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Comment by inflatableDodo | Hacker News Reader

I want the majority of the road network roofed with turf into a long hill with occaisional exits, or lowered and moved completely underground.

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Terrible maintenance costs for ventilation, plant vehicle access, widening (e.g. temporarily for roadworks), poor kerb access for deliveries/emergency vehicle access, plus a firetrap in the case of a burning vehicle

At least that's what I've worked out from Cities: Skylines.

I've concluded the opposite: leave the cars where they are. What I want is a separate pedestrian level to the city - a skyway system (though I'm fine with it being underground). Let the humans walk in air conditioned comfort while not cars to worry about. This is much cheaper than the underground roads.

How about air conditioned skyways for pedestrians in cities and underground roads everywhere else?

Underground roads are orders of magnitude more expensive, so it isn't worth creating them (with some exceptions). With unlimited resources we could create as many as we want, but I have better things to do with my time/money than build roads.

Skyways are significantly cheaper than bridges. It would still be cheaper to make the ground level of your city a building, but not having to support the mass of cars and trucks means skyways can be significantly cheaper.

In the modern world trucks and buses are far too useful to ban completely from cities where people live. People need their stuff delivered, and need to get longer distances once in a while. Thus I'm saying reserve the ground for those uses and get humans away from them. It is a compromise, but I think it is a good one.

Not worrying about the humans in particular. Uncovered ground level roads are just death traps and fencing them off is even worse in many ways.

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