Why I'm Ditching the Grid for New Banff's Downtown... | NB 6

Add a roundabout in front of the hall. After the bridge people should be able to go left or right. Also the roundabout can be something with a statue signaling something culturally important to the city. Add also running paths in the roads near the river

Loving the "shorter" more frequent episodes! Something to look forward to every morning

"a giant round about but bi-directional" lol It's a ring-road friend!

I travel to Banff quite a bit, and an interesting cultural amenity you could add is a replica or facsimille to the 'Banff Centre of the Arts and Creativity.' It is an important cultural node for not just the town but the whole of Canada. It is home of the Banff Mountain Film Festival, and various works of live performace. Love the series so far!

I genuinely cannot remember the last time I looked forward this much to the next episode of a YouTube series. I haven’t since being a kid. I think the relaxed approach mixed with your incredible editing, professional background and kind poise make the perfect entertaining series. I also just want to thank you as a YouTuber as you somehow make covering city games feel like premium content.

We do indeed have yellow middle lines in Canada!

Albertan here (Edmonton) - it is fairly uncommon in our climate to have long segments of elevated roadway because in the freeze/thaw cycle and extreme temperature swings we need expansion joints which increases the engineering and maintenance costs for a bridge. It is much more common to have earthen enbankments for segments that need to be elevated. I am not sure if it is similar in Wisconsin, but here there is extreme incentive to reduce the amount of bridge spans.

If you want to put the highway to ground level you can create dedicated wildlife crossings based on what already exists in the area. Banff has the world's most extensive system of 44 wildlife crossings (6 overpasses, 38 underpasses) along the trans Canada highways.

Unpopular opinion (maybe). Id love to see a pond in the middle of the apartment complex. Great sight in the warm months and perfect for the Apartment complex kids to play hockey on in the winter!

That junction in front of the city hall is a trap. There are no left turns, so you can't really get anywhere, it would be a terrifying thing in real life, you'd see where you were supposed to be going, and be forced going completely the wrong way and trying to backtrack, possibly with an unsafe U-turn. CPP did this in other older episodes, too, thinking he smoothed out the roads and simplified turning. In fact, this triangular configuration misses HALF the movements, which creates a whole bunch of extra traffic when vehicles must find a crazy backwards routes through side roads to get around the problem.

The triangle junction in front of the city hall should either be a roundabout, with the city hall stepped back a couple of spaces, or a T junction. The triangle has missing movements and also restricts access to the asset. I favour the roundabout approach, I think. I also feel like the roads are overbuilt -- that exterior looping ring doesn't need to be a wide road or couplet at this point, and there shouldn't be a need for a separate highway access -- the arterial running towards the city hall is reasonable for that purpose. The next highway access would probably be by tying the arterial the city hall fronts into the service road between the geothermal plant and the river, and then extending that out to the TransCanada highway. EDIT: *Really* overbuilt. A four-lane divided elevated highway access directly into a residential roundabout?! With a full flow triple-layered system interchange on the TransCanada?! Right next to *another* interchange?? That'd be a diamond junction onto a two lane road, with a stop sign on the ramps, at absolute max, like the one right next door, and you absolutely wouldn't see a triple-layer interchange, that's something that's uncommon even in the middle of a big city. In Canada a town of 10,000 people gets served by, like, a traffic light on a one-lane-each-way undivided highway, or a roundabout. The real Banff (and Canmore too) *already* has larger and more highway junctions for its size than usual because it's on a transcontinental link and is a major tourist destination; the kind of shenanigans going on here are really extreme from my PoV.

That highway connection is massively overbuilt for the area. almost every single interchange through the Alberta/ BC mountains is a variation of a simple diamond with a single short bridge span. You want to minimize anything that isn't fill. If you wanted to play with the idea of wildlife crossings they are things that exist in the provincial parks, they are basically a big grassy bridge built over the highway, there are a bunch in Banff.

Not gonna lie, I'm such a huge fan of (almost) daily episodes. It's just so chill to watch those vids :)

I was waiting for the moment when you realised that you hadn't bought the tile, gonna be honest didn't think it would be 20 minutes in.

27:27 it's very common to have wildlife bridges over the highway to let them cross, and would likely be cheaper.

At 34:20 Phil realises that European cities aren't curvy, they have lots of short direct routes point to point, in straight lines but not in a grid format

is lurking, looking down upon the town.

43:55 there is almost always a dog park and some sort of playground at apartments. I would add those to the middle area. Also, almost every apartment complex has a main office building and a community pool. Would be awesome to see those added.

Link to the Cities 2 Modding Discord - /N7zaNbBhKv

Small non american urbanism opinion, a 4 way lane is always a huge pedestrian barrer. Once you've placed a collector, you've made the area hard to access for pedestrians. Having an arterial in the middle of it all makes it even worse. In Montreal for example the 4 way lanes most of the time make the perimeter of the districts and people will most of the time only stay on one side of it. If you take Boulevard St Joseph for example, there really is a pedestrian friendly district north of it, then a residential area south of it. Then another pedestrian district starts again around Avenue Mont Royal a few blocks south of it. So your ring really confine people in a small district, they won't go to the shore and they will hate going to the city town part of the circle because of the arterial. You would realistically only have offices and business dedicated for the commuters on this part.