This gives you a lot more space for building. Road plates work best when you don’t use them directly back to back, but insert one or two rows of plain plates (with buildings on, usually) between the roads. This variety of road plates gives you scope for including different types of roads in your town. There are other baseplates which were used to build sets on, which make good parking lots, bus stops, etc. LEGO also now sells a new design of green road plates which have wider lanes on the road and narrower studded borders, suitable for 6-wide vehicles. Don’t forget that LEGO makes T and X junction road plates as well as straight and curved ones. Although older roadplates are no longer available new from LEGO, many people own them from previous years, or you can sometimes buy them used. Grey is better for downtown or industrial areas, green for suburbs or countryside. Most people use the Lego road plates of various kinds, either with grey or green base color. There are several methods of making roads. Roadway width also varies with the use of the road: freeway/motorway lanes are wider than the lanes on a country road. More recent LEGO set vehicles are 6 studs and even 8 studs wide, and newer road plates have wider roads to accommodate them. Many builders like to make their larger vehicles like trucks, fire appliances and machinery, 6 bricks wide. LEGO standard roads have in the past been designed for vehicles which are 4 bricks wide. Institutional buildings like schools and churches are often found in residential areas, and hospitals are often on the edges of commercial areas where they join residential areas.Transportation: roads, waterways and railroads and their infrastructure, along with airfields of various kinds.Residential – high density (apartments, hi-rises, townhouses, row houses).Commercial – low density (small offices, local shopping centres and malls).Commercial – high density (“downtown” style office blocks).What kinds of groupings could be included? We usually don’t have enough space to spread things out as much as the real thing, but we can group things in a way that makes sense. We can arrange our Lego towns any way we like, but it can add an interesting extra dimension, especially for towns in a realistic style, to include some kind of zoning. That way you don’t get the steelworks next to the daycare, and the all-night disco next to the seniors’ home! Real towns have ways of arranging their various parts so that they don’t interfere with each other, usually by some kind of zoning. Building Instructions Bundle #1 with 7 custom LEGO designs $12.00 Add to cart.Building Instructions Bundle #2 with 8 custom LEGO designs $12.00 Add to cart.Building Instructions Bundle #3 with 7 custom LEGO designs $12.00 Add to cart.Building Instructions Bundle #4 with 7 custom LEGO Town or City designs $12.00 Add to cart.What kind of water or waters-edge features do you want to include in your town? Towns often have waterways in or close to them, and they provide us with plenty of scope for fun models and details. Here are more detailed notes on the steps: Land Use Decide on specific building locations and sizes and write in on your plan.Draw up an accurate plan and adjust roads and tracks to fit.Decide on road, track and water levels and mark bridges and slopes where necessary.Decide on train track and monorail routes and train width standards, sketch in tracks.Decide on roadway width and construction method, sketch in roads on your plan.Decide on general areas: water vs dry land, use zoning, etc and sketch in on your plan.Draw out the space available using your design tool of choice.Here’s an overview of the steps in this article: Now we’ll walk through a step-by-step design method that you can use to create a LEGO city that makes sense and is fun and challenging to build. In a previous article, we covered design tools for LEGO layouts.