Cities Skylines Photo Diary

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by finkenst

are your neighborhoods/suburbs essentially connected via highways and mass transit only? For some reason, i tend toward the dense urban citybuilding but may try to build a suburb if they're viable.

Yeah that main highway you see in a lot of the photos goes in a circle all the way through the entire city/county. So the suburbs both out in the distance and adjacent to the city all have access via the highway and it's pretty much how I'm building those places.

I inherited the central city map for the most part, it's the sprawl that I'm responsible for and the highway already existing makes it a lot easier to do. This game makes it so much easier to do than past city builders because the map is just integrated and you can create districts at will.

And yeah, I expanded subway access pretty substantially when I took things over. There was not much infrastructure for that when I started, but we have buses and subway lines all over the area now. When I started less than 100 people a day were taking buses and subways combined. Now? We're at about 16000 a day and counting.

[Young Drachma]

So more building out in the far Southwest part of the county, mostly developing the oil industry and cities to provide workers to those towns, though the tax benefits of oil aren't seeming to be what I thought they'd be, so I probably won't be building anymore towns like this, because it pollutes badly and messes with the water supply.

The new towns include:

Clarentown
Three Bridges
Leche Hills
Deery
Milick

I'll go over each of them in more detail later, but just accounting for the locations helps me keep track.



The MSA population is around the size of Nashville and Austin now. Onward!

I think I decided we'll say this place is on the border of IL-KY which do not actually share a land border. Which makes it a little easier to visualize how to build future areas of the cities, as well as a future "twin city" for Churchill.

[Young Drachma]

Rinskyville is home to the AAA stadium with the hope someday of a major league team to come to Churchill.



Highcester is a residential community adjacent to the international airport on the far northeast side of Churchill.





Villasarracino is the neighborhood bordering Parsonage Park home to high end boutiques, an indoor sport track and residential properties.



Three Bridges is located further south just outside of the oil patch cities (Byrnside/Huston) and was borne out of more people moving to the area for oil jobs.



Here's an aerial map of that area:

[finkenst]

Originally Posted by Young Drachma

I think I decided we'll say this place is on the border of IL-KY which do not actually share a land border. Which makes it a little easier to visualize how to build future areas of the cities, as well as a future "twin city" for Churchill.

IL-KY do share a river border though. (not sure if you're aware or not, but you know)

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by finkenst

IL-KY do share a river border though. (not sure if you're aware or not, but you know)

Yeah I am, my thinking is the map we're using is going to be taken to represent a bit further down the Ohio River near the Livingston County KY/Pope County, IL sides of the river. At least for the purposes of our storyline -- and probably more to do with the baseball side of the house than anything, but as I was building, it was becoming more important to me -- for some reason -- to define where the heck this was supposed to be since I'd gone and made it fictional and I preferred it be a totally new city rather than a reboot of an existing one so it's easier to build without preconceptions.

[Young Drachma]

I'm going to build a farm town out here, you can see Churchill in the distance. There will likely be a storyline around said town.

[Young Drachma]

Here's the setup of what I'm considering:

A full setup of majors and minors, with a college league all with real life teams and set in present day. The only difference is the Churchill, KY metropolitan statistical area has exploded due to oil found on the southern part of the Ohio River Valley.

The city, which was founded by Union sympathizers and renamed after World War II when it was rumored that Winston Churchill was going to visit the town on rail (he never did), the city has grown exponentially in recent years and with a population over 2 million across two states (KY and IL) and is rumored to be on a short list with several other major cities for either an MLB expansion team or a move from an existing franchise.

We're going to chronicle the story both of the city, learn more about the area and also follow the independent league that's housed in the city, since Churchill does not have an affiliated minor league in its midst.

Playing with real players would be nice, too, because it means that we can occasionally see those guys sign down in the Churchill league.

So that's the basic setup. I'm still working on a few other aspects of the story (like what the teams will be called and what stand-in uniforms/logos I'll use since I don't have any...)

[Radii]

Definitely enjoying this, I think I bought this when it came out and haven't touched it yet (like most steam games), living vicarously through your work seems good for now though

[finkenst]

Originally Posted by Young Drachma

I'm going to build a farm town out here, you can see Churchill in the distance. There will likely be a storyline around said town.

how did you get this picture done? Zoom/scroll all the way in and then tilt the camera?

