OpenGeofiction
Hello to all, I have been working on Terwen’s capitol city, Campech, for a while now, and have mostly completed it. I want to take a look at Campech and ask for suggestions and criticisms on the city. I think that Campech is at least currently my best try at a city because its the first time I’ve made a city with features like detailed building complexes and geography. I know that it needs improvements like a proper mass transit system and more details in certain areas, but I would like to hear your suggestions on what I can do to improve the city. I plan for the city to have a population of between 600,000 and 750,000 in the district limits, and 4-5 million in the metro (seperate from the future San Opicho metro). I also am planning an airport here. So please, give me your most honest and helpful criticisms so that I can improve my cities.
Discussion
Comment from Portopolis on 17 May 2017 at 02:12
The biggest Problem you have is the number of Highways are extremely unrealistic. I can tell that even though your city is based of of Washington D.C realistically a country the size of yours should only have one East to west highway and one north to south highway passing through the city.
Another thing is naming scheme. Using real world names like Fairfax, Acapulco, Reston and other names doesn’t make sense. You should most likely define Terwen’s origins before you decide to name anything. I would try to blend into your region or personally try to think if the Terwen people are say European, how did they get there as for now we have decided NE Uletha as the origin of what would be the European/White people in this world.
You need to look more at river mouths in the real world and try to replicate that as while I’m am no expert on rivers something about the Columbia River looks of to me. I think it is possibly way to wide.
Your city seems way to small for a city of 600,000-700,000 people. Also your city blocks are too big, they need to be slightly smaller IMO. Also your Highway interchanges and highways take up too much space, I would open up a tab of openstreetmap of Washington D.C and try to see if your blocks can match at the same zoom.
Realistically San Opicho is within ten miles of a metro of 4-5 million people. Even if your city had the density of an Indian city, ten miles is still way too close for San Opicho to be it’s own metropolitan area.
Now to fix these problems, I would choose one East to west highway and one north to south highway to keep, then I would make all the interchanges smaller and downgrade the rest to at most primary roads. I would also focus heavily on creating the coast and rivers as 90% of the coast and rivers will determine your city’s look and feel sometime. I would delete San Opicho or move ignoring closer to land as the island seems random and would make more sense if you put it on a barrier island osm.org/#map=10/32.1704/-80.7756 Also at best San Opicho can be an edge city similar to Tysons Corner but it is way too close to be its own seperste city.
Comment from Thunderbird on 17 May 2017 at 02:40
The city as it stands is believable and well thought out. I like American style cities, keep up the great work!
My input for improvement:
It is unrealistic to expect a population of ~700,000 in a space of 24 square miles. This would mean you have about 29,000 people per square mile, slightly more than Manhattan. With a large portion of your city taken up by motorways and parks you should consider how tall the buildings would have to be (even near the edge of the city) for this population density.
Block sizes are too large. With average block sizes being 700 by 500 feet, there would have to be some massive buildings to fill this space. Either consider decreasing block size or adding some alleyways or courtyards.
Personally, I believe the number of motorways would be justifiable if the blocks were more condensed. But it looks rather strange to have three parallel highways just 8-10 blocks apart. If there were 20-30 blocks in this space it would look like they were separated by entire neighborhoods.
To agree with what Portopolis said, I don’t like the fact that there are so many real world names. Having lived in the Northern VA area, I notice many familiar names. Reston, Fairfax, Rosslyn, Alexandria are all names of well known places.
I have to tell you though, your city is a pleasure to look at aside from that and I hope you listen to some of this feedback! I can’t wait to see what the suburbs look like. After all, there have to be lots of suburban commuters to warrant all of those motorways ;)
Best of luck, happy mapping!
-Thunderbird
Comment from Portopolis on 17 May 2017 at 02:55
Thunderbird actually 29,000 is closer to the density of Brooklyn and Bronx and is believable it’s just with all the motorways and the fact that he isn’t trying to design it like most American cities that density is way to high. For me the main reason I question the highways isn’t that they aren’t possible but that in a metropolitan area of 4-5 million with planned mass transit when would that many bypasses would ever be necessary. Unless this is Madrid level density were everyone and their mother lives in Apartments then the highway network is simply to compelled for such a small metro. Another thing is the highways blaze through so much of the city, how would eminent domain justify that, at least in places with high highway densities in the U.S often it happens over a marshland or a field that was never developed for Various reasons like this area south of Washington D.C. osm.org/#map=13/38.8755/-77.0650 The pentagon huge daytime population justifies the huge amounts of highbways but why would a region so close to a city spend that much on highways?
Comment from Portopolis on 17 May 2017 at 02:58
Also good job taking the initiative sorry if I sounded harsh, not everyone is brave enough to allow their nation to be criticized within the first few weeks of joining.
Comment from PurplePandas on 17 May 2017 at 06:11
Campech is really good!
