Highway construction in a good city simulator

One of the things that makes a good game is that you can get inspiration from other games. SimCity 4 was released in 2003, and the way that highways/roads/etc. are constructed is less than favorable: place something, and it takes a few seconds of going from transparent to usable as workers finish it off.

But while it's an improvement over the "plopping" of the old SC games, it's still not very realistic. In 2004, Evil Genius had a much better way of constructing things: when you planned out something, it wasn't a direct cost to you immediately, it was in "blueprint" mode and you had to actually enable it. So the way that a good city simulator would work, if you say, wanted to build a new highway, you would create a blueprint for free (which is a bit unrealistic, as it takes money to even plan out something) then enable construction. From there, you have to wait a set period while it slowly takes cash to build (in a certain number of increments in a certain amount of time, more expensive, more time). At any point, you can stop, but if you're in the middle of a huge road project, you can't do anything with it: those huge trenches and the like cannot be helped without a bulldozer. If you have to stop due to budget shortfalls, it's especially dangerous, and you'll have to live with your mess until you can backfill things or finish it. When the money is finally paid off, the road opens, any detours disappear, and you have a new highway/subway/public works project.

With the "blueprint" mode, you can have any number of projects in various states of completion, and you don't run the risk of accidentally developing an area with residential you wanted to put a highway through. If that happens, then you'll have to pay market price for the land value, so if you want a highway to run through an upper end development, expect to lose tons of money (and popularity). Of course, there would be other ways to get around it: buy one house at market value, demolish it, don't maintain the lot, and let land values plummet, but that would be...mean.