Uh oh... I am trying to build CS2 cities without cars...
I have been serially restarting Cities Skylines 2 with new city starts and new mods. It was inevitable that I would eventually try to make a city with no cars (well, no privately-owned vehicles):
I'm pleased by how easy this was to try. I'm still feeling out the game's relationship to "realism" - it's not strict. But I'm not even halfway along the progression track, and I assume that as I pack more people into the city, it will get more difficult to run it this way.
I do enjoy that the game even allows me to go so far with a stunt like this without throwing alerts at me over it. Using pedestrianized streets means that service vehicles and delivery vans DO appear in my city, but private vehicles do not, and people can just walk in the street. So there are never any traffic jams. I can run trams down the street, too, so my city has proper public transport and everything. Just no cars! Traffic isn't a thing anymore! I don't even have to plan around it - just around trains and trams!
My only initial complaint about attempting to make a city without cars was that bike paths do not count as roads and do not create zoning for buildings alongside them. The one thing I'd want to make a truly weird and utopian city would be to create zoning off of bike paths - you could do some really weird stuff that way, I bet. I wonder if there's a mod for that?? You also can't put bike paths on pedestrianized streets, which seems like a huge miss. Maybe there's a mod for that too???