Comment from iBallasticwolf2 on 18 May 2017 at 22:09
Thanks to everyone who left suggestions! You have really helped me find some of the faults in my city design, and I have taken many of your suggestions into action. I’ve removed the capitol freeway in eastern campech, made the Columbia River a little bit thinner, and I’m in the process of rescaling the block sizes. I have also started planning on how to redo San Opicho as a much smaller town with a population between 25,000-40,000 instead of the much higher originally planned population. I am also planning to move AW 45 onto the AW 145 alingment since the San Opicho/Tolucha area will be too small to need more than 1 major freeway. Thank you, if you would like to suggest anything else feel free to comment!
Comment from Portopolis on 19 May 2017 at 04:42
I would increase the size of Campech or slightly lower the population a bit (500,000-600,000) as it seems a bit dense, for a city with that many highways. Unless you will put majority apartment buildings even dense rowhouse neighborhoods (single family housing connected to each other) should only contain 20,000-25,000 ppsm/ with decent amenities. For a city to maintain that density you would have to literally drop a lot of amenities and or green space or have several large apartments or apartment complexes that supported a high population density.
Comment from Portopolis on 19 May 2017 at 05:16
Another thing I think would work is downgrading the majority of your freeways. Think, why would taxpayers pay for this? Why would anyone in suburbia want to live next to a highway. How and why did your suburbia spawn. was it because the inner city was dangerous or because another ethnicity was taking over. Again who is building all these freeways. Think about the amount of Freeways the U.S has per capita and you realize that even the U.S can only afford huge amounts of freeways do to the massive size of the country as well as the population. osm.org/#map=12/29.7484/-95.3534 Houston’s metro is only about 2 million people more than your planned city size, which in Amenities especially since your city is probably more idealist than the average U.S city is a about equal. Campech- http://opengeofiction.net/#map=12/25.6197/32.0166
Denver- osm.org/#map=12/39.7456/-104.9809 You see these cities are more sprawled out than yours most likely but your highway density is still shockingly high compared to even denser cities. osm.org/#map=12/40.4544/-3.6588 You clearly see in madrid’s case that the city center has ZERO highways comapred to the dense highways in the suburbs, but the dense suburban highways is due to the fact that the average Madrid suburb is…
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Villa+de+Vallecas,+Madrid,+Spain/@40.3618115,-3.5935741,3a,75y,281.08h,91.95t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1shJq0lSoqsSE-29wuaJVmNA!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DhJq0lSoqsSE-29wuaJVmNA%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D7.5%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0xd42248b9a3606b5:0x1801617181ceab09!8m2!3d40.3669506!4d-3.6060476
Blocks upon blocks of apartment style living.
Comment from iBallasticwolf2 on 19 May 2017 at 21:07
Today’s update on progress of improving my country: I have removed pretty much all of the original San Opicho area except for the rivers and a couple of major roads (which will be redone anyway), and now San Opicho will be a small beach town with a size of about 28,000 residents, and Tolucha will be a medium sized town with about 51,000 residents. I have also changed the population of Campech to about 564,000, and I am planning to downgrade what’s left of the X Avenue Freeway into a trunk road and reroute AW 45 onto AW 145.
Comment from Portopolis on 20 May 2017 at 01:33
Good job, your country is looking a lot more realistic in IMHO. Also I really like the suburb of Dublin to the south of the city (Should probably change its name to match more with Campech but that’s just my personal opinion), I am assuming Dublin is one of the more exclusive parts of the metro, as it is only a few miles and two suburbs away from the city and has a large office park right next to it. I would live in Dublin if I could as it has the perfect American suburban vibe too it.
Comment from Thunderbird on 20 May 2017 at 03:14
I’m very impressed, you took all the suggestions! Your city is looking more realistic now. Great job, I’m excited to see what it will look like after more mapping is done.
I love all the traffic circles in the suburbs, I wish there were more traffic circles in the US in real life.
Comment from Portopolis on 21 May 2017 at 05:32
I have a few more suggestions.
I think you should downgrade 1. North Port Connector to a secondary road, most ports don’t have much more than a two lane street leading in and out of the port area.
DR-10 should be a secondary road, it is way to close to another highway, and realistically someone can take the less than mile trip to AW-200 from Milford and no one would want to live between two highways like that.
Fort Podrido should not be inside the city as Fort’s normally take up a lot more space than that, unless your nation is developing or the fort is ancient.
DR-401 should be downgraded or recreated two or three suburbs south of Dublin.
AW-100 should be downgraded to a primary road between Nottingham and Terras and the actual highway AW-200 should be rerouted as the new AW-100 at the east intersection and west intersection with AW-100. By dropping this highway you realistically keep the inner city highway numbers to two. Also AW-200 now AW-100 would actually have more purpose as previously AW-200 is way to close to the city to be seen as much as a bypass and would have hellish traffic.
Also Fort Podrido having it’s own highway doesn’t make sense with the tiny size of the Port IMO.
Comment from iBallasticwolf2 on 21 May 2017 at 15:37
Today’s update on progress: I have downgraded part of DR 10 to a trunk road, and I have renumbered the autoways to not use a grid pattern since my country is too small for that, and I have reworked a couple interchanges. I am planning to move Fort Podrido a few miles east, and move DR 401 a few miles south as a trunk road under construction to connect to an under construction piece of DR 15 (which will probably become a TR route). I may remove the North Port Connector and simply connect it to DR 170.