We should invent a way... to live on top of an Arby's! Cities could be so efficient if we all lived on top of stores, I should Copyright this new found idea!
@@louisineseThats honestly kinda smart because gas stations have those roofs, but I don't wanna get blown up if someone smokes, seems like a terrorist target 😬
The “murder” in “Murder City” is historically derived from the Pennsylvania Dutch word for “mother”, and definitely not the brutal quadruple homicide shortly after the city’s founding
and "Pennsylvania Dutch" is actually german since the german word for german is "Deutsch" and people that didn't know german assumed wrong what they said was "Dutch"
@@SomeoneYouDontKnowOfficial I would suspect Pennsylvania Dutch to be more related to Low German than, as the word for "mother" in Low German is "Mudder" instead of "Mutter" in german. PS: I did some research, seems I was wrong about that, as it is related to a more southern dialect. Tho they seem to sometimes use the word "Mudder" as well.
As a bullock carriage guy, I feel this way too. Thus I try explaining to my carriage buddies that manure-filled street designs are actually worse for walking
ok but that is unironically how everyone should look at cars. making it so nobody NEEDS a car to get where they're going means the only people driving are going to be the people who WANT to drive. less cars = less traffic = better drive, it's a win for everyone.
@@burnin8able Unfortunately, there’s a weird cultural belief in some sections of America that any mode of transportation besides driving is dangerous (which is rich), suspicious, or weird. My in-laws see it as a critical failure of my masculinity that I don’t own a car and they see it as borderline suicidal that I take the bus/walk everywhere.
@@guyanomaly yeah, it's a byproduct of the fact that every generation since the 1940s has been bombarded with propaganda advocating for cars and only cars.
Yeah I actually love the freedom of having my own car and while idk if I’m a car guy, I would love to continue owning one. The fact I HAVE to drive everywhere is such a pain though, and increased public transit would make both my and everyone else’s lives so much easier road trips are dope, but it’d also be great if I could take a train or bus to the grocery store instead of having to drive myself barely 2 miles, which I couldn’t even reasonably walk if I needed to do so (which isn’t a great idea with perishable groceries anyway) because there aren’t even any sidewalks
"Anything that makes a city a worse place to drive in makes it a better place to live in, short of scattering random tire spikes on the road" "...honestly, I think the city council should consider the tire spike thing" - xkcd 2832
If a city is allowed to scatter random spikes around to discourage literally homeless people, it should definitely be allowed to do it to discourage drivers.
5:57 "In Finland, when an accident happens at an intersection, that intersection is closed down until the city figures out how to prevent that type of accident from occurring in the future." I'm not sure where you've got that information, or what has been the original text behind a broken telephone, as that's definitely not what we do in Finland. We do close down some dangerous intersections based on accident statistics (like many other countries), but not immediately or automatically after just one accident and not for any studying period or anything like that.
In the UK roads are often closed for several hours after a major accident to allow for evidence collection (rather than just removing any debris and reopening the road ASAP) - if Finland is the same it's probably someone reading "roads are closed to investigate the cause of the accident" and "dangerous intersections are redesigned" and misinterpreting it to mean that the roads are closed _until_ the intersection is redesigned.
For comparison to here in the USA, if there is an accident at an intersection everyone will move on and nothing will be done about it. Hope this helps!
@@nicksamek12 While it's true that most issues are multifaceted and an intervention that works in one country may not work in another for various reasons, "[FOREIGN COUNTRY] has reduced road deaths by redesigning their intersections, maybe we should try that" shouldn't be a controversial take.
In addition to "we shouldn't require people to operate heavy machinery as part of daily life," I always think about how capitalism leads to a huge portion of those cars operating while unsafe (ignoring "check engine" lights, cracks in windows, burned out lights, blinding LEDs...) and our lack of adequate medical care has people driving while exhausted, overly emotional, sick, inebriated, and on medication with negative side effects....
THIS!!! I hate cars (although newer trucks seem to have them more often) that have really bright lights that completely blind you during the night. Capitalism and the healthcare system, at least in the US I don't know about anywhere else, are full of so many issues and problems that are all interconnected and create this feedback loop where they all make the problems worse over time.
