It's also been stated that this game has, by default, a very "easy" gameplay which may have contributed to siding to being a bit less realistic but sufficiently real for playing and having fun.
The traffic is a mess, true. They'll patch it up with a better algorithm hopefully. It's still fun though. I recently had a couple of industrial buildings burn to ashes because the firetrucks were caught up in a jam! Now that's quite possible!
Like the above poster said, the agent model may have been intended to be more realistic, but in practice you couldn't follow a single sim and see a facsimile of reality: they would go to the nearest workplaces and return to the nearest house even if it wasn't 'theirs'.
So where did Sim City 5 succeed that no others have?