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by Radii

Definitely enjoying this, I think I bought this when it came out and haven't touched it yet (like most steam games), living vicarously through your work seems good for now though

Haha..that was this game for me for months. I bought this back in March but didn't start messing with it until a few weeks ago. I'm trying to avoid buying Rocket League because it looks awesome, but we'll see how long I can hold off.

how did you get this picture done? Zoom/scroll all the way in and then tilt the camera?

I am using this enhanced zoom camera mod.

[Young Drachma]

I've spent way too much time tonight on inane things like adding Russian surnames in OOTP, but among other things I've discovered is how this game calculated population and the reason it only shows a lower number is based on the number of active stuff the game can simulate at once.

Long story short, the fudged population is closer to the actual population of the city, since cities with only 300k people (where we are now, I have not posted new pics of that yet) do not have the kinds of skylines we have in our cities, but that's kind of another flaw of the game's programming that there is no real in-between.

But no city simulator is perfect.

Anyway, the actual population of the city matters for the future of this dynasty which is why I'm telling you this and also because I'm only going to report the fudged population from now rather than whatever the game spits out since it's way too low and unrealistic.

[Young Drachma]

Once I feel like the city has hit is stable growth point -- which is coming soon -- I'm going to spend some time rebuilding the mass transit infrastructure. Right now, it's a mess of illogical connections that don't really make a ton of sense. It works, but it's kind of a shitshow because I didn't develop it as a city, I built it mostly piecemeal and added stops as I went.

The buses and trains aren't bad, it's the subway that really needs to be rebuilt from scratch and rethought of. I'd like to really have a clearer idea of what goes where and who and why.

In fact, before I do any building that might be the next thing I do, because it might make it easier to figure out what should go where. I won't get rid of any stations, just drop all of the subway lines essentially and rebuild the lines so I can actually tell you what lines to take where.

This game even though it's not great at some things, does a fantastic job with the traffic in that it almost melds all of the stuff I liked about Cities in Motion 2 and puts it into a SimCity wrapping. I used to find it kind of tedious in the older city sims, but with this game, the traffic is almost a game within a game to me and I really enjoy solving the traffic and commuting puzzles.

I'd like to get to a point where I can tell you what line to take to get where within the city. It would be just be fun to build that from the ground up, even though in this case we're not really building it from the ground up, just reorganizing the lines we have.

[Young Drachma]

Founded by a Boston steel magnate during Reconstruction, Churchill, Kentucky quickly became a booming city rivaling the ore production of Pittsburgh and Birmingham. By 1950, it'd eclipsed both Louisville and Cincinnati as the largest city on the Ohio River south of Pittsburgh.

The city was renamed in 1931 when a rumor thst Winston Churchill was
coming to town made officials change the name only to realize wasn't and they never changed it back."

Churchill grew quickly due to the growth of the Illinois side of the border, in the form of West St. Gregory, IL, a city that saw massive investment during WWII due to Great Migration blacks headed to Chicago and Detroit crossing the river. They also populated a section of Churchill called "Dred Scott" and were joined by immigrants from Ireland and throughout Europe, making the southeastern city a unique melting pot despite its location.


In 1990, oil was discovered in the area and dramatically increased the influx of capital to the area taking an area that had experienced well over 10% growth per decade and turning into "Dubai in the Heartland" according to the New York Times front page story highlighting the boomtown.

By 2010, the Churchill-St. Gregory-Santa Monica, KY-IL metropolitan statistical area boasted a population of 2.236 million, making it the 30th largest MSA in the country. Churchill is one of only 11 cities in the US with a population over a million.


FACTS
Lincoln County, IL Largest City: West St. Gregory (19th Congressional district) Area code: 921
Churchill County, KY Largest City: Churchill (7th Congressional District) Area code: 974
Highways serving area: I-3, I-98, I-67, I-298, I-767




With its massive growth and significant funds, Churchill is home to a lot of things -- except a major league baseball team. City officials hope to woo an MLB team to the city that already has an NBA team, NHL team and a team in MLS. MLB has said on the record that it would like the idea of bringing a team to this area given the closest team are the St Louis Cardinals.

In the AL, there are no immediately close rivals outside of the Chicago area or perhaps Cleveland. In the NL, Cincinnati, Atlanta and St. Louis, with Chicago a few hours north would all provide ample competition for the city's fans who would much prefer a hometown team for their booming metropolis.

