Playing city builders and fundamentally disliking car-centric urban design is sometimes a bit of a challenge. So as a boundlessly optimistic city planner, I want my citizens to walk. Sometimes that means crossing a busy road that I simply had to build because of delivery vans and ambulances. Despite my best efforts, hundreds of people now want to cross that road, and it impacts traffic flow.

Since concrete is cheap, I build them a nice, safe pedestrian bridge.

And they ignore it.



If this has happened to you, I might have a solution. Inspired by a Reddit post by LyrukoF showing off a cool circular ramp, I set out to copy their design. In the process, I figured out how to make cims actually use it as well.

The major pitfalls are:

• Getting it to actually build
  
• Having additional crossing options nearby (bad)
  
• Keeping yourself sane

Start with your major road. I chose a simple 4-lane arterial road.



Build your main span. For the look I’m going for, I extend the pillars out one zoning square. 6.25m is the lowest your bridge can be while still crossing the road.



Go out one more square with the continuous road tool. Set the angle of the turn at 180°.



Build your first turn and go down as low as possible, here 3.75m.



The next turn is at 90° and down to 1.25m. I couldn’t get this one to build properly most of the time, so I recommend demolishing the main span for this step. We will rebuild this without issues after the ramp is done.


°
Next, go down to ground level, but don’t connect to the road just yet!



Rebuilding the main span…



Finally, without any guidelines, join up to the sidewalk.
Avoid creating a pelican crossing or your cims will use that, even if you remove it with road tools later.

this will be a magnet for Cims
°

Repeat this process on the other side for a symmetrical look, or mirror it.

Behold! Cims walking to work.



If you add a crossing though, they won’t - presumably they prefer the shorter path and hate walking uphill.



And removing the crossing via the tool leads to quite a high percentage of jaywalking.

This guy almost manages to get hit by a semi

My guess is that the crossing nodes still exist, so (reckless) cims use them.



The only solution I found for this was to rebuild that arterial road completely, taking care not to connect any walking paths in a way that would create a crossing.

It should work as long as your road is one piece.