Hexagonal city

Screenshot from the game "Cities: Skylines". Clickable

This article is a small study, started after reading an article about a private city in Russia , and specifically the feasibility of building a city of hexagons will be considered.

Since I don’t even own, but I don’t even know of any program or other professional tool for simulating cities and transport in cities, I decided to do research in the game “Cities: Skylines”, since it is quite suitable for this.
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If interested, welcome under cat.

Sensitive about me

I myself am an ordinary developer for Android, I do not have any education related to the planning and construction of cities, so I do not consider this study to be serious evidence in favor of hexagonal cities, but I still consider it necessary to share them.

A bit about the game

The game "Cities: Skylines" is a city-planning simulator and is on a par with the famous SimCity. A distinctive feature of this game is that it simulates the life of every citizen. Every resident of the city goes to work, then goes to the store from work, and then goes home, and the order may be different. Also, citizens regularly need to go to relax in some institution or park. Tourists also arrive in the city and go for a walk in the parks and watch the sights.

If the destination of the trip is close, the resident will go on foot or by bicycle, if he is far away, he will take public transport or take a car from his pocket.
Having got into the car, he will drive along the roads, passing pedestrians at intersections and observing the rest of the traffic rules and then get stuck in traffic due to the fault of the Artificial Idiot

Residents can also be born in the city and go to primary school, then go to secondary school, and then to university or work. Then he dies of old age and a hearse comes after him.

Also in the game there are other types of transport, ranging from firefighters and ambulances and ending with trains and ships with hundreds of passengers or thousands of tons of cargo, which are then transported around the city by truck.

Summarizing all the above, I believe that this game can be used as an amateur tool for various studies, and maybe even for the initial planning of new cities.

Actually, hexagons

It is not difficult to guess, to check the city in the simulator, you need to create this city, which I did.


Clickable

From above the city looks like this. It consists of 19 hexagons and is surrounded by a highway, also in the shape of a hexagon (more on that later). It is home to 150,000 people, which is quite a lot by game standards. Also in the game absolutely every resident has a car and carries it in his pocket, including teenagers (this age in the game corresponds to 12-20 years in reality, and in 20 years you can drive a car), so there are plenty of cars on the roads.



And this is the layout of a single hexagon. An important point in the design - inside the hexagon, moving on foot should be more convenient than by car, which creates some special features.

- Along the perimeter is the main wide road (from two to four lanes in each direction), along which the main stream of cars will move.
- From the middle of each face into the hexagon there is a small road (one or, in special cases, two lanes in each direction), which still diverges to the sides, forming smaller hexagons.
- A footpath passes through the corners, and at the border of hexagons it turns into an overhead or underground passage (it is better overhead, it looks good), since in these places there is especially active traffic, and they should not be disturbed. Well, for people safer.






- Along the perimeter (blue) there are various shops (except grocery), cafes and other hairdressers.
- A little closer to the center (blue color) are located office buildings, schools, police stations.
- The rest (green) is residential buildings, in them you can arrange small grocery stores on the first floors, since it is much more convenient to go to the store next door than to drive to it.



The general arrangement of the hexagons I got is this:


Clickable

Yellow zones - industry. It is advantageous to place them in the city so that the goods produced do not need to be carried far, but they must be close to the highway, so that trucks carrying imported raw materials also do not need to go through the whole city. Any movement of large vehicles in non-industrial areas should be prohibited.

Alternatively, in the very center of the city you can make a tourist hexagon, with hotels instead of ordinary residential buildings, this will allow tourists to reach any part of the city in the same time and so they can see all the sights in a fairly short time, and therefore the number of tourists can increase.

Also, as mentioned above, the expressway rounds the city around the perimeter, also in the form of a hexagon. This makes it possible to build new neighborhoods in the neighborhood and thus expand the city.

And what are the advantages?

Take a look at this color map of road congestion:


Clickable

Green - the road is not loaded at all, red - on the road, strong traffic. Having seen quite a lot of red and orange colors, you might think that there is a problem with traffic. Actually no, take a look at this stretch of road:


Clickable

There are really a lot of cars driving through here, but notice that there are no close traffic jams. And the city, by the way, is already inhabited almost to the limit and it’s time to build the next 19 hexagons in the neighborhood, and there are only 4 lanes on the road (two lanes per direction) plus parking spaces. This suggests that two lanes are quite enough, well, in the extreme case, you can easily remove the separator in the middle and increase the number of lanes to 6 and thus increase the capacity by one and a half times. And the roads inside the hexagon are not loaded at all, so there the extra noise should not interfere with the residents.

How is it that the roads are not overloaded with such a dense building?

To this I have no exact answer. I tend to think that although the roads are not very wide, there are still a lot of them, so the transport is simply spread over the area of ​​the city. Also, with such a road planning, there are always several equal ways from one point to another, and it is generally better to walk on foot within one hexagon and its neighbors.

Are there any cons?

Yes. With this layout, there are many traffic lights, and at the intersections of three wide roads they operate in three phases, whereas at the intersections of four roads there are only two phases. Because of this, the waiting time for a green traffic light can take up to 2/3 of the entire cycle, whereas at ordinary intersections you will not wait for more than half of the entire cycle. With equivalent roads, of course. This problem can be partially solved if you allow to turn right to a red light (in my city it is just allowed).

Public transport

Nothing solves the problem of traffic jams as the lack of cars. Naturally, to completely get rid of the machines will not work, the same buses also go on the roads.

But no kind of public transport can compare with the metro:



As you can see, there are enough of all three metro branches, and each of them is connected to the other, so that more than one transplant is not needed. However, there is an unresolved question of how to connect the metro system in this area with the metro in the next one.

Each metro station is in the center of the hexagon. Thus, tourists can immediately get to the sights in the center without disturbing the residents of the city. Also, from here you can immediately take a bus that will take you to residential buildings or to shops and cafes on the border of the hexagon.



I got 4 small bus routes. Two of them are taken to residential buildings, two to the border of the hexagon. I'm not sure that I did it in an optimal way, and in fact I am not sure that public transport is needed inside the hexagon. But I am still young and can walk, but what about old women?

With this, I consider my research complete and gladly ready to answer your questions and read your thoughts.

City save file



PS
Six months later, I suddenly discovered one small town of hexagons in reality.
Here he is.