Cities Skylines have a good walking and cycling modeling alongside an excellent public transport system. You can totally create a city with really little trafic. Even industrial trafic can be done essentially via rail or via seaway. It seems that most (all?) actors in the game will prefer your infrastructures over the road as long as they are more efficient. You can now even add toll gates on the road to make the incentive even stronger.
I am a fan of city simulators and I found out the reason for this is all of them copy the USA style zoning system in their rules.
USA style zoning is just stupid and is a major culprit of cities needing cars.
As far as I know there is no major city simulator that simulates non-zoned cities that are full of organic growth instead of the player, like a US mayor, deciding where people are allowed and not allowed to live and work.
In Infraspace there's no zoning as such (you can do it yourself to some extent with their "districts" feature), it's still early access alpha though with hopefully a lot more to come. For some production you need so many of some of the buildings that it's easier to slap them in their own area.
It does have trains, but they are fairly limited use right now and it's pretty car focused.
I'm trying to just do one super long road in my current game.
Infraspace is not a citybuilder that allow organic growth.
I am talking more about a potential game where cities would grow like in real life, with people moving in voluntarily, and building stuff voluntarily, and the government focused more on building infrastructure. As far as I know there are no major game like that.
Closest to it in a sense is a space game (Distant Worlds, where you build the military ships and colonize planets, but the population builds commercial stations and mining operations, and the population have their own civilian ships for immigration and tourism)
Check out Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. It's essentially an Eastern European factory town simulator, which means walkable tentament blocks linked by bus lines directly to massive industrial blocks. It's also the dark souls of city managers, which means get ready to have everything crashing down because your heating plant ran out of coal in the middle of winter and now everyone is too sick to mine more
One of my biggest gripes in most city builders is a lack of mixed zoning, and realistic dense zoning. Most CBDs are dense mixed zone and that is really the heart of what makes a dense inner city area operate. There usually is no "dense commercial" zone in most cities, it's low to medium density specific use and then dense mixed use. Exceptions abound of course.
As the sibling says, Cities Skylines definitely does a better job than its predecessors of legitimizing non-car strategies for managing transportation. However, as the player, the path of least resistance is absolutely to just do roads everywhere and bulldoze buildings and houses to widen roads (just like in the real world). I don't think CS has much/any modeling for the longer-time-horizon benefits of an active-transportation city, in terms of culture, health, pollution reduction, and so on.
So yes, it's a major step forward in terms of it being possible at all, but it's something you have to be pretty intentional about— and maybe that's reflective of the real world too. But it's always nice when media (games, books, movies, whatever) inspires us to dream bigger than we might otherwise have done.
You can build whole cities without cars in Cities Skyline. With mods like TPME banning private cars is easy. You can still allow services (police, fire engines, ambulances, etc), good trucks, buses and taxis but can also disable any of these on a per-road basis.
I like to create areas that have no cars in my cities. Add lots of pedestrian and cycling paths, lots of trains, metro, ferries, etc and just watch oodles of people using public transport or cycling everywhere.
