Transit Network Ideas

Hi, first time post, so I hope I'm not about to restate a load of ideas that have been suggested ad infinitum! I've been thinking for ages about ideas I'd like to see in a theoretical future Sim City, so when I discovered this place, I thought it was worth posting my ideas, in case anyone finds them useful. If not, feel free to ignore me!

It's mostly related to transit, as I find it becomes the number one concern when a city reaches a certain size and SC4 is quite limited in what you can do.

So first off, roads. I want to see an end to fixed types of road. We should have a road tool that shows us to custom-design a road type. Options available for the network would include things like number of lanes, whether the road has a median, the width of the median, the speed limit of the road, a variable height slider (going between high-flying raised roads to sunken roads), whether the road can have intersections or only interchanges, etc.

Obviously this would be quite complex and would get annoying if you had to do it every time you lay a road, so you should have the option of saving templates of road types (with several templates pre-included to ease people into the system). But I don't believe I should be limited on my roadways by the game. If it suites me to have a 10-lane superhighway running through the middle of my city, I should be able to have one.

Of course there would be significant disadvantages (as well as the obvious advantages). No-one would want to live near a 10-lane highway, It's ugly, noisy and loaded with pollution. If you were to set a 150mph limit on a road with no median, you would be increasing the chances of a serious accident dramatically. Larger roads will be more expensive to build and maintain, etc.

The big thing for railways and subways for me is the stations. This might be harder to pull off than the roads (which is pretty much just scaling them out and would look ok in doing so), but stations need to be buildable to handle varying volumes. My thought was to make them modular, so you would choose the size of the concourse, how many platforms you want to build, how many exists there should be (and what roads they exit on to) and even if the station should contain any commercial services for private business. I'm not sure how to achieve this on a graphical level without it looking ugly, though.

One thing I would like to see is trains and subways handled correctly. ie. they should be built as lines, rather than commuters taking whatever path they like as if they were roads. You should create a line and if you want to change from one line to another, you need to go via an interchanging station.

Also, with regards to public transport networks, I'd also like to see fare zoning. For instance, in London, we have zones 1 through to 6. It costs more to use to travel between zones - particularly if you travel into zone 1, which is the city. If i have a city centre, I should be able to increase fares in that area and keep them low in suburban areas. Adjusting fares would not only affect income for you, but also how likely the network is to be used by the population.

One last thing; designing networks. It's annoying when you are trying to build a network in SC4 and you are often constantly building and rebuilding, trying to get your layout (usually intersections) right. You should be able to build in a "planning mode" first, where you can lay out a new transport network as if you were building it - but it costs no money and doesn't actually do anything. You could run a highway straight through a string of buildings without it demolishing them, just to make sure you can join it up properly with the roads on the other side first. This should also include any terraforming changes that you want to do. Once you've completed the design, you hit submit and the network starts construction.

This is simply to make planning and building the network easier, without wasting time and money building, knocking it down and building again because it didn't look quite the way you wanted. No-one builds a new transport network in the real world by simply bulldozing their way through their existing city! You plan out the routes first and design the layout in advance. Another possibility would be that you would get feedback from your population as to whether the plans are popular or not (high speed link to city centre = people like the idea, elevated highways running through the middle of a low-density suburb = pissed off locals!)