> for example, who does a city of 50K need a mass transit system?
I think that has more to do with the fact that the game is developed by a European studio (Finnish, IIRC), and in Europe even smaller cities have decent mass transit systems, so it makes perfect sense to them that you should put mass transit in a city of 50K.
Edit to add: Doing a SimCity-style fixed grid layout with two-lane roads is a disaster in Skylines because it's a disaster in real life. There's a reason why real downtown areas are horribly congested. If you set up a proper street hierarchy with arterials, collectors, and local streets, you'll have much better traffic flow, just like in real life. The SimCity games never really cared much for letting you build different types of streets (SC4 came close, but not to the extent of Skylines), and the game itself made you place everything on a grid where every tile matters, diagonals are a waste of space, and curves are close to impossible. But Skylines has several different street types built in, and the game itself uses a more flexible layout engine that doesn't penalize you for doing curves and diagonals.
Also, the traffic AI is just poorly coded, and there are mods to replace it with better, such as Traffic Manager: President Edition. It's not a problem with the agent system; it's a problem with poor AI programming.
The first thing that jumped out at me is that the vanilla AI just doesn't know how to handle traffic lights. Some mods might as well be requirements for playing the game, and TMPE is one of them.
I think that has more to do with the fact that the game is developed by a European studio (Finnish, IIRC), and in Europe even smaller cities have decent mass transit systems, so it makes perfect sense to them that you should put mass transit in a city of 50K.
Edit to add: Doing a SimCity-style fixed grid layout with two-lane roads is a disaster in Skylines because it's a disaster in real life. There's a reason why real downtown areas are horribly congested. If you set up a proper street hierarchy with arterials, collectors, and local streets, you'll have much better traffic flow, just like in real life. The SimCity games never really cared much for letting you build different types of streets (SC4 came close, but not to the extent of Skylines), and the game itself made you place everything on a grid where every tile matters, diagonals are a waste of space, and curves are close to impossible. But Skylines has several different street types built in, and the game itself uses a more flexible layout engine that doesn't penalize you for doing curves and diagonals.
Also, the traffic AI is just poorly coded, and there are mods to replace it with better, such as Traffic Manager: President Edition. It's not a problem with the agent system; it's a problem with poor AI programming.
Here's a video I stumbled on comparing the vanilla traffic AI with the TMPE AI across various different types of intersections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yITr127KZtQ
The first thing that jumped out at me is that the vanilla AI just doesn't know how to handle traffic lights. Some mods might as well be requirements for playing the game, and TMPE is one of them.