I've given up all pretenses of using these maps for other purposes right now and will just use this dynasty to share with you stuff I'm doing on different maps I have. Because well I'm taking the screenshots anyway.
My latest city is based off a Louisville map. I've renamed it Churchill.
I've spent a lot of time rebuilding the mass transit situation which has improved traffic in the downtown area. But since I inherited this map, I'm dealing with a lot of the pre-existing issues that it came with. Which I prefer over just building the city myself from scratch perfectly, because these challenges are just interesting slash fun to deal with.
Here's a screenshot from University Heights, home to one of the two universities in Churchill. It's a small town with about 10,000 people.
The rural town next to UHeights:
Homewood Hills is a town due South of the downtown area and part of the Tucktown metro area. Tucktown is home to the theater district for Churchill anchored by Pavesi Square.
Homewood is a residential community which is adjacent to a major industrial ore operation, one of the big industrial businesses in Churchill.
Here's some issues with traffic that I'm about to take a radical move to fix.
In the mid-east part of the city (but on the map above, it's Southwest of downtown) we're going to actually relocate a major industrial district to a better part of the outer ring of the city.
Right now,
Uptown, Parkwood, Stabletown and Old Bank City are really congested because there are so many businesses there which get deliveries.
It keeps people who work there unable to get to work and while we have slowly added Metro lines to that area, it's nothing like downtown and so, people opt to just drive to work there and while I've successfully cut down on downtown congestion, we've not been able to really fix it coming off the interstate and into the Upper South Side neighborhoods aforementioned.
So the radical solution is to essentially make a New Stabletown and a bunch of other neighorhoods for these businesses but with six-lane roads and better mass transit coverage (specifically subway access) so that the congestion isn't as bad and it's easy on/off access to/from the highway.
Plus it just feels weird to have a major commercial district so far from the main downtown area and I'd prefer to really build more housing in that area rather than resorting to suburban sprawl, so this seems like a better idea to me.
How will I do it? I haven't decided yet, exactly. But I'm about to figure it out.