Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently
28 comments
·September 18, 2025xyzelement
noosphr
> Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
Buy a bakfiet cargo bike, there's models that can fit five kids under 7. Mine fits three.
Kids like them better and you get exercise. For the first time in my life I have a BMI of around 20 without having to waste time at the gym. My exercise is the drop off or pick up.
Every other parent my age in the neighborhood looks five years away from a heart attack. I'm fitter than I was in my 20s.
dataflow
"Americans love their cars" isn't so much about the cars as it is about the lack of good alternatives. Other countries have great public transportation and good bike lanes and all that... in addition to car ownership. So people can get the best of both worlds. It's only a zero sum game if you want it to be one.
JambalayaJimbo
Your kid will hate your car constrained area, because they will be unable to get around themselves until they’re old enough / rich enough to drive one
FredPret
Then the kid moves to NYC, loves it, meets someone, has a kid, and realizes they need two SUV’s and a heated garage near good schools.
noosphr
It's rather cruel to send an 11 year old to live in her own in NYC.
wpm
Somehow my parents managed to raise me without any SUVs.
tehjoker
then you ask yourself why aren’t the schools good enough in nyc… and it leads you down a rabbit hole
busterarm
I grew up in NYC and maybe having my movement restricted might have been a good thing.
I was deep into NY's drug and party scene from about the time I turned 12. Pedos used to follow me walking home from the public library.
Lotta my friends growing up did not make it and I no longer live in NYC.
bombcar
You can get quite a bit of advancements by having “one side” try to optimize for the other - if done honestly, you can get a “best of both worlds” as they learn what the others want (and need).
cblum
FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural environment than suburbs, and also because we both grew up in cities in our respective countries.
sien
The economic aspect is also worth considering.
The subsidy per passenger mile in the US is :
0.019 for road transport, 0.021 for air transport, 0.710 for Amtrak and 2.300 for transit.
From : https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22592
Just also as a note, you can create suburbs pretty easily where bikes use paths or whatever. I live in a suburb where I can ride 15 kms to work without riding on roads. The subsidy for bikes would actually be really low.
chimeracoder
> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is slightly tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
But more importantly: car-dependent suburbs are an absolutely miserable place to grow up as a child if you're not wealthy enough to have one non-working parent and/or a nanny (or both). Being dependent on someone else to enable your entire social life until you turn 16 is a torturous enough experience that I'm not surprised that the first generation to have universal access to social media as teenagers has become the first generation to use social media to organize a teenage-driven movement for public transit.
crooked-v
Of course, SimCity as a series leaves out the biggest visual impact of cars - all the parking lots. Even Cities Skylines doesn't try very hard.
hibikir
Coming from Spain it was always a difficult game to see as a simulation: What do you mean, commercial zones? What in the world it this low density residential? It was basically impossible to try to make a city like the one I lived in.
Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
casenmgreen
Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so.
Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.
So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.
As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.
You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.
I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
TheCycoONE
SC4 with the NAM mod sounds more in line with your expectations https://www.sc4nam.com/docs/feature-guides/the-nam-traffic-s...
liveoneggs
It's wasn't bad for two floppy disks. Transport tycoon obviously gives more of what you're after but might not be at the correct scale.
card_zero
It has another flaw, which is that you don't need to build any pipes. Water supply has no effect other than roleplay.
voidfunc
> the game couldn't be played realistically.
I think I found your problem..., trying to take a game too seriously.
I've played thousands of hours of SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4 and I treat them as what they are, incredibly fun city building sandboxes with illusory and believable but flawed simulations under the hood.
RodgerTheGreat
In contrast, Magnasanti: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-totalitarian-buddhist-wh...
card_zero
I always used to play with zero tax, and legal gambling.
NortySpock
... How well does that work? Asking because my SC3K runs always ended up being boring cases of "yes, we sell landfill space to the surrounding 4 cities, and if people want education they're going to have to go to a library and learn to read themselves, and we're obviously too broke to improve things."
bell-cot
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.
First, I had a similar feeling coming back to SimCity 4. Even a just a few years ago, I tried to optimize for maximum density and size - kinda like NYC where I lived.
Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.
Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.