Graph Paper Cities

[Kevin1a]

Since I was young (way before the Sim City 2000 days), I have planned out cities on graph paper, nowadays it helps me overcome the limitations of the game.  I have searched unsuccessfully for years for someone else who does this with the same complexity as me.  I have yet to find someone.  If you are interested in seeing more drawings, or have some of your own, please  me know.

[WC_EEND]

I actually do that myself sometimes (although not as detailed as yours), I find that it is a great help to get an idea of what you want to do, and most of the times the result is better than when you just see where you end up when you start plopping. When I make drawings of the cities itself, I write the name of the buildings I'm planning on using on it as well (for easy reference).

[RebaLynnTS]

I wish I could show you the designs I had. In the novel I am writing there is a city built into an extinct super volcano. The city extends 2000 feet into the mountain, and is made of multiple levels, each being 100 to 200 feet high. A long time ago, I had mapped out a vast majority of the city, also on graph paper. I use the 22 x 17 sheets, quad ruled. Sadly, this master piece was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. I've been thinking about trying to recreate it, with some improvements, but for now I am concentrating my efforts on finishing the book.

[CasperVg]

I also used to draw out some city design on graph paper myself. I think one of my first posts here actually showed one. Unfortunately, the image-host I used back then removed them and I lost the sheets  They were far from as detailed as yours though, nice work!

[metarvo]

I did this once, back in the days of the Super NES version of SimCity Classic (or just SimCity as it was called at the time).  I had already reached 500,000 in population on the Freeland scenario, which provided a landform (nowadays called a quad) with no water.  However, I wanted to do it on a legitimate landform with water, so I graphed out a 120x100 grid that required several sheets of graph paper to be taped together.  Then, I filled in all of the water spaces, and then I filled in the squares where the zones, police departments, etc. would be placed.  Of course, it's hard to plan this way when you don't know how a city will turn out, but I did manage to reach the 500,000 goal by following this plan.  It's too bad that I lost this graph 6 years ago, so I can't show it here.  

Anyway, those drawings do look very good, Kevin.  Mine weren't as complex, since I was playing ye olde SimCity Classic at the time, which had only two transportation options (road and rail) and only a fraction of the buildings available in even the vanilla SC4.

[riiga]

Great drawings! 

I do this a lot too, but unfortunatley, I don't have any of my drawings scanned except for one picture. It's only road interchange though, and it's not drawn on a graph paper, but rather a normal white paper. Probably I'll scan the rest of my drawing some day, and if that's the case, I'll upload them here.


(click for full resolution)

- riiga

[Kevin1a]

riiga- I think I've seen seen that picture on this site before.  It's the closest thing I've ever found to my own.  You kept the lanes really uniform for not having a graph or even dots in the background.  I tried to do some work on dot paper, or just plain paper, but it was very time consuming, though they did turn out to be some of my best work.  If I find them, I'll scan them.
RebaLynnTS- That sounds absolutely amazing.  I love the concept of an underground city.  I've often thought about how well protected a city built into a seaside cliff in the arctic would be.  Difficult to bomb because it is underground, but submarines can enter from underneath the ice into an underwater tunnel which leads to a subterranian harbour.  Having a city on multiple levels would make long distance transit less of an issue because a square mile of one story buildings could be repeated 10 times on top of itself underground without having to return to the base level and walk to the next building.  Actually, it sounds kind of like Farthen Dur from Earagon.  I have seen pictures of houses that people build using caves or hills as part of the building.  Fantastic ideas, truly interesting and remarkable.

In the meantime:

I'm not Japanese, and I don't know much about their traffic engineering, but their expressways look really cool.  That was the inspiration for this image.  The buildings have a more European look, but the road markings are a hybrid including some Japanese exit and entry markings.  If you see any significant portion of my work, you'll notice as I experiment with different road markings.  I have tried:

US
UK
Germany
France
Japan
and a zillion hybrids, and even some very special custom stuff I thought of myself, but I'm not publishing that without a copyright notice.  Most of my ideas can basically be considered Creative Commons Share-Alike Non-Commercial anyway.

