How To Make a Roadless City

Please PM STomnibus if you have any questions about this tutorial.


Have you ever wanted to have a city without traffic? No cars, no buses, no trucks? You know you have, but Sim City doesn’t seem inclined to let you get away with it. Now, you have free, unsolicited advice on how you can create a historic city and have it vehicle free. As we know, free advice is definitely worth twice what you paid for it. So, let’s see how to make this happen.





First, we lay out a fake road. This is actually Jeronij’s rural embankment (straight shown here… diagonal used elsewhere). The residential embankment, shown above, could work too, but it has the fence line on one side, so you probably want to stick with the rural. The rural looks more authentic as a street as well.





Be sure to use the home and end keys to orient the street in the proper direction. This will be a T intersection.





Using the diagonal embankment pieces, you can get off of the grid and get some angled roads. You have a upper diagonal and lower diagonal angled lot from which to select. As you can see, the balance of the tile is covered with trees. So, you probably will want some sort of greenery at the turn instead of having a building facing out and having its entrance obscured with trees.





The diagonals are only half of what you need for the road, so you will need to rotate the lot and plop another set alongside to finish the road.





When finished, your road will be 1 tile across, but the extra trees will make the construction take up 2 tiles across. Note how the trees sort of stick out in a zigzag from the road. You will want to soften that with other lots in your final product.





After a while, you create more of an old world looking free-form pattern of cobblestone roads. But, these are technically parks, so they are not transit enabled and growable / ploppable RCI lots will have a fit! How do we solve this? How do we get some Sims to their jobs via a non-useable eyecandy transit system? Observe!






If you are placing commercial or industry, try pedmall tiles from NAM to provide transit access. Hook those up to a subway station to allow for transit between pedmall segments.





The sub stations will be quite unhappy without the pedmall lots, found in the roads menu. You can use the sandstone or grass lots as effective camouflage and they also have pedestrians, providing movement in an otherwise static cityscape.





Landmarks, such as these timber framed houses, do not require transit access and can be placed just about anywhere. You can save the pedmall tiles for lots which truly need access. Note the path between subway stations in grass tiles. That’s a pedestrian mall… counts as a road, looks like plantings.




See the movement on the grass… gives more life to it as well as needed access.





The transit system is in place and my ploppables are going in.





All of this is connected by subway. Commute times are tolerable and cars avoided.






Commercial businesses will grow if they can touch the pedmall tiles.





I start filling in the blank areas with trees to smooth out the diagonal road jaggies. Foot traffic gives life to the town, which would otherwise be very quiet.





Will it work? Yes! Residential will not grow in this will nor will it work if you plop it, but commercial and industry are fine with it.




The beauty of the pedmall set up is that the Sims think they are in cars, but they are not.


Following these steps will net you a traffic free neighborhood – full of old world Schulmania charm. Try it sometime… the Supreme Wirdle will purr for you.