Clueless Urban Planners: Desert Edition

The relief east-west road is completed and immediately makes a positive impact on the city's traffic issues. Stephen gets his wish for another major north-south arterial road, albeit at the cost of recklessly bulldozing dozens of houses in the way. Aaron continues outfitting his namesake neighbourhood with rec facilities and a football field. He also moves the original town hall park out of th...

Aaron and Onyx are in awe as Stephen unveils the result of offline blood, sweat, and tears: a new 9-hole country club golf course and driving range in the notionally gated community of Oasis Park. We build a new relief arterial road to take traffic pressure off the city's main east-west connector route. To aid this further, we also relocate the main postal sorting plant to the industrial distr...

In a "build and yap" session, the city deals with a dangerously below average school graduation rate, along with a severe shortage of students entering the university, with most of the population either already graduated from college or having skipped it entirely to enter the workforce. We attempt to downplay the situation by comparing the county to other locations in the US, but ultimat...

Confusion abounds regarding Onyx's intentions regarding the campus athletics facilities. Traffic conditions continue to deteriorate across the city, and Stephen explains Traffic Manager's Advanced Parking AI, which forces us to build additional multi-level parking garages in multiple neighbourhoods. Onyx also insists that Church's Texas Chicken is a Canadian company, despite the name....

Over 20 episodes in and we still have no catchy slogan for our region. We devote probably too much time brainstorming taglines with wildly mixed results, including Aaron reaching for ChatGPT for some "inspiration". Meanwhile, Stephen attempts to build a bridge across the highway to Nazca which Onyx immediately seizes to rebuild, only to make it worse. We also finally settle on a name for...

Stephen and Onyx squabble over the location of the university's baseball park. The route alignment for the tram line is finalized. Aaron takes advantage of the glitchy disappearing businesses downtown and begins upzoning blocks for higher density development. The city's first shopping mall is constructed. We also discuss various "niche phases" of our lives, including our shared p...

Aaron installs a skate park in Nazca Heights and Stephen continues expansion of the Manchester neighbourhood. We hold group discussions on the design of the city's first tram line. Meanwhile, a faulty mod causes residences and businesses in downtown to vanish, resulting in empty streets, reduced cash flow, and a sudden drop in population. Video: https://youtu.be/zZ0zogz1sk0

Aaron adds a mall to the Nazca Heights neighbourhood which severely distorts the terrain, and we experiment with zoning some residences on the steepest roads in the area (which turn out to be very popular). With the residential demand leeched away, Stephen instead investigates traffic issues throughout the city and rages at the stupidity of drivers. We also begin the first steps of the process to...

Issues with water pumps and drains continue to confound us as we struggle to create a lake for our park. With a new adjacent highway interchange in service, Aaron adds additional neighbourhoods to his "Nazca" district. Onyx continues to expand and modify the university campus, while Stephen adds a direct bus service to the outer suburbs and fends off accusations of being a brutalism admi...

Urban planning isn't always as glamorous as it might seem (did it ever seem glamorous in the first place?) as today we turn into "boardroom planners", exchanging lots of words rather than putting lots of shovels in the ground. We collectively decide to build a medical school for our university, which will produce the doctors necessary to treat sick workers from our new coal power pla...

We debate the proposed downtown location, settling on a space just beyond the two intersecting highways and north of the oasis. Stephen reveals some light offline building in the form of a new interchange north of the university, and a freeway extension that also bypasses it to the southwest. A site for the airport is roughly planned out, along with some optimal plane spotting locations. Onyx goes...

In a primarily discussion-based episode, the city expands to the north in order to provide land for the construction of our first university campus. We lose power as our main power plant, the solar tower, goes up in flames. As we extend roads northwards, we debate our proposed locations for the city downtown core. A sync error forces us to delete all cars in the city to resolve it, resulting in a...

Stephen rescues the city from its "vanishing buildings" plague but Onyx alertly notices that we have way more money than we should have (a side effect of the fix) and Stephen pledges to fix that too. Aaron builds another bus line to serve the north edge of the city through to the park. Onyx neglects his lake watch duties and it floods again, even worse than the first time. We begin devel...