I didn't finish drawing the tracks on the light rail bridges.  When they dead end at those black rectangles, those aren't stubs, those are the beginnings of tunnels.



A little more European looking.  Some OWRs hit a complicated looking 5 way with a plaza on the NW corner with some stairs for an underground ped underpass

edit: just remembered, that that isn't a ped underpass it was the entrance to a subway station, I had visited Munich recently and was very impressed with the subway and strassenbahn system.


Some of drawings have colour!  In this one, a road runs next to a canal with a bike road on the other side  Dedicated BUS lanes and a pelican crossing reminicent of what I've seen of GB.


For a while I did a series that had a very interesting theme.  A unregulated boarder crossing between two countries that drive on opposite sides of the road.  The countries are seperated by a canal in this picture.  If I remember correctly, one side used British looking striping, and the other was German with some modifications.  I did significant research on how traffic moves in locations where the right of way is changed from left to right or vice versa.  In this image, it is accomplished using a roundabout, for the smaller road, and a strange interchange for the primary road.  Some strange situations are the circular ramps to the underground parkhouse by the interchange, and the unique road markings to make the transition from left to right slightly less deadly by reminding drivers to stay in their lane.  Additionally, the parking spaces on the right side are situated slightly furthur away from the road in order to make pedestrian traffic more visible to drivers.  I saw this while looking at google maps of tokyo, though I'm not sure if this was their motivation for doing it that way.

I literally have thousands more pictures, so if you found something particularly interesting let me know and I'll try to dig up similar images. 

[riiga]

More great work I see... I'll try to scan some of my other drawings this weekend, and probably there's some good drawings I made when I was bored in class. 

- riiga

[Ryan B.]

I do some of the same stuff . . . . it's not always on graph paper, however.  Here's a few:

[jigsaw]

when i was a kid i drew cities on paper. it started in class, i would draw a city in the back page when i was bored. i always used red biro for roads, black biro for rail, and blue for drawing houses/buildings and the coasts etc. i would draw topographic lines to illustrate hills and mountains with lead pencil.

none of these exist anymore, but i think i was about 12 when i first started doing this.

the biggest one i drew was on 6 x A3 sheets of paper, that were stuck together. it was over 2 years worth of work and was almost as big as a kitchen table. i bought white stickers so i could 'bulldoze' parts of it and re-draw it. the scale i would use was basically the tip of biro was equal to one normal house.

most of my friends thought it look awesome, they couldnt believe how much work i put into it. it was only 1 dimensional, from above and buildings were basically just squares and shapes etc. based on region sizing from sc4 it would have had a population of about 4 million!

i showed a family friend once the big map, and he told me to get into civil engineering. i never followed up that advice, but i wish i did sometimes.

now i have SC4 that quenches my thirst for this little artistic hobby of mine

[riiga]

Finally got this one finished and scanned:

(click for full resolution)

- riiga

[Kevin1a]

Excellent!  You do a really good job of including the pedestrian facilities, something I've always struggled with.  Additionally, I really like the bus pullouts, and the medians.  How do you keep your lane widths so uniform?  Additionally, are those cycle-paths I see?  I've experimented with those somewhat, but considering that I draw more urban areas than rural, they don't show up nearly as often as bike lanes or sharrows.

[riiga]

Excellent!  You do a really good job of including the pedestrian facilities, something I've always struggled with.  Additionally, I really like the bus pullouts, and the medians.  How do you keep your lane widths so uniform?  Additionally, are those cycle-paths I see?  I've experimented with those somewhat, but considering that I draw more urban areas than rural, they don't show up nearly as often as bike lanes or sharrows.

Thanks!

And yep, those are cycle-paths. However, they are more like shared paths for both pedestrians and bikers, while the few sidewalks are pedestrian only. Regarding the land widths, I think that's something that comes with practice. When I look at my older drawing from, say 5-7 years ago, they are quite non-uniform.

