One of the truly awful things about SimCity was that transit was unrealistically beneficial. It was some sort of awful joke, the sort you might roll your eyes at and say "oh brother, this is idiotic". It felt like somebody was pushing a transit agenda hard.
Similarly, pollution was unreasonable. Coal power may be dirty, but SimCity made it absurd. There was also the nuclear plant explosions that pretty much never happen in the real world. Both the failure rate and the failure consequences were way above normal.