Question about perfect road layout.

[Катя Меов <3]

So this is my 2nd try with already 1 100 000 sims:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=927779930
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=927779893 (if you wanna see it's skyline)
However I am struggling with a good layout for public transport. Especially Highways, railways and subways.
My first try to build a bigger region failed at around 1 500 000 sims when unemployment took over and my public transport was so underdeveloped that people couldn't even move to their workplace. I never built highways or railways as they were too expensive for smaller cities. When my city grew more I started to get trouble with too many cars. Building bigger roads and railways were not an option as I would have had to destroy too many buildings to do so.
Now I pre-build them. They all start out in downtown and some other cycle around the centre like rings (see screenshot) [Kinda like in RL]. However now I have the problem that they are barely used most of the time.
So my question is when you should start building highways and such. Am I doing it wrong by pre-building them? Or should I build them afterwards? At what size are they even useful?

[Stracci909]

Unless you're careful and really know what you are doing, the problem with prebuilding (as you found out) is that sims may not take the route you planned. It required careful zoning and network placement to make sure your highways are actually the shortest routes to/from work. If you are having issues with money early in the game (and don't want to use "cheats"), consider planning highway routes out, but instead of building them, leave the tiles completely blank until the extra capacity is needed.

Also, if you havent already, I would highly recommend the Network Addon Mod (NAM). It adds tons of extra networks to the game, but if you don't want that, at the very least, install the minimum version, which fixes numerous issues with the vanilla game pathfinding, as well as adjusting network capacities.

[desolation0]

For designing traffic and transport I find it good to plan in terms of neighborhoods. Setting up areas to have certain connections instead of having every street criss-cross all the way across town lets you control how your population moves around better. Residential neighborhoods, if not packed with highrise buildings, can get away with dead end basic grey streets. Just have grey streets branch off a central blacktop road, which itself only connects to a bigger boulevard instead of yet more cross streets. One way roads can be another way to optimize directing traffic around. Minimizing intersections also speeds traffic along, which is why highways are good as your main arteries.

The Transportation FAQ at https://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/917992-simcity-4-deluxe-edition/faqs/23133 is really quite handy to wrap your head around.

As a preview - "When you design a detour for your sims to alleviate a road's congestion, the detour will then be instantly congested and the original road will be clear. Similarly, Do not place "access roads" astride your highways. Your sims will always use the roads and never the highways. However, with a little planning you can design roads with a "Broadway effect," where you either deliberately bottleneck a road or simply have a limited amount of access from residential to industrial. What this means is as the road gets congested, you can rezone residential into commercial, which ensures relaxing of the traffic slightly, and also ensures commercial development (high traffic means high costumers).

Plus, this is generally how cities develop. Res on the periphery, Com on the main roads, Ind in the center until Com takes over - at which point Ind goes to the periphery, Com in the center, and Res just about everywhere else."