Here's an example of what the sidewalk looks like:



While this is the shared bike/ped path:


(pictures taken by me near where I live)

- riiga

[wallasey]

Fantastic scans!

Just out of curiosity, how many of you put them into Inkscape or Photoshop and turn them into proper schemetric road layout drawings/ maps?

[travismking]

I usually do digital versions of this when trying to re-route or plan in a new network in an already developed city.  It really helps.  I tend to let my cities grow on their own instead of planning them completely though.

[Kevin1a]

I don't know exactly what you mean with inkscape or photoshop.  I've found, it's easier just to sketch it out, than to fight with the computer.  Although I did make some rough maps for my old MD using MSpaint.  I have created a few cities in the game based on my sketches.  One was inspired by a walled city where the old inner city has controlled access for vehicles, allowing only residents, deliveries, and the handicapped to enter.  I used toll booths to discourage drivers who wanted to enter this area, but made sure to provide multiple transit options and parking garages on the edges of the inner city.

[riiga]

Let me revive this thread with some drawings...


(click for full resolution!)


This is a drawing I made back in September 2002, when I was 10 years old:

(click for full resolution!)

Last summer, I thought I'd be fun to redo the drawing, so I made this:

(click for full resolution!)

Now, which version is better? 

[Nego]

Here is an interchange I drew last summer:

[click for full size (Warning! 2675x2456px)]


Whoo hoo! Now a forums Governor!

[Kevin1a]

Wow, what a fantastic bit of nostalgia.  I particularly like the colourful one you drew when you were younger, and the first image in the same post.  Excellent work, it demonstrates a more thorough understanding of traffic engineering than all my cities traffic department combined. 

BAHHH, I just uploaded a bunch of scans 10+ and they are all really faded out and hard to see.   I guess I'll just post the handful that turned out ok.  I'm going to try to find a solution for this since I literally have thousands of pages of work that I'm willing to share.


Fig001: Freeway with dedicated bus lanes, C/D roads, and an uncharacteristically spread out SPUI with turnaround ramps.  Also, space has been saved on the crossroads for the eventual addition of second left turn lanes if conditions require it.

Fig002: Sometimes I create maps from higher up where you can see more of a city but in lower detail.  I wish I had scanned this in colour because the roads were coded based on hierarchy.  I have no idea what "starving prayers" means.  I'm not religious, so I don't know why I jotted that on there.

Fig003: An example of how dedicated u-turn lanes can be utilized at junctions with a high percentage of traffic making that maneuver.  Also the legend in the top right is an example of how small screens (similar to the large ones hanging over the autobahn) could be added above every light to display information about speed limits, construction, and accidents in the form of a small graphic.

Fig004: Another expressway/freeway with frontage roads taken from my "Inspired by Tokyo" series.  I spent hours looking at satellite pictures of Tokyo trying to get a feel for how they do things, and I tried to incorporate some of the more brilliant ideas into my own planning.

Fig005: An adaption of the continuous flow intersection to an interchange.  The invention of the DDI kind of supplants this, but it's all about the fun and logic puzzles of building something interesting.

How about this.  I'm going to take some ideas from my fellow artists and artistic admirers, and I'll draft up something just for this thread.  Any ideas?  Don't make it ridiculous, but not to simple either.  Any traffic anomaly or interesting interchange will do.  Actually, we could make it into a friendly competition.  Anyone who wants to participate can do so, and then we'll post our own interpretations of the subject junction (theoretical or based on real life) and compare them.

Keep posting pictures people! 

[riiga]

How about this.  I'm going to take some ideas from my fellow artists and artistic admirers, and I'll draft up something just for this thread.  Any ideas?  Don't make it ridiculous, but not to simple either.  Any traffic anomaly or interesting interchange will do.  Actually, we could make it into a friendly competition.  Anyone who wants to participate can do so, and then we'll post our own interpretations of the subject junction (theoretical or based on real life) and compare them.

This sounds like a fun challenge! Anyone with a good interchange/intersection scenario to begin with?