In the interim, the city has not attracted a minor league in part because no owner wants to decamp on the city only to be booted by a potential MLB club. So instead, an independent league was formed several years ago.

The Lincoln League has a mix of young MLB hopefuls and veterans alike all playing a 120 game schedule annual. There is no split schedule and the top 6 teams make the post season (Top 2 in each division, plus two wild cards regardless of division)

In this dynasty, we are going to take a look at the teams in the Lincoln League, introduce you more readily to the cities and communities that make up the Greater Churchill area. Things have grown quite a bit from the maps you might have seen before.

Lastly, we'll keep an eye on the big leagues, following the teams and players contained therein to see if there's a chance of 1) MLB expansion to 32 teams or 2) a relocation of an existing team.

The people are Churchill welcome you.

[Young Drachma]

I'm currently working on the city's entire transit system, by remapping everything. Existing stations will mostly continue to exist, but I've removed ALL of the transit lines (Think: Transit workers strike) and I'm going to meanwhile work on reorganizing the lines more logically.


Here's my tentative idea for Subway numbers:

LINES THAT ORIGINATE IN THE CHURCHILL CITY LIMITS (are lettered)
LINES THAT ORIGINAL IN THE COUNTY (are numbered)
LINES THAT ORIGINATE ON THE ILLINOIS SIDE OF THE BORDER (are double lettered)

For buses:
CITY LINES: Numbered between 100-199
ILLINOIS LINES: Numbered between 200-299
COUNTY LINES: Numbered between 300-399

For Rail Lines:
CITY TERMINATING LINES: "SPECTRA" #40-49
COUNTY TERMINATING LINES: "HORIZON" #90-99
TRAINS THAT CROSS INTO ILLINOIS: "TRANSRIVER" #75-85

[Young Drachma]

[Young Drachma]

[Young Drachma]

So here are some more views of town. For starters, the transit strike really caused havoc on traffic in the city for months.

Here's a road out in Byrnside, an industrial city on the eastern outskirts of Churchill.




If you recall earlier maps, this area was anchored by Shipchester and a bunch of suburbs, it originally was half industrial and then Stadium City was anchoring it on the bottom. Now?

It's the City of St. Gregory, the second largest city in the Churchill MSA and has a small downtown of its own anchored by Stadium City.



CONESTOGA BEACH
A suburb of St. Gregory and between


CANYONVILLE
Canyonville is the fastest growing community in the Churchill metro area. It's a pretty place, commutable to the city without being right in the muck of it.





Here's the entire Churchill area from an airplane:



I didn't get any good photos of rural Santa Monica, the city that spans the far eastern side of Churchill county, but here's an aerial view that's only half of its annexed territory.



I managed to start the rebuild of transit lines last night, which I'm happy about. I'll go through and show you, because why not? There are still areas that lack service, but that feels realistic to me and we'll eventually expand service to those areas gradually, but I'll show you how we've done it.

[finkenst]

i think i havea noise problem:

[Young Drachma]

OMG.

I just checked Churchill and it's at 50% but I had not been trying to mitigate the effects at all, so no real surprise.

[Young Drachma]

Finally two photos from Santa Monica where there is only one bus route and still no subway or rail access. Mass transit use isn't where it was before the strike, but it's slowly getting back there and at least it's far more logical now. One of these days I'm going to ride along with a car from out there and tell you how far it is from there to the central part of town. I imagine it's AT LEAST an hour drive, but I have no clue offhand.

SUBWAYS REVISITED
The game doesn't display Subway maps very nicely unfortunately, but here are the current list of the 13 subway lines I rebuilt. There need to be a lot more of them, as there are still sections of town with no access, but I need to think about it logically. We need more express routes because right now this setup are all take too many stops, so my next go-round of buses & metro lines are going to be direct routes that make it easier to get where you want to go, in the hopes that increases ridership.

[Young Drachma]

I added a few new lines and I've confirmed my theory that express lines do well and save people trips. No big shock but my city has bad traffic so adding more buses isn't the trick just yet though subways everywhere isn't realistic or tenable.

[Brian Swartz]

This in incredible. You have a lot of creativity with this stuff -- I'm very left-brained so I end up making ant-colony types of cities. Excellent work here!

[Young Drachma]

The NHL team built their own arena on the IL side of the border, leaving the Arena Square location for the NBA team.



Parsonage Park is the largest park in the city.

[Young Drachma]

Some updates.

