A city needs streets, roads and other means for your sims to move about.
Streets are for light traffic among zoned areas, allowing sims to pull in and out of their driveways and parking lots. Streets are also useful in farm areas, which cannot tolerate heavy traffic. However, you can't use them to traverse rivers and mountains, nor can you use them to connect between cities.
Roads have more capacity and higher speed limits than streets. They connect neighborhoods to each other and to commercial and industrial areas. They also connect between cities.
You can build bridges and tunnels with roads. When you drag your road cursor over a river, a bridge will appear automatically (or a reason why it can't). The Rush Hour pack lets you choose from among seven types of bridge. For tunnels just drag the road cursor over a mountain.
Avenues are Euro-style four-lane divided roads available in the Rush Hour pack. They have more capacity and higher speed limits than roads. These are meant to replace intra-city roads that are jammed with traffic. Avenues are two tiles wide; they are very expensive to set up and keep; and likely will require tearing down buildings along the roads they replace.
You can replace street with road and road with avenue. Don't replace too many streets, though, or the city planner will raise a ruckus.
You can also lighten traffic by placing bus stops at strategic points in your residential, commercial and industrial areas, so that sims do not need to drive to work or the store. Make sure you place a bus stop where your sims can walk to it (within a ten-tile radius), or they will not use it.
Buses can travel between cities: So planting bus stops in the industrial area of one city and a residential quarter of its neighbor helps ease traffic between the cities. But don't put just one bus stop in a city, or the transit advisor will be going Say what?
The Rush Hour pack lets you make roads one-way (both lanes in the same direction). These cost the same as roads, but are difficult to set up. You can only convert pre-existing roads (not streets); or, you may have to bulldoze any roads or streets you replace.
One-way roads are useful in relieving traffic jams in busy commercial or industrial areas: One road goes in one direction, a parallel road a block away goes the other. Use them carefully, or you'll make your traffic problems worse.
Another Rush Hour pack goodie lets you make money off your roads with strategically placed toll booths. Sims will not like paying out, so prepare yourself for a rating hit if you use them. On the plus side, if toll booths are used with bus stops, they can lighten traffic.
Don't even think about highways with their wide variety of ramps and interchanges. They are for groups of cities with more than 10,000 sims each.
| Item | Initial | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Street | §5 | §0.05 |
| Road | §10 | §0.10 |
| Avenue | §60 | §1.00 |
| Bus Stop | §150 | §10.00 |
| Toll Booth | §200 | §10.00 |
SimCity 4 provides city ordinances that can reduce traffic for a price.