That's because SimCity is not a tool for preaching your personal opinions of what makes "more livable cities" to people who more often than not want to design semi-realistic, typical cities in an entertaining strategy game.
If you want to make your perfect city builder, go ahead, it's easier than ever now for somebody to create a game. Just don't expect everybody else to share your view of "aspirational", more so if you actively punish traditional city structures.
What you call "typical" and "traditional" is not in any way universal.
Or you haven't travelled a lot.
Notice how in the continued thread after receiving confirmation that they were not just making up a story as many do, or otherwise living in an area of the UK that is not GMT, I immediately switched to asking for confirmation about their point about simcity.
Could you help me understand how digging is personal attacks?
I have great respect for what you and now also Tom provide to the community, so I don’t believe I have much ground to argue from. So I will just say as I do not understand the application of this rule, I may potentially run afoul of it again in the future. Please understand it won’t be out of disrespect, simply out of ignorance and a need to grow my definition of what a personal attack is one instance at a time until it aligns with your views.
In more simulation-focused games, cycling and walking paths are often available, and you can use them, but they come with many of the same constraints they face in the real world. In practice, that means they are usually not efficient as the primary way to move large numbers of people across a large city.
Reading your comment, it sounds like you want a game that is realistic in most respects, but treats transportation differently, in a way that makes your preferred options the optimal strategy. That is going to be hard to find, since transportation is a core part of city-building sims, and developers tend to pick either realism or a more utopian/fantasy model rather than mixing both in a single game.
A well-built large city isn't just going to be 100% biking and walking paths, it's going to have streetcars, light rail transit, subways, and buses as well as roads with cars. The difference is that people shouldn't be forced to commute across the entire city to get to work because you decided to cram all of the commercial zoning into one downtown core.
Isn't the point that they should be, if that's how I choose to build a city, and they don't have to be, if you choose to build it otherwise? The entire point of a sandbox city-builder is, I assume, that it's a sandbox, and not a dogmatic interpretation of a childish Reddit meme.
If you think Simcity and Cities: Skylines are realistic depictions, then ask yourself why Simcity famously has no visible parking whatsoever (or don't: the devs are on record saying they excluded it because it made the cities look terrible, there's no need to speculate here), or ask yourself why Cities: Skyline added car pokeballs (where drivers get out of the car and put the car in their pocket) or straight-up delete cars when traffic gets too heavy.
It's the opposite, no? Most city builders cheat to be able to be fun. Like, with the amount of roads one build in Sim City, half the map would have had to been parking lots to account for that amount of traffic. But that's boring gameplay, so they remove that constraint to make a fun game. Aka you never have to deal with the consequences of making your city car dependent.
Edit: See another comment from CalRobert about exactly this.
Cities Skylines with all the DLC and the right transportation mods gets pretty “realistic” in that you can build a transit paradise but the car still exists.
Everything in the article applies equally to trains and rails.
We get enough complaining about evil car-centric city designs on the posts directly about cars thanks.
* Add all of the non-car transport options: walking paths (including underground and raised paths for walking between large buildings in the winter, a la PATH in Toronto), bike paths, buses, streetcars, light rail, subways, inter-city trains, high speed rail, ferries
* Add parking lots as a feature to all commercial and residential construction, require every car to be parked somewhere when not in use, but allow residents/property owners to decide whether to build parking or not
* Allow land-value taxes as an alternative to property taxes, as well as the possibility for things like street parking and pollution ordinances to give you levers to incentivize/disincentivize the construction of parking lots
* Simulate emissions appropriately from all transport methods
* Parking lots and heavy traffic should lower property values, as citizens complain about the ugliness, pollution, noise, and danger of excessive traffic
There's a whole conversation to be had about the design of games like SimCity and how it affects future urban planners, but that may be going too far afield. Still, I think it would be nice to have a game that doesn't reward car-centric planning while burying the drawbacks.
Neither US or Europe do living areas well due to their historical constraints.
And, of course, the fact that the areas you say "aren't better to live in" also tend to be extremely expensive doesn't make a lot of sense.
Most people consider that a benefit. It's just as livable as anywhere else. Just different.
People are totally entitled to like what they like, and that's OK. Everyone has something that works for them, and this world has a great variety of options available but the "car-centric suburban sprawl" is linked to various negative mental and physical health consequences. Negative health consequences, IMO, isn't "just as livable".
As a simple example, when people walk more during commuting instead of drive, they tend to be healthier. There are other more nuance (but studied) impacts, such as increased car accidents, mental impacts from increased isolation, etc. In America, there is even a correlation between how car-centric a community is and how often individuals are willing to seek out healthcare (even when accounting for access and affordability).
A small errand that takes me 5 to 10min in my hometown takes me 45min to 2h in suburbialand. Worse, mutualizing errands do not even reduce the overhead of a single trip because infrastructure is usually made in such a car centric way that it makes it super inconvenient if not downright dangerous to walk from one huge parking lot to another one a couple of blocks away so you are kind of pushed to move your car, sometimes navigate a stupidly long loop to simply turn around and go on the other side of a stroad.
By the end of the day you realize you have barely done anything.
Funnily it makes it worse for both drivers and non drivers.
At home I usually opt to not take the car, not because it would be slow but because in many cases it is silly. It would be too short for the engine to even warmup and I would not have the chance to enjoy some time outside and/or exercise at the same time.
I totally see the impact spending so much time in the car and traffic has on my in law family's stress level and they do complain a lot about it while being seemingly unable to envision a better way of living and push for it at political level. It is also super bad on the security side of things because they often opt to take/make calls while driving for it to not make it time totally lost and aren't just as focused as they should be on the road.
https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...
you need "plop the growables" and "move it" mods at minimum to nudge all the buildings close together.
Compare that with the sprawl of Vaughan also shown in the video [1].
However, another way to look at that is that some people are willing to give up some space for a more convenient location. We're not running out of space quite yet.