Lower Marsey/South Marsey is the area that used to be the main airport in the city. For years I've wanted to move MKS International Airport from where it was to a different part of town, but didn't do it until now. The reclaimed area is now known as Lower Marsey/Gunpowder Hills/South Marsey.






Mitchell K Stevens International Airport, the new version


[b]Santa Monica Island isn't really an island, but it's adjacent to one and located between Santa Monica and the rest of Churchill, it's a bedroom community right on the lake.



Remember earlier when I destroyed quite a bit of commercial and office areas and I meant to rebuild? Well, I finally started that process in a section of town between the new Airport and South Marsey called The Financial District







The downtown skyline has changed with a new tallest building in Churchill, the Bravery Building


Downtown view from Danishtown neighborhood


Downtown view from Way North section (Norway) neighborhood


Downtown view from Arena Square

[bbgunn]

Are you using a mod to show all of the bus and train lines, or is that part of the vanilla game?

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by bbgunn

Are you using a mod to show all of the bus and train lines, or is that part of the vanilla game?

Improved Public Transport Mod + Extended Public Transport UI mod.

[bbgunn]

Originally Posted by Young Drachma

Improved Public Transport Mod + Extended Public Transport UI mod.

Cool. Thanks!

[finkenst]

yeah, that and the traffic tools are amazing. I've learned you have to hve mass transit to get the biggest residential and commercial buildings..

Young Drachma, are some of the building placed buildings or are they randomly built by the game? (with or without mods to bring them in)

[Grover]

Fantastic stuff, man.

This has shot to the top of my wishlist.

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by finkenst

yeah, that and the traffic tools are amazing. I've learned you have to hve mass transit to get the biggest residential and commercial buildings..

Young Drachma, are some of the building placed buildings or are they randomly built by the game? (with or without mods to bring them in)

Most of my prominent skyline buildings downtown and the entire Financial districts skycrapers I plopped rather than letting the AI place them. When the AI does place things in places I don't want, I delete them but it hasn't happened too much because I have the high rises banned in most parts of the city so that skyline isn't so muddled. Arena Square, all of my stadiums and downtown St. Gregory were mostly curated by me, too. As well as Parsonage Square Park.

I downloaded a ton of mods (my game on the laptop runs very slowly...I should've started it on the desktop would've been faster, but I'm gone a lot) to include mods for things like skycrapers, cars, different kinds of buildings for residential/commercial, etc.

They didn't do a great out of loading stock diverse items to start, so the mods are key to make it seem a bit more...eclectic.

If you go on reddit, those guys have different cities that'll give you even more ideas.

[Young Drachma]

I actually have been working on a city for most of the year called Vampire Lake. Anyone who followed my old Neloxia dynasties, it's a city in NW Neloxia.

It's actually built on a Roanoke map, I basically transformed the place though over months into something resembling a city I wanted. I focused on mixed-use neighborhoods, rebuilt the entire mass transit infrastructure and almost tripled the population from its original state when I took over.

Here's the City Skyline among other parts of the city:





Firefly Ridge is a neigborhood I built out of a former lumber/industrial area overlooking the city limits.




Cathopolis is the largest suburb in the Vampire Lake metropolitan area. It's the fastest growing area in the entire region.



Bernstein is a small city just over the highway from Cathopolis.



This is an old photo of Old Town Vampire Lake. The skyline is a lot more mature now.

[Young Drachma]

I've since fixed that gnarly traffic problem you see up top, too. I took that photo to illustrate the issues I was having with parking. I'll eventually go back to that map and show you more.

Right now, I've started working on my first new map in a while...it's a city I've named Helensburgh. Unlike my other cities, I'm actually imagining this as an American city, but not in any state that I can immediately think of.

The idea here is for me to actually go through and name the neighborhoods, name the major streets and then do a census of the various schools and then do some kind of parallel dynasty with the local high schools.

[Young Drachma]

Here's a nighttime aerial shot flying into Helensburgh city.

[Young Drachma]

Here's an aerial neighborhood map of Helensburgh. In an ideal world, I'll be adding a lot more neighborhoods to this town once I get a handle on the whole place and figure out what I want to do with it. There are a ton of commercial-only/industrial-only areas on this map and of course, I prefer more mixed use and gradually less industrial.

[Young Drachma]

I'm doing a different strategy this time, trying to figure out the various streets first and then renaming the neighborhoods. The adjusted city population (is around 3.2 million people, so it's about the size of cities that I have context for like Portland, Denver or Minneapolis.

