is not a series where i roast the creator i try to give you constructive feedback that you could use to improve your city today's map was submitted by a creator on the discord server secaria this is actually the second map that was ever submitted for the series and i'm really excited to take a look scary is an architect by trade and an experienced city skylines player and it's quite obvious this is really a special looking city it's it's beautiful there's a lot going on here and a lot of hours were poured into making this city and there are over 500 mods and assets in this build which make the city feel really unique so i want to dive right in because there's a lot to take it and take in here i will say that i have had a couple of uh clearwater county issues here so i had to disable the fire spreading and the other thing i wanted to mention is that i do not actually know what map theme was used on this on this particular build so i chose one by mr miyagi that is of tel aviv israel and i think it fits well here maybe maybe this isn't what the original intent was but it's it's uh it's what we're going with it's what i've got and uh and i like it so let's dive right in and we're gonna start out with the map this is an absolutely beautiful map so let's zoom out here and what you can see is that there are mountain ranges surrounding it we've got an ocean right here we've got river we've also got we zoom in a bit we've got a little stream here we've got a little lagoon we've got a nice little river right here it's it's really a spectacular map we've got a it's an island right here and then we have my favorite part of the map which is if you come and look out the creator of the map is actually put the time and adding relief in the ocean what makes it with the effect that it gives it is that it looks like there's something beyond the water i haven't actually seen this in another map and i love it so when we take a look i just want to show you how they've done this because it's so cool so we'll come and we'll look at our terrain and you can see that out in the water they've actually created these little islands they're underwater islands they're not even at the sea level but because they're out there and it's not totally flat when we come and we take a look we take a look it appears that there's something in the distance and that is just such a an innovative way to design your map so the other thing about this map is that it has every transportation feature available to it there are highways going basically on every corner of the map we've got this significant rail infrastructure going out of the map it's it's well uh well appointed we've also because we have the ocean right here we've also got ship lines so this is an excellent map i wish i knew the map itself i would love to build on this map i don't know it but i'm gonna give this map a rating of five out of five you'd be hard-pressed to find another map that that is is this good to start out on next we're gonna take a look at the roadway configuration and overall city layout and from the air as you could tell this is a really impressive city it is huge and it looks good but on the ground there are some pretty significant issues with this city with its layout and its overall roadway hierarchy so why don't we come down here we'll take a look at the tren at the traffic and you see that the traffic flow is 73 72 percent and one of the main reasons for that is that i think that the creator of this didn't keep the cardinal rule that i keep in the back of my head in mind whenever i make a city uh either in either in reality you know when i'm when i'm planning or in the game keep it simple so you can see that there's there's some things happening here so right here for instance so we've got this collector road right here feeding into a roundabout with two other collectors we've got an arterial here and then we've got an underpass and this underpass i so it's a it's a local road here turns into a highway and then if we take a look it kind of slingshots back around here and brings people to the other side of the roundabout where apparently they're deciding this is an excellent place to get back in the roundabout and go back i i don't really understand what's going on there and this is just one of a number of examples like this in the map and what i think has happened here is that every time there was a significant transportation issue the default was to add more roads and this reminds me a lot of a city i used to live in los angeles just add roads anytime there are problems and then there are things like this that are creative but not necessarily helpful so what we have here is we have a trumpet interchange and it's it's a fine interchange i would say that this queueing distance probably is a little challenging we've got another trumpet here then we've got these roundabout things off the trumpet so what this tells me is maybe this should have been a diamond but instead we have this then we have a roundabout here and when i've looked at these there's something interesting so this roundabout does see utilization all the way around so does this one some of these do uh or i should say all the ones i'm identifying do but i've seen some roundabouts coming off these highway interchanges that don't actually have vehicles using all of their movements and of course now i'm going to look for one and not be able to find it but either way that the point is there are these roundabouts that don't really have a purpose there's no reason for this to be a roundabout it just happens to be one so lots of very confusing roadway connections and i think that the way to fix a lot of this is just to remove it so let's look at one of the more complicated areas and see if there's anything we could do to improve it so this isn't complicated but it's being made complicated so they've done an excellent job they put this diverging diamond in here you know i have i have mixed emotions right here we have this significant highway just dividing these two neighborhoods in half we take a look we've got homes and jobs over here we've got homes and jobs over here and if you want to get