The short story of RCI zoning

I am going to show you all the ways your zoning choices affect the future traffic situation of your city. Planning out the RCI which is short for residential, commercial and industry zones is not something players take seriously enough.I am going to show you several types of RCI zoning and explain how their design directly impacts the traffic flow of your future city. Now let’s dive into the 3 main ways you can zone RCI in Cities: Skylines and what that means for future traffic flow. As a bonus, the last part of the video will showcase the most advanced zoning designs and the ones that can prevent most traffic problems.The first design I am going to show you is what most Cities: Skylines players create, or at least try to, until the traffic nightmare that is produced by this design completely breaks down their city. This is what I call the exclusion RCI design. What I mean by this is that players create these large areas out of one zone type. They first create a residential zone as this is what you start any city with. Then they make another zone, this one dedicated to commercial zoning and keep it separated and off the residential zone. And the last nail in the coffin of this design comes with the introduction of another exclusive zone, this one dedicated to industrial all the way on the other side of the city, as far from the residential area as possible and next to the commercial zones. There are multiple things wrong with this zoning approach and I will explain them as I show you the simple evolution of this design into an actual working and proper RCI design.First off, separating the workforce from their jobs, the R zones from the I zones is a bullet proof way of creating extra unnecessary traffic. To work in factories Cims need to get to them. Placing these workplaces in an industrial area on the far side of the city just creates a long commute for the workers forcing them to use cars and/or public transportation.The same goes for C zones as they are visited by both workers and shoppers doubling the amount of Cims which travel back and forth from them.But Cims and their usage of cars and public transportation isn’t your only concern when it comes to vehicles creating additional traffic volume. A large portion of the traffic volume is created by the delivery vans which are spawned at industry buildings and deliver goods to the commercial zones. In case you don’t have enough local industry, the generic type, which produces goods, these have to be brought in from the region by highway, railway or other means. This creates many vehicles which have long commutes between their spawn point, destination and their despawning point. This is something you can easily avoid by doing two things. First you zone C and I in such a way that commercial buildings are practically next door to Industrial buildings. And you make sure that you can produce all the goods your C zones use up locally, by zoning enough generic industry buildings to make it. The game’s AI is smart enough that it will send out goods produced in an industrial building to nearby commercial buildings which sell it, thereby reducing travel time of the delivery trucks to a fraction of the time they would need if they had to travel from another part of the city or come in from the region.Now I know you might be worried about ground and sound pollution. But you need to realizethat commercial buildings never have a problem with ground pollution. It doesn’t register to them as a danger to workers or shoppers. That is why it is completely safe to place C zones right up against I zones and why I think the developers intended for RCI mixing to be a very efficient city design.By incorporating the C and I zones into your R zones you all but remove two out of three sources of high volume traffic. Sim cars and delivery trucks. You are left with the large trucks and tankers which deliver products to generic industry buildings which use them to make goods. These products you can make by yourself in specialized industry buildings, which in turn need raw goods created by industry buildings zoned and constructed on resources like forests, fertile land, oil and ore. I have gone over this in great detail in my previous videos about industry which I will link to you in the description and up here on the right. But the point here is that even those specialized industry buildings are constructed door to door. When you zone specialized industry on a resource you don’t just get raw product producers but also raw product users which create the actual products the generic industry uses. It’s another example of the Developers themselves pointing to us, the players, that certain buildings should be constructed right next to each other so that their production chains would deliver to each other instantly and without long distance transportation.So, by creating this chain of raw product, product, goods inside your city and reducing delivery travel time to a minimum you also reduce the number of active vehicles on the roads, at any given time, to a minimum. And by having generic industry buildings dispersed across the city and next to commercial and residential buildings you reduce the density of traffic overall which prevents traffic jams from ever occurring.In essence, you eliminate the cause of bad traffic which is way more productive than spending hours and hours in thinking up traffic road and highway patchwork solutions which never solve anything because the core issue is not addressed.If you want another way to reduce Cims reliance on vehicles you can make this design in precise ratios of RCI so that you have just enough Cims living in a neighborhood to employ all of the in the near by C and I zones so that they have jobs in the walking distance from home and so very little reason to use cars or public transportation. No note that buildings on different levels of their development require or house different numbers of Cims so this ratio is dependent on the level of the buildings inside one neighborhood.Using the ban heavy traffic district policy is also very useful here as it allows you to prevent trucks carrying products from taking shortcuts through residential areas and forcing them to use the roads, avenues and highway ramps you have designated for heavy traffic which lead them directly to industry buildings which need those product deliveries.Of course this is not the only way to mix RCI and O zones. You can come up with your own ideas and designs but the underlying mechanics stay the same. By zoning properly and making paths and routes shorter for every type of vehicle and Cims in the game you can manage traffic in such a way that you won’t ever have to deal with traffic jams or a myriad of other problems which show up as a result of them.