Here are the 9 "sides" of Helensburg. Now that I've annexed the surrounding areas from the core city, the city boundaries will eventually grow. The total square mileage would be around 125 sq. miles when complete obviously much of that is water.



My next task is to identify the main streets around the city. Very tedious, but it's an important part of getting my bearings and knowing where is what, etc., then the next step will be adding various neighborhoods to the various sections of town, because there aren't that many for a city of this size.

After that, we'll look at the schools around town and figure out where they are, etc.

[Brian Swartz]

This thread is the first time I've ever seen a traffic issue described as 'gnarly'.

I'm curious, do you have any truly perverse 'spaghetti junction' highway interchanges like I've seen in some videos/pics about Skylines, or have you ironed all that out?

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by Brian Swartz

This thread is the first time I've ever seen a traffic issue described as 'gnarly'.

I'm curious, do you have any truly perverse 'spaghetti junction' highway interchanges like I've seen in some videos/pics about Skylines, or have you ironed all that out?

I'll look for some. In that aforementioned city (Vampire Lake), I had a HUGE problem that are partially inherent to the game mechanics where ambulances and cops were traveling halfway across the city to deal with issues where I had hospitals and police stations and that was causing massive traffic issues.

How I solved it? I mostly cut out outside connections, coupled with creating a bunch of one-way roads in the main part of town, coupled with killing off so many connections to the main highway in the city. It took me a while to get it right, but I finally did.

Should have documented it better, so I could show what I did.

[Young Drachma]

I went back to Vampire Lake and took photos for the first time in ages. The skyline is a lot fuller around the city than I'd remembered. I'm going to take more photos and share them. Here's what downtown looks like now.

[Young Drachma]

Cathopolis is the largest suburb in the Vampire Lake metro area. Here's the latest aerial view. Population there is about 228,752 people (game adjusted: 27896)

[Young Drachma]

Aerial view of the Greater Blake City area which also includes the towns of New Oberlin, Milk Woods and Breakfast Island.



Breakfast Island is a resort town just outside of the Blake City limits. It's a popular vacation spot for families around the VLMA.

[Brian Swartz]

I bought this finally during the Steam Thanksgiving sale and it is all your fault. As are the hundreds of hours I'll probably spend playing it.

Way to go.

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by Brian Swartz

I bought this finally during the Steam Thanksgiving sale and it is all your fault. As are the hundreds of hours I'll probably spend playing it.

Way to go.

Happy to have helped.



Last night, I messed around a bit in Helensburgh with the metro lines to really figure out where they go. I need to create more neighborhoods, but went with a minimalist approach figuring they could develop organically. The road naming mod is broken right now because of the new patch, but when I can get that back, I can start renaming roads here and get a better sense of place.



Mass transit ridership here is better than any other city I've seen.

I'd like to make bus lines more efficient in the meantime, I've turned trams to only work during the day and might eventually eliminate them altogether as I'm not convinced they're helping anything.

I'll wait to do anything to subway lines, though we have too many and I think some of the southern ones can be consolidated, but I need to study commuters better before I can assess the better ways of doing that.

We also have some neighborhoods here that are too industrial and I'm going to eventually phase them out into residential/commercial mixed use districts and so, when that happens, we'll probably have other transit needs in those areas as a result.

[Young Drachma]

Having done some math, seems like ridership in Helensburgh is around 36.7% which would put the city around Top 30 in the US, which is cool.

I'm working on a subway map too, which I've been wanting for a really long time and I finally found a tool.

I think if I can work on some of the lesser lines and make the more efficient, there might even be a way to increase ridership, I especially need to work on the bus lines because they're not that efficient from what I can gather so far.

[Young Drachma]

The NYC nomenclature probably works the best. I can't decide if the nomenclature is just in my head because I'm most familiar with that system or if the fact that Helensburgh is so subway extensive that it sort of fits.

So with that being said, you have "lines" which are the sections of the subway, "services" which was the individual routes and then "stations" which are dotted all over the city. There way too many stations in Helensburgh and probably need to have some close, but I can't really close them until I've identified all of them.




I've started going through (and thanks to a street name generator, using that as a way to name the station stops without having to overthink it..I figure they can change later) and naming the various stops on each line. Once I've done that, I'm going to start naming each of the lines.