across you have you have to take the diverging diamond or you can walk that's those are your options so if you are right let's pop out of here if you're right here see where you're going you're going through the diverging diamond if you're over here you're going through this diverging diamond if you're right here well i guess you're you're so far away you're not getting the divergent gun right here diverging diamond right here diamond you get the picture everyone is being forced to take this so i think that this caused the number of traffic backups so what the the creator decided to do was go ahead and resolve and remedy those backups with this really long ramp so i this to me we could take a look and i'm sure i'm sure this has a ton of utilization yeah wow that is a lot of it looks like it's private vehicles trucks yeah there's a lot when we look over here what land uses do we have it's just like a commercial district i don't i don't really i don't really get it i would look at this and think this is the kind of thing we want to avoid okay so now those movements are being forced onto the highway but i think that's better than forcing them through this crazy long tunnel uh but the the bigger question here is why do we have this highway here in general we're using this as our arterial we have local roads connecting into it we've got some other stuff happening here uh so right here this is this is probably one of my favorite things that i found so we've got this highway it divides off into two highways and then there's a connection over to this other road here which is actually the highway so you could take a u-turn i guess i i don't know there's a lot going on here and this is for a new neighborhood that hasn't been developed yet but i think that it's it's really overthinking the highway network and making it more than it actually needs to be and when you do that you add this complication you're gonna you're gonna cause problems for yourself so in this particular instance now i'm not suggesting that maybe they don't need this highway okay well maybe i am but so let's try something i'm gonna i'm gonna get rid of this road here replace it with an arterial and make some key connectivity through here take a look it's congested it's congested let's see if we uh can lighten it low here all right so i've tried to get this working but there's so much happening here and so many things that would need to be changed to make this work it's the bigger job that i want to tackle right here but suffice it to say roadway hierarchy has not been followed there are kind of wonky solutions and those sorts of things just don't work when in doubt keep it simple the more that you add the more confusing it gets and the more chances for things like this backup you have and you know just throwing in random arterials and and things like that it doesn't it doesn't work so for the roadway configuration and city layout this is the sort of thing that you basically see throughout the city i do uh i do like the way it looks it just doesn't function so i'm going to give this a 2.5 out of 5 for good aesthetics but poor overall layout okay so next is land use planning and that is one of these one of the places where i think the city does a lot of really unique things some of it really good and some of it not so good so let's turn on our land use uh you know so that we can see what's happening here and start with the good this uh this mayor this planner is really sprinkled in a number of uses all over the place you can see that from block to block we are going from commercial to residential we have a variety of buildings everything from european to green cities we have office everything is within walking distance and i absolutely adore that it's an excellent thing to do and it's what you like to see in a real city too you want to make sure that your land uses are diverse that you can walk to things that you can get around and i think what's really impressive is with the size of this city it's not just the downtown area where they've done that from block to block things are changing here now one place where i think they can improve right here that you can see that they've divided a block in half i love to see that more often and i'd love to see little nodes of commercial and residential areas things of that nature instead what you see is kind of like these these blocks of commercial with towers around it so that's a little bit problematic in my mind but it's not that that big of a deal i also see interesting things like these green cities buildings flanking what appears to be a petroleum refinery which i think is kind of a a curious decision particularly with the random towers i guess maybe this maybe they're trying to emulate houston without the zoning code you'll see a random tower from time to time but but in general when you look at the land uses they are are i mean they just they're logical for the most part you have a nice mix you have your commercial uses along collectors residential uses you know away from collectors and arterials and then you even see here where you have this nice high school campus you also have uh some commercials that the kids can go and grab a bite to eat or charge their electric vehicles so you know whatever works one of the the critiques i have of this build generally though we just look around here's a good example so i love this little community that they've created but what i don't love is that there is a very stark transition between the low density and the high density uses now one of the things that i've mentioned in other videos is that it's really nice to be able to put the high-rise ban on some uh some of these taller buildings and transition and taper down that was what i said in the previous uh episode of city tips as well and i've talked about this in in some of my videos so i would love to see some sort of transition rather than going from what appears to be you know like a 25 story tower to a single family house we would have some some step down there some some some mid-rise buildings and you can do that either by you know having commercial like just the the traditional low