@dandre3K Some people do not get medical help due to the expensive healthcare here in America, and thus end up driving under dangerous conditions. It's not that the bad healthcare system causes people to drive while tired, but it adds to some of the dangerous conditions people drive in or is a reason *why* they do so.
@@dandre3Kthere’s a lot of factors that contribute to it. One of the worst examples I’ve seen is people who are diabetic that ration their insulin shots to save money, which inevitably leads to them falling asleep and/or passing out while driving. Same applies to people who need to take medication for blood pressure, if they can’t afford it and have to skip it at any point, it puts them and other drivers at dramatically higher risk.
Polygon is getting orange-pilled now and I love it. Car dependency sucks and I love the mods/updates in the first city skylines that allow for bikes and carfree streets.
Which is sad. Car based infrastructure is so ubiquitous in certain parts of the world that owning and taking care of one is a necessity. But no one even fuckin wants them
@@casadastraphobiaand the people who do have grown up so used to driving that they don’t know they never had a choice. it’s like a modern day allegory of the cave
That is 100% the fault of the city planners who got a massive hard-on for Suburb type design. It is inherently terrible for every single socio-economic factor in the books. The only benefit is you don't have to deal with sharing walls with neighbors, which ends up being a shitshow in most neighborhoods anyways.
I entirely agree with the message of this video. But also my real takeaway from it is that it 1:25 your "Egg" district looks an awful lot like you built a poop lake and surrounded it with houses. I know it's probably actually farming, but on that zoomed out scale that is not what it looks like.
5:26 Epic gamer moment when Brigham Young's weird insistence on Salt Lake City having super wide streets results in "33% of traffic fatalities in Utah [involving] speeding, higher than the national average of 29%." (Source: Salt Lake Tribune)
That's insane! When I moved from Utah to Connecticut I really missed the wide streets, but maybe Connecticut was safer! Scratch that, driving in Connecticut was horrible, lol. But that's just because everybody there is angry all the time.
reminds me of a funny reoccuring theme in city builder games, where certain reviewers complain about how easy it is to create a utopia by just implementing 'left wing' policies like higher density and public transport, and that 'right wing' policies create polluted hellscapes theyre so close to getting it
lol, I've never played a city builder where you can have bread lines and gulags. The people who made your higher density, public-transportation-connected cities (or the pleasant, non-Soviet style ones at least) were all either explicitly or implicitly more right wing than you or anyone you're friends with. You're free to give us a heads up when the Khmer Rouge DLC drops for Cities Skylines 2 though.
@@c_a_l5442 oh yeah, because breadlines and gulags come from super left-wing environments like the great depression and the USSR. And the best public transport locations are in those silly European countries that are always referenced as some of the most right wing places in the world 🤡
Honestly higher density and public transport is not even particularly left wing. It follows from "right wing" ideals of small government and cost effective investment of public funds too.
@@beback_ I'd call it solidly centrist. It's just a smart idea that makes sense. I don't think cost-effectiveness is something particularly associated with the left or the right. Correlates more with competence.
Alternate title should be "Clayton uses City Skylines 2 to explain the importance of road maintenance and public transit in urban areas to any potential congressmen watching" (And yes, I 100% agree with all that he said. As a car owner, I'd ride the HECK out of a train if it was more accessible for me and well maintained)
I love cars. My dream job is to be a racing driver. But I hate cars as a way of transportation. Every time I'm in a train and I'm easily passing all the cars on the road next to the train tracks I am thinking about how there is nothing that is better with cars than trains and public transport. Except maybe that you can carry more stuff. But 90% of the time drivers are just going to the grocery store and back, which they could easily have done with public transport. If they had public transport... I think the roads should only be for them who really need them. Also, I think the bikes and some stuff will come as DLCs in CS2, because Paradox is greedy and wants to cash in more money.
It's funny, because when cars were still somewhat scarce where I'm from, and considered expensive (which they still are of course, but people don't care anymore - it's too much of a status symbol), people planned their groceries in a way to get the best usage from the car. Nowadays, people "stop by the store" on the way home, or to work, or from the gym (going to the gym... in a car. Bravo!), because it's "on the way", right? Massively increasing traffic congestion and pollution for absolutely no reason, while thinking they're "saving" something.
as much as I LOVE driving (there's no better feeling then being behind the wheel, imo) I still think that society would be WAY better if we got rid of most cars. Busses and trains and especially WALKABLE cities are SO important and would be better for the environment AND the people who use them.