THEN once I've done that, I'll identify the services across the city and come up with some kind of color system for the various lines. I haven't exactly decided how I want to do that yet or how they'll correspond. It seems like the EASIEST way to do the color coding is to come up with colors based on sections of town.



There are 9 official sections of town, 10 if you count the suburbs that I haven't built on yet. Almost all of our metro lines extend beyond their section of town, so there won't be a whole lot of lines that start and terminate in the same section of the city.

The game doesn't let you name by "county" or larger area but I need to come up with borough/county type names so that it's easier to distinguish the various areas besides just geography. Because right now on the map, West and East are backwards in the naming, though North/South are accurate.



So each rail line will have its own color, like New York. Then we'll identify each service line in some fashion either by letters, numbers or some combination but I haven't figured out exactly how to determine those yet. Still trying to figure out some kind of consistent nemonic.

Trains that go E/W will be numbered. Trains that go North/South will be lettered. That solves that. Each line will have its own color, but I'll need to identify each of the lines (and their branches) before I can do that.

[Young Drachma]

Okay, so there are at least six lines I've identified that all of the services will fall under.

WEST SIDE LINE (Silver)
SOUTH SIDE LINE (Blue)
NORTHWEST LINE (Tomato)
CENTRAL SLOPE LINE (Brown)
BAYSIDE LINE (Red)
PENINSULA LINE (Green)

The street car/TRAM system will be designated Yellow (#FEE355)
The two commuter railroad lines will be designated Orange (#F5A62D)

[Young Drachma]

Here's a much better aerial view of the neighborhoods without the district icons. Highland Estates in the Northeast is not within the city limits.



The city looks really dense and I was trying to figure out why, but per capita density would indeed be just beneath NYC as the 2nd most dense major U.S. if Helensburgh were a real place. (26,607 per square mile)

I'm probably going to do some fairly massive changes to the city landscape though, because it's just too dense for my tastes and I'd like to have it be more distinguishable, so the neighborhoods are going to undergo some reconstruction, I've been avoiding it because I didn't want to suffer a huge population loss, but it's worth it to me if I can get neighborhoods to look more distinct.

[Young Drachma]

The revised map with the accurate N/S/W/E



Before I start doing some urban renewal, here is the present dominant neighborhood types:

Residential
Circle City
Kidney
Cantaloupe Creek
Highland Estates
Woodland
Brewerstown
Congotown
South Side
Laurel Lake
Uptown
Far Side
Crown Point
Spring Lake Park
Shippen Point

COMMERICAL/OFFICE
West Side
Downtown
Messier
Bayside
Heirloom
South Side Cove
Bottlecap
Rigby

Industrial
North 40
Bridgewater
Silkwood

[Young Drachma]

RED LINE: A, B, G, 1, 2, 3
GREEN LINE: C, E, L/L, 4, 7
SILVER LINE: D, 2
BLUE LINE: J/J, M/M, R
TOMATO LINE: K, 5, 8/8, 9, 11
B-LINE (Tram System) (YELLOW)
METRO RAIL (Passenger Rail) (ORANGE)
CITY ROUTE (Bus System) (PINK)

People won't ever refer to the lines by their color in Helensburgh, I just have them listed for organizational purposes. The eventual next step will be to list out all of the stations for each of the routes along each line. In a few cases, there are lines that have the same letter/number in different sections of the city that don't intersect (L, J, M, 8)

I'll probably (at some point) map out a few people's commute as I'm curious about how people get around.

The B-LINE only travels from Messier to the Lower Slope areas of town, so it's not as prevalent as subways or buses.

[Young Drachma]

I've decided to go through and eliminate all of the 20 bus lines the city had and start over. I didn't really like how many stops they had, it seemed inefficient to me, so I'm going to attempt a deal where we have a few major routes that travel major thoroughfares, with small lines in neighborhoods feeding them and see if that increases ridership.

Right now, bus ridership is really small to the point of almost not needing them at all and I feel like it could be more efficient if the lines were drawn better.

Also, it'll help me to know where the routes actually travel.

[Young Drachma]

I just went through the bus lines and now we're back to 20 lines again, but ridership is even lower now than before. I've decided that local lines don't quite work as well if they don't take you through the city without connecting. I think my plan now is to create several "inter-zone" express lines that people can connect to and that leave from the same stations in the hopes that maybe it'll increase bus ridership back to where it was, if not beyond that.

We'll see.