Make something people want

Someone at Y Combinator

When I started research for my game Microlandia, out of frustration with the lack of socioeconomic realism in other city builders, I almost immediately came across this call to arms:

Sim City gets credit as a pioneer, but it’s run its course. I hope we see more planning games that try to get transportation right, and games that try to do transit in particular. If you’re working on one, let’s talk!

Jarrett Walker, Notes on SimCity at 30

This was quite a long time ago. And yesterday I finally reached out to Jarrett, closing the loop.

When I set out to make a game with high fidelity urban simulation, I quickly discovered that this is perhaps a very long project, so my strategy to keep my sanity and deliver a working game early on was to start with a very small map size, and increase the limit as I add content and optimize it good enough so I can continue tracking virtual citizens individually without turning laptops into air fryers.

A very small city of a couple thousand inhabitants is already a nice socioeconomic test tube where policies about taxes, housing, safety, healthcare can be tried out, but as soon as I start expanding the map size, and with it the population size, the elephant in the room of city builders appears: Parking spaces.

If you plan a city where people live on one side and work on another without a functional public transit network, you will need lots of parking space. Without it, there can be no optimal job-worker matching and the economy sucks. At that time the solution was to implement curb-side street parking, with roughly 6 cars per 20m tile, and this is enough to get the people who don’t live at a walking distance to work. But in big cities the commutes are longer and the likelihood of a 100-worker factory to be located within walking distance of everyone is practically zero, so, if they’re driving to work, we need parking lots.

Yes, they are ugly. Yes, they take a lot of space and every square meter reduces your park index score. Your cities are suddenly not so glamorous and you’re getting closer to Houston in the 1970s.

Thankfully there’s more than one remedy to keep your cities from looking like a car motherboard.

Build offices next to housing: This is just a good idea that makes cities walkable. The downside is that the optimal place of work of someone might still be in another neighborhood, so this actually works better for cities that are mostly specialized in one white-collar job industry and the services that are provided to them (like San Francisco). It might not work in an industrial city where people living next to factories (or the techno club).

Build a robust transport network: This is also a good idea: invest in a fleet of buses with well-thought-out routes. But it depends on funding and the human factor. Here in Berlin, it’s common to have complete shutdowns of entire U-Bahn lines because of the unmet demands of unionized workers. As Jarrett points out, for cars and roads “the construction of the road, really is the largest expense, because the traveller pays to run the car”

Economic incentives: Making the car license very expensive and the buses free is also a good idea. The rich people are gonna drive cars anyway and they can (to an extent) subsidise the public transport. Economics, with a savvy policy, could work. But the problem seems to be cultural. In Germany, when the 9 euro monthly ticket was introduced, it didn’t completely eliminate car trips … more successfully, New York reduced cars by charging more at traffic hotspots but it still sparked a political backlash. People just love their cars. If they can afford it, they’ll use it. In the end, it’s a matter of balancing the right amount of induced demand.

So, unless you’re building a city in the style of Car Park Capital you probably need to implement at least one of these three ideas to avoid having the dreaded parking lot. Actually, there might be a better idea out there. But my job is to build a fair simulation, not to figure out how to solve it.

Shameless plug time! Microlandia looks like a cozy city builder game until the simulation kicks in. Out now on Steam for PC, Mac and Linux.