density commercial comes out to be like six stories or you could put the density cap now one of the problems is when you use green cities a lot of these buildings are bigger you could also zone smaller lots and that would help too it'd be very tedious you'd have to go through and you know play whack-a-mole with your zoning but you could do that that would be a strategy to create that transition but i dislike when i see this stark transition it happens from time to time but it doesn't happen everywhere and it's it's kind of a pattern you see here that there are these very stark transitions between really high density and lower density uses and well you see that from time to time you won't see it everywhere so that would be something i would i would i would keep an eye on but the diversity of uses the the use of all of the different dlc and they have everything is represented here everything from you know farm dlc to the college campuses to the petroleum refineries even if you come out here they've even got one of these uh offshore oil derricks i mean they've got everything in here and they're even polluting next to it which feels very uh in light of everything happening in california sad but uh this is this is what's happening and they've done some really interesting things like they're right here they had this fishing island uh shout out to biffa and i i really like what they've done here so uh that said like like i said there are a couple of issues and one of the things that i don't love if we pull up our our land use again you can see that we've got these pockets of really dense not well separated industrial use right in the heart of the city right by this freeway backing everything up and this to me you either need to make this smaller or provide it dedicated freeway access make it connected it's it's really separated there's only one way on the local roadway network in and out and then you've got this freeway thing here but it's not even a complete ramp it's only to one side of the freeway so there's just a lot it's a lot so this is this is the creation of a transportation problem with the transportation network and with land use decision making and when i look at these things all all taken together i i can't give this more than a three out of five but it's a solid three out of five i think there's a lot of good stuff here but some really weird things too so something to keep in mind so next is transit planning and this is one of the more curious parts of this build so if we go in to look at our transit you'll see that we've got pretty strong utilization we've got 5 000 rides per week from residents and 2600 from tourists and you'd be thinking good job good job but i want to point your attention in a couple of directions first let's take a look at our economic view and what you see here is that we are spending 12 percent of the city's budget on transportation and most of that is coming from public transit which is alarming to me so i want to come over here we're going to take a look at our transit and one of the things that jumps out to me right off the bat is we are spending almost 40 000 cells a week on trains yet our ridership is really modest for what we're getting so we're getting let's see three 600 rides a week and we are paying 40 000 for those rides that is really expensive the subsidy per trip would mean that this gets shut down immediately so i want to look and see what's happening here to figure out where we're going wrong i'm going to sort this by passengers and check this out there are one two three four five lines that don't have any passengers at all three vehicles two stops pinging back and forth it's not doing anything so let's let's look at one of these close this [Music] so i'm going to turn all of these lines off and i want to take a look let's look at train line nine so right here we've got this stop which is it's at the airport on the periphery then we have this stop over here which is which is the central station and to get there i wow we're traveling all over the place so we're we're heading over here heading up here heading over here heading around here down here then back this way and right here and as the crow flies that's not not very far and the other the other issue about this is you know we have other ways to get there so it's not surprising that nobody's taking that trip but it's still costing us money so that is problematic i think that if we take a look we're going to notice that many of these routes are doing this so 19 another one without any passengers well interesting this one does have passengers not a lot but it has a lot of vehicles it hasn't been adjusted at all let's see where this is going so we're kind of out in the mountains and then the other side of the map so just get low productivity routes for the capacity that that these trains have we shouldn't we shouldn't see this low of ridership and i want to look at the best one so this is train line 4 and we are seeing 111 passengers we've got one stop that's really full so this comes out this way comes down here comes up here and you will you got train backups here goes past this cargo terminal it actually divides off and goes in different directions holy cow so i don't even need to look any further because i know the problem and that is it's just convoluted and long and if we look in here that kind of bears itself out this is a basically a 20 kilometer long line with four stops maybe not the worst distance but but it's it's it's difficult to navigate route so even though i mean this is our most successful route it's it's not successful in terms of trains so i think the whole train network itself would need to be reimagined and really the number of stations reduced i think that's the main problem there truthfully when you look at a lot of these other modes that's the problem so right here this is our metro and i think that we're gonna see the exact same thing we've got stations with four passengers and so let's take a look so first of all there's a lot going on here so this is in front of the train station or in front of the in front of the airport so we've got a metro station here we've