a new simulation frontier for 1960s planning?

It appears that one of the would-be successors to Sim City is called Cities XL.  I haven't played with it, but here's what they have to say about transportation:

Sophisticated transport system: players can define the number and uses of traffic lanes; while using bridges and tunnels to expand the size of their cities 

Sound sophisticated to you?  I'm sure this isn't their whole story about transportation, but it is their top-level description of the entire topic.  Will they be teaching 1960s planning to yet another generation?  

In his blog, the developer writes:

After several hours of playing Cities XL your city will start to face one of the many issues to manage in cities of a certain size: traffic. One of the solutions at your disposal to solve this is to build highways.

Well, no, "solution" is not the right word.  "Band-aid," perhaps.

To be fair, the developers seem to be focused on  beautiful highway interchanges right now.  Let's hope that's not the main story.  On viewing their current sample highway interchange, one commenter hits the jackpot:

I hope highways with less amounts of lanes will be included. this looks a little bit to american.  [sic]

 It certainly does.

Comments

[Patrick]

The game hasn't been released yet. It's in private beta as of a few days ago. And after a little hunting, there's some mention of transit.

But the game won't be a true simulation anymore than SimCity was. Wouldn't it be nice to have a game that functioned as an actual city? Annexing land, having the state build highways through, etc. It'd be a real challenge to produce a beautiful city, but it'd be rewarding.

[Ari]

And now their site is down. Look what happens when you rely solely on larger and larger highways? :)

[Rapidtransitman]

A friend who played SimCity quite abit said that the best city she'd built had only rail transit, and no private vehicles. The main benefits were:

- Much less pollution than equivalent sized cities,
- The residents and the city were wealthier because they didn't have to spend large amounts of money on vehicles or its infrastructure,
- Much fewer deaths & injuries due to vehicle traffic.

[Sndo]

There is a plug-in for Sim City 4 that can make the game a little more "realistic."

Simtropolis Network Addon Mod (NAM)
http://simcityforum.com/showthread.php?t=844