games

There was an interview with the lead designer of the 2013 iteration of SimCity in which he said that they tried to model cities as closely as they could, but one of the big things they had to abandon was parking lots because of how much space they take up. Like, it would have made the game unplayable, so they decided to model parking by putting it “underground” i.e. all the cars basically exist in a parallel dimension when they aren’t on the road. The same thing would apply to any remotely realistic city builder. You can either model parking properly and have gigantic asphalt wastelands occasionally interrupted by a shopping mall, or you can use magic to deal with cars.

One thing that I found kind of interesting is that you literally can’t make a pedestrian-only city in the base version of Cities: Skylines. Things like garbage pickup and emergency services require having roads and vehicles. You have to get a DLC to even create pedestrian areas, let alone try and create a car-free city. That’s how deep the car ideology goes.