got the space elevator and then we have the international airport which has its own metro so we could be relying on that but we have another one here that's not the end of the world but we have these connected that's a bigger problem so now we have this train traffic or this metro traffic conflicting and it's making a very sharp junction so you can't pick up speed and these stops are close there's no reason why you would ever need to take the subway from the airport across the street but you could and that's kind of a pattern that i've seen when i look at this network so this is one of the routes that's a little bit better but when we look at some of the lower productivity routes you'll see that that is clearly the problem that i guess that was one of the lower productivity routes let's look at this one six passengers one person at each stop and when we look here we've got a loop and all of the stops are very close and i would imagine uh here's here's a fun trick we go into here we click on our land use and then we click on transit now you can see both and what you see here is right here we have residential office office industrial office no land use okay i guess commercial so you're connecting a bunch of destinations to one another you don't really have transfer opportunities so it's just if you're going from an office to a commercial zone you're good but everything else is tough so these are the sorts of things that i think are challenging with the transit network really these all of these lines don't need to be linked together like this they need you need to have transfer opportunities but not necessarily a looping system and you need to spread apart some of these stops it's really thinking about the the hierarchy of the transit network and the nice thing is they organize it for you right here so buses at the bottom then you get some of these trolley buses and trams metro trains that is the hierarchy in that order and your stop spacing for buses should be closer and then the further out you go the longer that stop spacing should be so if you're not using the metros similar to trains you're doing it wrong they're too close obviously the trains should be very far but metro should be pretty far too the catchment area for that is about a quarter or half a mile for a bus stop it's about half of that so things to keep in mind and it's a pattern across all of these i guess there's one tram line and this one tram line is actually a loop it's a circulator i guess i have less of a problem with that it's not going to do much besides kind of act as it's kind of a tourism attraction because it's even this one it's it's going around the commercial area but it misses the residential entirely so it's the same patterns i i'm not going to belabor it and with buses i will i will i will look i'll show you a couple of these this is our best utilization on on a form of transit outside of metro and we've got we've got routes that don't really go anywhere so right here for instance it's an industrial route it goes to these industrial areas it goes to this commercial area but it doesn't have a transfer opportunity not a legitimate one anyway i guess right here there's a metro station but it would be a lot better to get that bus route to some residents uh so those are the sorts of issues that i see so transit's probably one of the weaker parts of this build and i'm going to give it a 1.5 out of 5. so i'm really happy to get that stuff out of the way because we've got to get to the really good stuff because i'm about to really give this map and this creator some high marks so let's move over to city services this is one of the places where the builders really excelled check out this dam holy cow it is phenomenal it is huge it's holding water back it feels like a reservoir this is what the the dams in california look like and in colorado when you're looking at the reservoirs you see these fingers of mountains uh poking out and peaking and i love the way it looks this road has utility and the dam is creating a ton of power so just excellent utilization of the dam and this is this is emblematic of what they've done for utilities in general they've even done some things that i have never thought to do that are very creative so right here we have an eco water outlet that's not perfect in terms of cleaning the water but it doesn't matter they have this floating garbage collector which is going to clean up that pollution before it gets to this dam and the result of it is no water pollution so even though we're getting drinking water from some of these areas we're not getting polluted water just just a really outstanding job with the utilities and really creative work here the design work is top-notch anyway but they've put these utilities in places where they just blend into the landscape and don't really it's not really obstructive in any way and i really appreciate that like this is an excellent place for this it's not gonna cause flooding they look good here they're not uh they're not they're not they're not they're not getting in the way of anything so uh and then that that damn is is is next level so i can't help but give this a five out of five four city services that damn alone will get that that that damn damn damn damn we'll get five out of five for me any day so that's that's probably saying something if you want to submit a map have a cool damn that's just it's awesome [Music] and make sure it's working so five out of 5 for city services next i want to take a look at unique features and this is another area where the builder has done an excellent job so they have little parks sprinkled throughout big parks they've got massive campuses so let's find that campus right here huge college campus that even put in parking to serve the the uh this football stadium over here hopefully that dead person gets picked up they've got metro stations in here so even though this might not be the most well working metro station the idea is there and it could be fixed and the design just it looks very very good in each of these areas that they put together they've got massive industry areas they've really tried to do a good