SimCity - Parking Lots Don't Work in an Ideal World

Why 'SimCity' Doesn't Have Any Parking Lots Because They Don't Work

In an ideal world, parking lots just don't work for a city.  In creating SimCity, the designer said, "My inspiration wasn't really drawn from urban planning books; it was more from deconstructing the existing world."

"Our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots," SimCity lead designer Stone Librande says of his decision to simply pretend the game's parking is underground. It's one of many decisions Librande and his team had to make when building their world simulation — adding some details created fascinating emergent phenomena like in-game traffic jams, but other things, like food supply chains, just wouldn't fit."

"I think the biggest (problem) was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots."

"We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them -- so, if you have a little grocery store, we'll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they'll have what seem like really big lots -- but they're nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive."


"Then I also really got into Netflix streaming documentaries. There is just so much good stuff there, and Netflix is good at suggesting things. That opened up a whole series of documentaries that I would watch almost every night after dinner. There were videos on water problems, oil problems, the food industry, manufacturing, sewage systems, and on and on -- all sorts of things. Those covered a lot of different territory and were really enlightening to me."

"I came up with two extreme cases -- around the office we call them "Berkeley" and "Pittsburgh," or "Green City" and "Dirty City." We said, if you are the kind of player who wants to make utopia -- a city with wind power, solar power, lots of education and culture, and everything's beautiful and green and low density -- then this would be the path you would take in our game."

"But then we made a parallel path for a really greedy player who just wants to make as much money as possible, and is just exploiting or even torturing their Sims. In that scenario, you're not educating them; you're just using them as slave labor to make money for your city. You put coal power plants in, you put dumps everywhere, and you don't care about their health."

Comments:  "Trying to accurately model parking lots would be an interesting proposition. I've lived and commuted in a few different cities, and the ones with more parking had higher levels of traffic congestion and noticeably worse mass transit systems, while the ones with highly limited parking had well-used mass transit systems and noticeably lower traffic congestion. Now, I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg, but I'm sure some planners know."

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-philosophy-of-simcity-an-interview-with-the-games-lead-designer/275724/