Clayton's video from a few years ago on SimCity and the limitations of city simulator games is one of my all time faves. This is a great accompanying case study!
Everyone plays City Skylines wrong. They try to "fix" traffic by building more highways or widening their streets. THIS DOES NOT WORK. The game is quite similar to reality. Most people choose whichever option is the quickest way to get around. Therefore to get less traffic, you need to make streets slower and less direct, and make walk/cycle/transit options direct and quick. I have fairly large cities in City Skylines with zero highways and I rarely even need think about dealing with traffic because it isn't an issue.
RIGHT?? I feel exactly the same- love cars in concept as leisure and racing, HATE HATE HATE them as something our entire everyday society is built around. There's gotta be a better way of balancing things.
@@Michael_Lindell I might be misrepresenting a point, but I think some reviewer said that it was rather difficult to build a european-like city in the game. Case in point: lack of cycling infrastructure (mentioned in this very video) or something about walkable / public transport only areas (video that I'm referencing). Hence my correction to it being an American (in ethos) game that was developed in Finland and published in Sweden.
great video--just a heads up, it seems like there's a couple closed captioning errors, seemingly where parts of sentences were probably just cut out while editing and then the captions script wasn't updated to reflect the changes: 2:09 (this one is just an "Anyway" that isn't there), 4:29 , 5:37
I kinda stopped playing CS2, cause it forced me to build a city for cars, not people. And then these endless suburbs... why not just a cool city center made for people with public transport and bicycle lanes? But hey, maybe a DLC may fix that eventually...
I have walking paths and lots of public transport. Traffic issues are minimal and I have something like 160k public transit journeys a month for a population of 150k, which seems pretty reasonable to me. I have far more issues with the way residential demand is generated!
Great video! I do think it lacked a little in offering alternatives to games like CS2, as in, what games are doing a similar thing, but with less of a car-centric approach. Would've loved to hear more. Happy holidays!
It's not really car centric, actually. The roads are required for the _services_, not for personal transportation - in fact, part of the challenge is doing your best to have as little personal traffic on the roads as possible, because it makes the cities awful, just like in real life. You can eliminate most of car traffic, and it's glorious. It's not American City Simulator, after all :P It still takes a lot out of Sim City, so building European-style cities is a bit of a challenge, though. One of the easy ways to make cities suck is exclusive zoning - who figured out the moronic idea that residential and commercial areas should be separate? Is that also part of the big plan to sell more cars and gas? :D
one thing I really wish the game had is just, car-free roads and/or limited traffic roads (only allowing streetcars etc aside from pedestrians) so I could make cities where there's As Little Car Traffic As Possible in the most dense urban areas, instead having people walk or take public transit
They built a railway station next to a football and rugby stadium near me, but the station is closed an hour before and after matches and concerts because it is only served by a 75 seater train once per hour and there were safety concerns about too many of the 32,000 seating capacity of the area trying to squeeze onto it.
If your city has more than 200k people you should probably have a good transit system and allow for high density housing. The fact that so many cities still build like they're a 1000 person hamlet is nuts.
@falkin42 that's mostly due to the government shouldering the entire burden of infrastructure instead of passing some of the costs off. Building out is far far more expensive to maintain and causes more land to go to waste. Plus do you need an architect for a mid-level apartment building?
Enjoyed the video! I would like to encourage you (and everyone) to call car-on-car collisions just that, not accidents (where the implication is that there is no fault for the driver or consequences). Drivers are responsible for their actions behind the wheel and the top causes of collisions IRL are distracted driving and speeding - not whoopsie poopsies! Glad you're working towards eliminating them in your city!
