The traffic modelling is as good as you could really expect from a small niche studio on their first foray into the genre, and it mainly being based around the logistics of people going to work and business transporting goods is fine enough for a video game.
I was thinking about mostly how traffic behaves when it comes to speed and volume, not "going to the shops on the weekend".
Regarding local traffic modeling, contacting a coffee shop chain could provide good insight. As most people get coffee in the morning and prefer to only make right turns, which side of the street you are located on can mean if your business is a success or a failure.
That's still useful information to incorporate. As we see in Houston, commercial businesses favor heavy traffic, either passing traffic (or passing foot traffic, though vehicular traffic is usually the better metric) as a means to make profit.
That's what the real problem is. There are people who like the "hustle and bustle of the city" and want super-convenient access to commercial establishments. However, they understand that traffic noise comes with that.
There is a third option, where you
can live above shops, have pedestrian-oriented streets, and lots of foot traffic...
As you might have guessed, it's a shopping mall. It's an option but not a realistic one if you're looking at cities as a whole. (The above is from
The Domain in Austin. Certain tourist districts also fulfill the same criteria.
For all the autism that runs in these circles, do any of them actually look at the cities as a whole, how they're built, what an average neighborhood looks like?
Notice some of the "utopias" they name all happen to be high trust societies like Japan and certain parts of western Europe.
I know "no niggers" is the obvious answer, but cyclists don't exactly engender high-trust either. High-trust societies assume that if you see a red light, whether you're a pedestrian or a driver, you stop. There's this whole mindset of "lights are for cars" or "I know what I'm doing, this is better". You can't have a society of scofflaws and expect society to be high trust.
Even from an "individualistic" mindset, it's astonishing how quickly the "lights are for sheeple, I'm a free person" goes to "oy vey, how could this happen to me" when they get hit by a car.