job of making each of these buildings feel special i've seen way too many cities i've been guilty of taking these buildings and just plopping them next to each other really not giving them the respect that they deserve if you take a look at this this modern art museum i mean i just they've made this a place it's special you go here and it's an event and everything from putting fences rocks landscaping and parking and then gazebos and a place for children to play when they're unruly after they've had to spend time in this modern art museum and the parents are going crazy and they take him over to this playground and i've clearly had that experience once or twice so that's that is the sort of thing and then look at this they have they added these rock features here and this pedestrian path this feels like it just feels like a place that would exist and i i appreciate that and they're just little details like that with their districting and their unique features throughout this excellent farming area just huge tree planting a forestry area rather huge tree plantations lots of stuff going on just massive areas that just feel good just feels good so and i i think that that is the the description i would give for the really most of their parks over here for instance they've got amusement park maybe some questionable land use decision making around here but what i really appreciate is when we look at our districts they've actually taken this and divided it up so that we get the benefit of this park throughout they've spread the buildings they've really made this neighborhood wrap around this this really neat park and they've done other things like this where they have the you know this this soccer field here and they've made this a campus i pointed out that high school before they've added in baseball diamonds and things like that things you'd expect to find in a community a small community's gonna have lots of little sports parks some cases maybe they've already done it but i would rather err on the side of overdoing it than not doing enough so in general i'm really impressed with what they've done with unique features they've really gone above and beyond and they've detailed the heck out of each of these little areas they don't feel unfinished which is something that i i really struggle with from time to time even here in this farm area lining the farm with trees making it feel like a place so for unique features i'm going to give them a 5 out of 5. and that leads in really nicely to the next thing which is the aesthetics and these you know unique features and aesthetics really go together so lots of landscaping and i i obviously i love that trees lining this path they'd have a bike path and a ped path not well utilized but still have them both here excellent and then what i really love when we're talking about the aesthetics is they've gone above and beyond and picked out key assets to really take this city to the next level this bridge right here just that that's what you get in a postcard when you see the picture of the city this is what you get you get this bridge with that balloon right there that is exactly what you see it reminds me of milwaukee how you have the art museum and that's that's what you see uh same thing here another beautiful bridge this is the city of bridges you've got different bridges throughout maybe this is a little sharp we can deal with that and then look right here another really cool bridge and so this save is from before the bridges and piers pack and i'm sure that if i had received this save after that we would have some of those worked in you see they still worked in other bridges and so they've spent a lot of time focusing on these little details like this adding little buildings here and there adding little bridges here and there i just i really appreciate the time that they put into this can we talk about this waterfront for just a moment wow just spectacular good use of landscaping everything that they've done has a sense of purpose and it tells a story you know that this city prides itself on its beachfront and its skyline and that really there's a there's a sense of purpose to all of this so i i really appreciate that the amount of detail that they've put in the amount of trees the city feels natural they uh they respected the topography for the most part and it's just it's a it's a really great job with the aesthetics so i'm gonna give them a five out of five and drumroll please this gets us to our final score and we have a 27 out of 35 which places this city just slightly in front of our last city and uh honestly both of those cities both of the cities that we've looked at have been fantastic i really like this city there are some issues with the transportation network uh really that's the big thing here transportation planning is so critical and there's some issues in the city but the design of the city it's such a beautiful place done a great great job incorporating all the dlcs making the place feel special making the districts large and unique making every place feel you know really well detailed and finished and landscaping so much landscaping i love it look at all these trees that is what i like to see this is when you're flying across this city to get to the airport it's what you notice bridges and trees come in here you feel good you feel good about your trip you want to visit so i'm really impressed with the city i i give kudos to the creator of it and i look forward to reviewing another city soon i hope that you enjoyed this video if you did hit the thumbs up button if you didn't you know what to do and uh i will see you in the next one take care bye [Music] you

Channel: City Planner Plays

Views: 121,200

Keywords: cities skylines, city builder, city planner plays cities skylines, city planner plays city builders, cities skylines tips, cities skylines city fix, cities skylines city tips, cities: skylines, cities skylines traffic, cities skylines transit tips, cities skylines zoning tips, city tips, tips city skylines, city skylines tips

Id: WOxw71iNiCI

Length: 36min 19sec (2179 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021