Posts about SimCity

And...: Metro riders are skeptical of proposed fare hikes. (Post) ... Several local bike trails will receive part of $2.5 million being awarded in Maryland. (Post) ... After a 10-year absence, a new SimCity will be released in 2013 (Post, Youtube, Dave Murphy) (Comment)

And...: Transportation Alternatives updated CrashStat, an interactive map of pedestrian, driver, and cyclist collisions in New York. (Streetsblog) ... Arlington may raise taxi fares in exchange for requiring credit card readers. (Post) ... SimCity and Herman Cain share something in common when it comes to taxes. (Huffington Post) (Comment)

Development

SimCity getting better, still a simplification

by David Alpert • May 15, 2008 7:09 am

The original SimCity taught me it's best to segregate commercial zones far from residential zones to make property values higher, and to build very large donut shaped superblocks. The 1960s form of urban planning that SimCity's model rewards turned out to be totally wrong.

Now SimCity is on its fourth verson, and the model is a lot more sophisticated. Matthew Yglesias bought it and found some flaws like no mixed-use buildings or bicycling. But it does reward locating different zones near each other and good road connectivity. Ryan Avent has some more comments.

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Tags: SimCity

Development

EveryBlock and more for DC

by David Alpert • March 4, 2008 9:31 am

EveryBlock is a new site that lets you see everything going on in your block: pictures people upload, inspection violations in local restaurants, building permits, and more. Here's my old block in NYC. It looks like it could be a very useful tool for citizens to keep up with what's going on in their neighborhoods. Rob Halligan is pushing to bring it to DC—that would be great!

Rob Goodspeed wrote a good post a few weeks ago, Web 2.0 for Urban Development, about ways Web tools like interactive maps could help planners and citizens keep up with their city. My ultimate dream would be to have an interactive tool that lets people click and drag buildings of various sizes and shapes onto the existing city—a sort of SimCity for real cities. The objective would be to try to fit in the growth in jobs and people that's coming in the future, like the charrette done a few years ago where participants placed Lego blocks on a map. With this program, anyone could do it, share their visions, and see the impact on traffic, the environment, crime, etc. based on the land use choices each person makes.

Meanwhile, we do need a site like EveryBlock to help citizens visualize the information already available. As long as governments expose the basic data (as DC does relatively well and WMATA does poorly), there's a Web developer out there who can turn the data into a snazzy site.