The attempt to fill the park lake works too well as we flood the surrounding neighbourhood and damage several buildings, including the park's maintenance depot. Aaron proposes a crosstown bus line once again and Stephen finally builds it, hoping to alleviate the massive traffic jams emerging on our streets. Meanwhile some unknown issue begins to spread across town, causing businesses to rapidl...

Stephen de-zones all of Manchester industrial area but Onyx forgets to replace it in the temporary district despite being asked to do so. To temper expectations of a quick university build-out on Manchester's former lands, Aaron builds a vanilla university instead as a stop-gap measure. As we survey the city, we notice that severe traffic jams are emerging across the city on all our arterial r...

Stephen audits the city's finances and cuts healthcare funding again, only to restore it immediately as everyone gets sick. To boost our revenue, a new mining district is drawn out and we start the relocation of the Manchester industrial zone to this area. Meanwhile, the former land is reclaimed and cleaned for residences. Onyx states he may be on the autism spectrum, while Aaron voices his be...

Onyx is back from vacation and makes sure that everyone is aware of that. Stephen mass replaces all the US-style roads back to an enhanced vanilla road style due to the US road inventory not having any roads with bike lanes (as should've been expected). We begin to collaboratively plan the eastern neighbourhoods as a mixed residential-commercial district with a separate office park. Onyx attem...

Onyx builds a pool at his urban park as he still doesn't have the terrain tools to begin his terraforming. We begin building some pockets of high-density commercial and residential zones at key intersections around the city. While placing a fire station down, Onyx bemoans its utilitarian appearance and we debate form vs. function, with Stephen favouring function and Onyx favouring form, with Aaron...

The city's first official "light offline building" project is revealed by Stephen to be a trumpet interchange on the east side of the city. Onyx tries to work on his park terrain but forgets to turn off a broken mod, resulting in Aaron attempting to take over and failing spectacularly. Pollution begins to grow out of hand in Manchester, forcing us to move residences away. Money also...

Expansion to the east continues as we build out the road grid and map out the new mid-city park site. Onyx stakes claim to the park and takes great exception when Aaron tries to build a road through it. We begrudgingly begin to jointly plan the adjacent community centre and recreation area, including a pool and leisure complex. The subject of the neighbourhood name trips us up and we settle on som...

Technical issues plague our working session with Discord and Windows crashing out together. Due to increasing traffic congestion on the city's sole highway access point, Stephen begins work on a new interchange and roundabout on the east side. Aaron names a new neighbourhood after a cactus. After banning high-rises throughout our new districts, we also install the city's inaugural block of...

After deciding to forgo extracting oil from one of the richest deposits in our region, we begin to have second thoughts as we weigh the economic vs. sustainability benefits for the community. Onyx struggles to build a curved road through the city's newest park. We also reminisce over some classic Mr. Burns insidiousness and bad jokes by Carlos from the Magic School Bus. Video: https://youtu.be...

A hazy cloud is choking out our fledgling desert town, and it remains to be seen whether its just some fog or something a bit more sinister (aka industrial pollution). As such, we begin preparations to clear Manchester and relocate the industry elsewhere. After some persuasion, Stephen buys two new tiles for city expansion, though Onyx-DOS suffers a fatal error trying to process that info. We begi...

In a bid to embrace absolute realism, Stephen replaces most of the city's roads with "US-accurate" ones that completely lack grass and trees. A handful of new mods also rename every street with generic American-style names and gives every building a unique address. We determine the urban containment boundary at the base of the nearby sand dune and unintentionally bash the American education system...

In a reminder to us that we're back to a town's very early days once again, we start to encounter cashflow problems resulting from our late-stage habit from Azur Bay of spending too much, too quickly. Stephen shares a story from cartography class about one of our worst TAs from our university days. We argue over whether it's too early to be adding more schools to our town. Onyx gets ev...