Mad About Science: Cities: Skylines

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

Everyone is talking about “the Couplet” right now — you thought you could escape it in “Mad About Science,” but alas, it has invaded your favorite science blurb, as well.

But, while everyone seems to have an opinion on the project, how do you test a traffic revision without revising traffic first? While I may not have a perfect solution, I can present something that comes close: Cities: Skylines.

Cities: Skylines is a city-building simulation packaged as a video game that was first released in 2015. If you played the SimCity franchise in the 1990s and early-2000s, Cities: Skylines is essentially an upgraded version of that principle.

A screenshot from Cities: Skylines. Courtesy image.

The project began as a traffic simulation tool designed to show people how traffic evolves and issues arise from poor civic management and planning. Traffic jams, higher rates of accidents and increased vehicle emissions were all accounted for in the project, which led to the natural progression of managing the other issues that surround increased traffic: water management, pollution, emergency services, crime, education and crisis management. Creating a full-blown city management simulator was the next logical step, so the developers did it.

If you were to boot up Cities: Skylines on your computer right now with no prior knowledge of video games or civic management, I guarantee that you’d be able to create a functional small town with a moderate demand for housing; a stable source of industrial and commercial jobs; a school, firehouse and police station; and maybe even a park — all in the course of about 35 minutes. 

The system’s tutorials are easy enough to understand and follow that absolute beginners can take their first steps toward understanding how a city works, yet the system itself is deep enough to let you scale to near limitless size. It naturally progresses to unlock higher and higher resources and a wider breadth of services as your population grows, giving you breathing room to learn the basics a chunk at a time.

The entire structure of the simulation sits on the foundation of roads. Before you build anything else in your simulation, you will build a road connecting to a major highway. This road can be straight or it can be curved. Placing the road will create a grid pattern next to them that designates where you can zone for buildings. You can zone residential, commercial and industrial zones, and then people will buy up this property and build matching structures in your zones. These zones all have a demand for water and power, so you will have to build a water intake, a sewer output and windmills or a coal-powered power plant and connect your city to the grid.

Pro tip: Build your intake upstream of your sewage disposal, or your city will suffer from horrible intestinal woes — just like real life.

Spend any amount of time in Cities: Skylines and you will soon learn that perfect grids of roads are not a one-size-fits-all solution to traffic. As your city expands, you’ll begin to see choke points as you track traffic congestion in real time. If a residential neighborhood only has one way in and out, that intersection is going to be backed up for hours, trash will accumulate, pollution will rise, property values will fall and your ability to build new roads with tax dollars will rapidly disappear.

Making larger roads and adding more access points also isn’t a universal fix. Adding a four-lane roadway to a residential neighborhood will increase the number of vehicles traveling through the neighborhood, increasing noise pollution and reducing property values that eventually translates to higher crime rates, more maintenance costs and more pollution to deal with.

Adding interstate highways presents a unique challenge to the aspiring city builder in the simulation, as well. You cannot zone areas adjacent to a highway as you can with a regular road. This means that you can’t simply pile up industrial and commercial zones around your interstate to solve your traffic problems, but instead need to figure out how to make adequate freeway entrances and exits to relieve traffic congestion. The program is advanced enough to allow you to create roundabouts and traffic clovers, which are some of the best — but most expensive — solutions for managing traffic in your city.

Cities: Skylines is a perpetual balancing act that scales as you grow. Everything about the simulation is customizable and can carry long-term consequences if not managed properly. 

One of my personal favorite projects in the simulation is to create a hydroelectric dam. In many games, this is as simple as placing a dam where you want it and getting free power. Due to realistic water physics in Cities: Skylines, you will have to build your dam in a location where water is not only flowing, but able to gather behind the dam so that it can fall for a greater distance and generate more power on the opposing side. As you are damming a river, you also want to make sure that there isn’t another portion at a higher elevation that may cause seepage and flooding into your city, or your multimillion-dollar power solution just escalated into a massive disaster. 

What would happen if an earthquake were to destroy your dam? Would your city be imperiled? These are things that real civic engineers need to take into consideration.

You may be wondering how some silly game can translate into understanding how a project like the Couplet may or may not work. The PC version of Cities: Skylines has access to the Steam Workshop, a user-generated collection of maps and tools, which just so happens to have a map of Sandpoint. You’ll have to build the streets yourself, but do you think you can create a better city than the one we already have? What happens if you slam a five-lane highway through the heart of town? What might this do to congestion, and how might adding more public transportation alter the flow of traffic? Of course, you can also just build a load of luxury condos and spawn a meteor to hit them — I’m not judging your aspirations.

Cities: Skylines can be found on Steam for PC, Linux and Mac for a base price of $29.99, though it frequently goes on sale. It’s also available for almost every gaming console, albeit as a digital download. If you have a Nintendo Switch, feel free to put in a request for it at the library to test out some of the concepts and see if you can design better civic infrastructure than what we already have.

Stay curious, 7B.