When you take away the roads, and consign people to the pedestrian areas, the footpaths and crosswalks, how much space is left for people? Spoiler alert: Not much!ДЄnd then thereвЂ™s the environment. You have to park them for the majority of the time that theyвЂ™re not being used, which is the majority of the time.вЂќ A famous graphic by the venerable traffic researcher Claes Tingvall illustrates just how much space we willingly give over to cars without even realising it. Gordon calls cars a вЂњgeometry problem,вЂќ and noted how вЂњthey take up a lot of space that cities generally donвЂ™t have. According to the World Health Organisation (as cited by the European Environment Agency), noise is the second-highest environmental cause of health problems, right behind air pollution.Д¬ars are a spatial disaster, too. For instance, the noise pollution they generate - be that from interstate highways or midtown thoroughfares - can cause cortisol levels to spike, essentially putting your brain into a constant state of вЂњfight or flight.вЂќ You can imagine how bad that is for mental wellbeing. Cars can impact health in more insidious, but no less serious, ways. ItвЂ™s not just what you can see and calculate, either. By the numbers, few innovations are more singularly harmful to the continued prospect of human life than the automobile. These are staggering figures, and they recur at roughly the same severity year after year after year. In addition, more than 4 million people suffered injuries serious enough to warrant medical attention. (Heads up: Things are about to get dour.) In 2019, according to the National Safety Council, an estimated 38,800 people were killed as a result of car crashes in the United States. Nobody goes to those places and says, вЂThis is wonderful! But you know what would make it better? A bunch of cars.вЂ™вЂќ вЂњYou can just think of the kinds of places that people like to go to on vacation, whether thatвЂ™s Paris or Amsterdam or Main Street U.S.A.

вЂњYou donвЂ™t have to actually imagine the ideal city without cars in it,вЂќ Doug Gordon, a co-host of The War on Cars podcast, recently told me over a video call. That might sound patently ridiculous, but itвЂ™s really quite normal. So the question at the core of Cities: Skylines isnвЂ™t just вЂњWhat does the city of your dreams look like?вЂќ ItвЂ™s also, вЂњWere you a god, what would you do?вЂќ You can, in other words, play god-king in your own personal domain of zoning laws and civil ordinances. And you can do all of this without having to bend to the frustrating whims of a community board. You can impose limits on density, manifest new parks out of thin air, construct hospitals and other essential social services, level highways, widen roads, build metro lines, build bus stops, taxi stands, or train stations, and even terraform the surrounding geography. (Sorry, NUMTOTs, no mixed-use zoning in Cities.) You can designate districts, rename them whatever you want, and tweak the jurisdictional tax rates right on down to the percentage point. You can zone various areas as commercial, residential, or industrial districts. It comes from how deep in the weeds you can get in micro-managing every square inch of your realm. The allure of Cities: Skylines isnвЂ™t just a result of its terrific city-builder bona fides (though thatвЂ™s very much a part of it). The modding community, too, has gone all in on Cities, introducing graphical improvements, one delicious Google Maps-esque viewing tool, several new architectural facades, and various, countless fixes that just generally made the game more user-friendly. Post-release updates have since ironed out any glaring wrinkles. First released in 2015, Cities was a cool bath for wannabe city planners burned by EAвЂ™s disastrous 2013 SimCity reboot. But in the process of trying to do some good, I really screwed up: I sparked a full-blown pandemic.Д¬ities: Skylines is a city-builder game widely considered as a high-water mark for the genre. Like many other wide-eyed millennials, I set out to enact meaningful change, to prove that American cities neednвЂ™t rely so heavily on a car-centric framework.

Cities skylines more roads