Cool city plans

I've been sketching out city plans of what would be a cool city to do in SimCity...or anything.

I was really interested in Jerusalem at first: I wanted to create the Old City as more of it existed in Biblical times (no Dome of the Rock, for instance) while it is surrounded by a sprawling modern city, with downtowns, suburbs, and American retail.

I tried mixing and matching layouts of various cities, including Niagara Falls (both United States and Canada sides--makes for contrast), Austin, Cincinnati, Baton Rouge, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Houston...but I found that any city built along a giant lake or river can't make any ring roads. Plus, Beltway 8 is one of the largest ring roads in the world (sorta), which may skew any plans for a ring road.

And the size of the city mannered too. Do I want something pretty big, like Baton Rouge, or major on a scale of Cincinnati (big enough to support, say, light rail), or do I want something like the Bay Area of California, complete with commuter lines?

Of course, either way, there's not a lot of room to do it in SimCity 4. Besides the innumerable BATs that would have to be constructed to portray a close-to-accurate relationship, it's just not practical. The largest tile is 16x16 KM, you'd need six of them just to equal Manhattan alone. And assuming you made the streets line up in a way that SC4 can handle it, the whole city might take up an entire region. But that's not counting all the suburbs and the thousands of people who commute there every single day. Ouch.