I know this is just a video on Cities Skylines mainly, but people focus way too heavily on cars, purely hating on them, when in reality its not that "cities designed around cars" are bad, its that cities that rely on a singular form of transpiration are bad. A city that solely relies on walking everywhere would be a poorly designed city, and one may say "but people enjoy walking, and it's healthy..." Well... Not when your job is on the opposite end of town. A well designed city has multiple effective transportation options, be it biking, walking, rail, or even by car. European cities aren't these utopian havens of picturesque towns with zero cars in sight, they still have heavy amounts of vehicle traffic and infrastructure designed to sustain said traffic. The difference is that they've also heavily focused on other forms of transportation besides automobiles allowing for people to have the option not to drive their car if they don't want to, or feel they don't need to.
Fellow Clayton video enjoyers(and Clayton too) will likely enjoy Well There's Your Problem, podcast about engineering disasters that shares a love of logistical puzzles and a distaste for car infrastructure. "Train good, car bad, horse...dubious".
3:24 recently moved to a more rural area with my cute little Nissan cube and a road that is *barely* 2 lanes with big trucks and... yeah. Sometimes you gotta choose between ruining your alignment, spontaneous offroading, or becoming road pizza. These aren't the cute potholes I experienced in suburban areas, either. These things will eat my tires (and possibly axles) for breakfast.
I like having a car in that it allows me to move independently - if I don't like a function, I can leave, etc. But I definitely agree that cars should not be *required* to baseline exist in society. When I get stuck in traffic I think about how 10 or 12 of the cars around me could be substituted with a single bus and it makes me crazy. And looking at map predictions where driving is 15 minutes and walking is 3 hours also makes me crazy, in a slightly different way. Cars are great as an option and absolutely horrific as a necessity.
in my last cities skylines city, 200k population, I had 50 bus lines, 20 tram lines, 7 metro lines and 15 train lines, and bike lanes all over, traffic was not an issue
Nothing opened my eyes to the problem with cars when I was diagnosed with epilepsy and therefore could no longer drive a few years back. We are so ill equipped for any sort of public transportation outside of a select few cities in the whole nation.... and even then those cities are also traffic nightmares.
Apart from agreeing with you (and yeah, I am one of those people that car-drivers really hate, a cyclist), it's funny to see CS2 not even running smooth all the time in your video. So probably will wait some more until patches fix that, before actually buying. Anyhow... With all of that said, change is hard. I am temporarily living in LA for work. I am actually from Berlin Germany. Guess what? It's night and day between those 2 cities. In Berlin, I almost never felt bad for not having a driving license... Over here? Yeah, every day. And it's not that LA is not semi-walkable, or doesn't have public transport... Actually as I hear and see it, it's improving at a very rapid rate. But just providing a connection, is not enough. First, the stations of the metro eg. are too far apart, walking 1.5 miles to the next station (surrounding area) - is pretty far away... Should have been more frequent. a Metro every 20 minutes for a city of that size is also a joke. And last, but not least... You never feel super secure down there... Drug addicts and homeless people are occupying the wagons. I, by myself are fine most of the time, but taking family with me? No chance. Europe is ahead in that game... Also with Cycling security. I almost don't see biking lanes, which really doesn't make me want to go anywhere on the bike in LA... Which is also unfortunate. But yeah, to improve that situation, there must be a ridership to actually make a point in front of the congress, so... It's a bit the hen / egg situation. BUT, Europe is kinda doing it, so, I hope that America will do as well, at some point.
I hate cars, too. I hate everything about them... A person moving around in a two ton vehicle is just ridiculous, a tiny percentage of the energy is actually spent carrying the person and all the rest is simply wasted. Most of the energy goes to inefficiency, the rest goes to carrying the car itself. Not even talking about the traffic, its dangers and the disgusting pollution.
There’s plenty of devices you don’t use to their full capacity 100% of the time. Cars can typically transport multiple people. Your same complaints apply to public transit vehicles too.
it's prolly hacky and not indicative of real world traffic but in the first game i manage 90%+ traffic rating or whatever - all green, basically - no matter how dense the city every time with three rules: never use a four way. never ever. manually remove any stoplights that got made in construction to enforce stop sign only three way intersections. fractal offset (because three way intersection rule) grid. rectangles of highways encompassing rect aves encompassing rect streets. chop away bits for big projects and aesthetics after established. dunno if i'm explaining this one well but you get it, right? finally. go fuckin apeshit on public transport. particularly subways, as buses and taxis are good but are extra road traffic even tho capacity is higher. i mean go ham on them subway tunnels. speaking of tunnels i also do have an odd string of highway tunnels i like to put here and there to directly connect farther reaches of the city, but not always and when i don't i still get good traffic so i don't consider it part of the rules i just think they're fun to do.
