Because it really f%&*ing pisses me off. Here I am, designing my own intricate pattern of streets, and it tries to stick its own streets willy-nilly wherever it wants when I zone an area. If I want to make blocks of 6x12, for example, it insists on sticking a street down the middle, even if I don’t want one. The only way I’ve found to stop it is to zone things one square at a time, and I hardly think that’s an elegant solution.
Arghgh!
Haven’t played my copy since the first week or two of release (computer’s just not well enough equipped to handle it), but I’m pretty sure there was an official patch a few weeks after release that allowed you to hold “shift” while zoning to temporarily disable the “feature.” Experiment. I know one of the three (shft, cntrl, alt) will allow you to rotate the direction of the lots, and one will allow you to turn off auto-streets. Again, this is all assuming you’re all patched up.
First I’ve heard of this, I’ve been avoiding autoroads by zoning 3×3 lots at a time. I just checked the SimCity boards and it is <shift> to disable autoroads, <alt> to rotate.
I’ve lost the f|^%¿»g manual for mine.
Yes, holding down SHIFT while zoning will disable automatic side-street placement. Holding down ALT while zoning rotates the orientation of your lots & the streets that are placed.
In practice, though, I leave automatic streets on. Without them, you end up with orphaned lots – SC4’s traffic sim pays closer attention to lot orientation than previous versions, so each one of your lots MUST have access to a road or street for it to develop. You’ll see an arrow on the lot art that indicates where the street has to be.
And yes, this all assumes you have the patch installed. You’d be foolish to be running it without the patch installed; it fixes a ton of stuff and makes the game run more smoothly overall.
You doodz is da bomb and a half!