It's a pity that they didn't bake in the option to turn on realistic parking lots and road sizes for the required capacity. It does have traffic jams and more roads can help, especially since the player can control induced demand far more than in reality, but allowing the player to switch between both what's a fun game and what's a realistic simulation could have gone a long way to inform a good chunk of the population on the tradeoffs and impacts of parking and other infrastructure dedicated to automobiles.
I haven't looked at 'cities: skylines' or if there is a sequel... recently. I'm wondering if they finally did start modeling parking.
I think 'realistic parking' should probably be an option, like you said some people want the 'classic' sim-city experience and modeling. I'd hate to drive those people away from the 'cities' series, as it just seems to be sim-city without the EA enshittification.
I think it could be really interesting to allow users to try to build less car focused cities within the game. To simulate concepts like Barcelona's 'superblocks', to plan bikelanes or golfcart-focused communities like 'the villages'.
Generally the devs of 'cities' seem like they are interested in many concepts (there are sooooo many dlc for skylines) .. hopefully this one bubbles up.
There is a sequel coming out in the next few months and the developers say that parking is modeled more realistically than in the first Cities: Skylines. In the first game, citizens did not park cars at all - cars appeared out of thin air, were driven to their destination, and then vanished again. Folks often called these "pocket cars" because citizens could put them into and take them out of their pants pockets.
Apparently in the sequel buildings actually have parking, and the cars sit in the parking lot. Some citizens such as older ones prefer to drive.
Cities Skylines 2 is in the release press window, they have announced that parking and commutes will be modeled. So CS2 will be much more parking heavy, and should hopefully show just how terrible cars are in cities compared to literally any other transport mode.