There have been a couple of patches which have apparently really helped with performance but it's still got a ways to go. The thing I'm more concerned about is that the simulation part of the game is just straight up non functioning in many parts. Give it another 6 months or so I'd say
When I moved from America to Japan the greatest thing I saw was that disabled people here are not forced out of work because they can't drive. Not having a car isn't a one way to poverty here unlike in the states. Blind people commute via train here, old people take the plethora of busses that stop at every intersection. Life feels so much more dynamic here. As a visually impaired person (not fully blind but not fully sighted either) I was forced into the most degrading and harsh work environments if I could even get work in the us. Here im a professor and no one cares that I don't have a car. Most people don't.
My problem with speed bumps is that people who drive compact, fuel-efficient cars have to worry about them more than people who drive giant, pedestrian-murdering, gas guzzling SUVs and trucks.
"Traffic Manager" put words to why I have had no desire to play CS2 despite adoring CS1 I was dearly hoping for pedestrian streets, bike lanes, and better mixed use options. Aside the abysmal launch, it is just as you describe: CS2 is a traffic manager, and imo that sucks
I played hundreds of hours of CS1. Great game. Picked up CS2 and expected greatness. I noticed something right off the bat. Public service buildings. Are. Huge. What the hell. Why is the elementary school in CS2 so huge? It's like all of the problems that plauge the U.S IRL was added to CS2 by a small european game dev studio. Bigger and more spread out elementary schools as opposed to smaller more frequent schools is the reason why our children can no longer walk safely to school and we have to car or bus.
Hell, sometimes even public transit drivers are rude. I walked in front of a parked school bus when walking to school (to board a bus and head out to the vocational school.) and I got honked at and they almost drove into me because they started driving. No, I was not in their front or side Blindspot. (I know how blindspots work, I'm wanting to get a CDL.) Nobody respects pedestrians.
I need someone to make a public transport in cs2 already, i have no idea how trams work and it seems like nothing is coming and going from my cargo station
I’ve never played CS or its sequel, but I follow plenty of online urbanists who do, and something that seems funny to me is that the game seems so car-brained despite being made by Northern European game developers, not North Americans
I’ve always lived in either a semi-rural area or the outer areas of very small “urban” areas, so many of these discussions about public transit don’t really impact me because even if it improved in my area it still wouldn’t be practical to not drive my car most of the time. I’d like to not have to drive ALL the time, but these discussions miss a large portion of the population and are generally focused on urbanites.
To think society has been moulded by the oil/fuel industry as well as car industry to make the large majority of places around the world only accessable by car. I understand buses, trains, ferries etc all absolutely guzzle fuel however I wouldn't mind betting a more public transit oriented city with consistent, quick and accessable transit would take more cars off the road than the addtional busses and trains required because often a car is carrying 1-4 people. trains can carry waaaaaaaaaaay more. so if 80 people all needed to go to the shopping centre it would make more sense to have 1 train carry them, than 20 to 80 cars depending on passenger per car. and see I feel that one train would use less fuel for that trip than even the 20 cars but surely for sure the 80 cars if everyone went solo. a lot of trains and busses are electric these days too. I understand cars are electric too, I do actually have an electric car and I charge it off solar panels and I have a battery installation at home too so I pay zero money on fuel. The traffic accidents and congestion points are extremely important too. I for the longest time have been super just eh whats wrong with cars just everyone have a car, and living in a regional location with next to no public transit minus a dysfunctional bus network I am forced to use a car, like many many others in the world. I did however go to the city just recently and rode on a train for the very first time and instantly fell in love. I normally avoid the city due to the traffic, the congestion, the stress that comes with the roads that make no sense, lanes that suddenly end, lanes that force you to turn, one way streets etc. But now, I can just park up on the city's edge and just public transit in and it makes city trips way way more appealing to me.
