The paper size of my drawings is aprox 28" x 22". From west to east my metro is 23 drawings wide which would be about 54 feet. From north to south my metro is 26 drawings in height which would be about 48 feet.
Your questions jump-started this old mind.....as Operations Manager for a large northwestern Ohio distribution center I have access to a very large open space.....our shipping department. It would be empty (we have same day service) on weekends.
My metro would be aprox 54 x 48. I could borrow the company's digital camera. We have rolling 12-feet high ladders, for a good view. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.......
I draw every street. The regular 2-lane streets are about 1/4" wide (non-metric-savvy U.S.A. guy talking to you). The 4-lanes are about 1/2" wide. I do not name every street. I only name the streets that are major arteries and any street that has a building (other than a house) or a park or mini playground or outside ice rink, etc. The houses are somewhat similar to the one's you draw.....although mine are "sloppier". They almost look like quick-drawn circles. I add these to my maps to indicate residential development and to get accurate population counts of each plat (sheet). In my world, a house is worth 5 people.
I also have a significant number of apartment buildings, including many high-rise units. The size and (livable) floors of an apartment building also help the population stats.
De Noc's current population is 1,174,100. The Metropolitan De Noc Area (SMSA) is 1,856,267. De Noc is in the 10 largest U.S. cities in population but it's metro is in the mid-20's. I need to build more suburbs.
The reason I name certain streets is because I have also been working on a multi-year project to give addresses to every building in the metro (excluding the houses). The buildings can be (and are) any building you would see in a major metro:
Offices, apartments, banks, malls, small retail centers, restaurants, taverns (my personal favorite), hospitals, factories, any and all business establishments, and on-and-on......all named.
When you get a metro this big it can get confusing. For instance, say that I'm working on a new plat in the southwest Metro (my favorite area right now because of a new airport I just built). When I go to add the usual "stuff" that you would see along a major artery I have to make sure that the same things aren't on the adjacent plat or so close that it wouldn't make sense. Star Bank and Trust (my largest banking corporation) may be getting a branch on West Alaska House Road in the suburb of Alaska House. If I don't have some sort of indicator to tell me where the closest Star branch is I could be, in theory, wastefully using the bank's money for over-saturation of bank branches. (That couldn't happen in the "real world", right? hah hah hah.....).
So I have a stack of 8&1/2 x 11 code maps, just showing the plat numbers. For my Star Bank example I check the code map for Star Bank.....oops, I have a branch in adjacent suburb Porcupine Lake and it is only one mile from this location. So I don't build it.
I also have about a dozen of what I refer to as "major maps", drawn to a scale that would show about 6 plats width and heighth.....with the buildings not drawn in. These majors help me keep my roads, parks, lakes, creeks, etc. somewhat logical.
Metro De Noc's park system is one of the best in the world. One of my projects (the list is endless) is to determine the acres, playgrounds, ball fields, outside ice rinks, tennis courts, etc. and compare with other similar metros. Research on the net (Google search of playground and park standards) has helped me on this one. Included within the park system is a significant number of bike trails. (Coincidence.....real-life Marquette, Michigan is considered one of the best cities in the states for bike trails.)
I said I was building an airport. Almost finished. Used runway patterns liberally stolen from Denver, Chicago, Seattle, etc. to develop my new airport. The airport also has a 4-lane road around the perimeter, gates and accesses to the aorport on one side of the road and hotels, motels, casinos, restaurants, retail centers....all on the other side.
The old airport will be torn down and converted to an office park, because it does have good expressway access. The old airport was a circle runway.....for real !!! I was about 20 years old and read and article in Popular Science about circle runways so that's what De Noc got. But.....the city is so big now it can't handle the passenger volume.
The expressway system needs some work. It's pretty good in the center of the city, helping to distribute inbound and outbound traffic in a logical manner. But.....the fast growing southwestern suburbs have constantly stopped traffic on the x-ways that head that direction. One major expressway ends at the city limits for Des Plaines (sound familiar, Chicago folks?) and feeds major traffic to a boulevard system. Because of this error in planning most of the SW burb traffic is on the Industrial Expressway, getting jammed in a sea of truck traffice from the heavily-industrialized near-SW side. Outbound downtown traffic that is heading SW has another choice but it adds a number of miles.....head south on I-98 to Metropolitan Parkway (8-lane outerbelt) and turn west. I-98 heading through the northeast suburbs is also a mess, even though the growth in this area is not as strong. This portion of I-98 becomes 2-lane just a few miles from downtown De Noc....bad, bad, bad.
There is good public transportation in De Noc....a comprehensive Monorail system. There has not been much development and retail growth around DNTS stations.....because that was just something I never thought about in cause and effect terms. After reading many net sites such as Subway.com (and their links) I see that this is an issue that is used as a reason to build public transit. Of course, bus routes feed the DNTS stations.....yes, route development is on my project list.
Skyscrapers.com is a great site for info on buildings, skylines, planned projects, etc. I researched similar-sized metros (such as Cincinnati, Kansas City, Twins) and reviewed the number of skyscrapers. These metros have (usually) about 125-150 skyscrapers. Since I indicate the number of floors for these tall buildings on my drawings I was able to pop an Excel spreadsheet together for all of my buildings. I have about 194 skyscrapers.
Justification? One of the top insurance centers in the states, a vibrant downtown with a substantial growth period in the 1990's, no high rise zoning issues in the metro (we look like Toronto from the air with small pockets of high rise buildings spurting right out of neighborhoods), and many high-rise apartment buildings.
I hope all of this info is of some use. I love the scans of your city. Keep them coming and keep encouraging me to figure out how to get De Noc on the internet.
Bear
