If you watch their videos on the glassbox system on youtube you'll find that this is exactly how they billed it. It was users who expected more. Not that it's bad to expect more.

The thing that the new sim city does that all previous sim cities didn't do was it models every agent visibly. Most previous sim city's simulations were based on locality, there was a radius of effect around buildings and that modified properties. In sim city 4 for instance, if you look at the roads you'll see cars appearing and disappearing because there was no "car" on the road, there was an area of high traffic density based on some linear algebra.

In the new Sim City, there's a few components,

There's areas, which tell things like pollution levels, crime impact, property value, water tables, natural resources, etc. These areas change the rate of certain events, trigger certain events and limit buildings that are build on the area.

There's resources, that's things like simoleans, happiness, water, power, pollution, profit.

There's agents, agents are things like people, power transmission, water transmission, garbage trucks, fire trucks, etc. Agents go from one building to another and carry resources.

There's buildings, and buildings have resources and release and accept agents.

So the simulation at it's simplest level is basically:

You build a residential zone, the residential zone sends a notifier agent to the highway saying "I'm here and I'm empty" the highway sends a construction vehicle agent to the residential zone. The construction vehicle has building material resources which deplete when it builds the house. If it still has building materials, and another request for building reaches the vehicle it will travel to that building and create a house there until its construction resource is depleted.

A built house will be empty, and it will send a notifier agent again to the highway, from there a new tenant agent will be sent to the building. This will occupy the building. Note that even a building that can hold 100 population will be fully populated by a single tenant from the highway. None of the names of the people in the building are recorded. Low density buildings will have names, like "Smith Residence" and people agents generated from "Smith Residence" will likely have Smith as a surname.

From there, at periodic times of day, buildings will send notifier requests along the roads looking for workers. A commercial building will for instance send a request at 6:00 AM. If the notifier reaches a residential building with a resident resource available, the building will generate a worker agent and decrement its resident count by 1. That worker agent will have a destination of the requesting commercial business.

During the night, the commercial business sends requests for goods along the roads. If an industrial building with goods intercepts one of these requests and it has available delivery vehicle resources, it will deploy a delivery vehicle agent, decrease it's deliver vehicle resource by 1, increase the goods resource by 45 on the delivery vehicle and decrease the goods resource at the factory by 45. The vehicle will travel to the commercial building and unload some goods. If the vehicle intercepts another request for goods on its way back it will respond to it.

When the worker count at the commercial business is not 0, the business opens. When the commercial business has enough goods, it puts out souvenirs and begins to make items to sell. Once there are goods to sell, the commercial business sends out notifier agents saying they have goods available.

If the notifier agents reach residential buildings with money and residents, the residential building creates a shopper agent and puts one unit of money on them. The shopper agent goes to the commercial building that notified it. Once the agent arrives there, the shoppers value of the commercial building increments.

Periodically, when the commercial building has shoppers, it will decrement the number of shoppers, increment profit and decrement goods. It will put a resident agent on the street and they will travel to the nearest unoccupied residential building. Once there they will increase the residents count by 1 and wait for a job or an opportunity to spend money or have fun.

It's an interesting simulation, but you have to treat it as that sort of simulation. For instance, if you have a highly concentrated commercial area, residents from all over will go to the shops there. When they return they will have different names. They will have no memory of their home. They will go from door to door, to the closest unoccupied residence. When you have a flock of people it gets worse, because they are all playing follow the leader as they all want to take the shortest path to the closest unoccupied house. As soon as the leader fills that house they all choose to go to the next closest unoccupied house. They don't communicate together and spread out. If you had a circle of houses and you dropped 10 sims just left of center in the circle, instead of each sim picking a house and heading there, they would all head to the leftmost house, and then they would slowly work their way around the circle.

In terms of gameplay, once you recognize this behavior it can be kind of fun to play. You do things like put your commercial properties sort of like a hub with residential spokes around it, you keep commercial density as low as it needs to be to effectively service nearby residents. The further the commercial property draws residents from, the less efficiently they can return home. Industry is less important because industrial work has longer shifts. A sim might like to shop multiple times during the day if given the money and the opportunity, but they are consumed for much longer working at a factory.

Ultimately, the game is about increasing density, density is increased by increasing happiness or profit. Happiness is most easily earned by spending money and not having negative effects like no power or no water. Once density is increased the only thing you might care about is education, education is increased on a per-building basis, it's a resource that the building holds. Either students going to school, or residents going to libraries increase education. Residents will go to commercial buildings with money to increase happiness, but if they are out of money they might go to parks or libraries to increase happiness or education.

I'm pretty sure they do take traffic into account, it's just that the traffic happens spontaneously. 30 sims decide to take the same route because it's not congested -- now it's congested, but they can't take a u-turn. If you have another path to the same destination that's more efficient some will break off when they reevaluate their paths.

The problem is mostly when a lot of sims manage to get on a highly congested road with no way off. Then they're stuck. The "major roads" example is that way because they don't think ahead, once they're on that road, they're stuck, and they don't choose the other path because they'd end up having to merge into another congested road on the other side anyways.

The Intersection trap is probably due to something like a ton of sims being dropped off by mass transit after work and then having their connection to residential areas demolished. Another thing that might happen is a high density residential buidling that was available before burns down or gets demolished. Then they have nowhere to go, and they just circle while trying to find an opening in a residential building.

If you notice the last pathfinding experiment, the congestion on the main road doesn't really let up when the one-way street is demolished. It does initially but starts to back up again because of the traffic lights.

I'm not trying to be an apologist. It's a better simulation than the previous version, but the people don't act like people and the city doesn't act like a city. Even ants have more things they can react to than the sims in this game. However, the simulation is pretty consistent and it can make a reasonably fun game if you try to play the game instead of build a city. The simulations in previous games were probably better at building a city, and while there was mystical teleportation and individuals weren't generally modeled, those abstractions mean that the city can make more sense without needing to do really complex modeling for 100,000 units at once.

Once you start to notice these limitations and play within those bounds, it can be a fun puzzle game; maybe even strategy game. But city simulation? I'm not sure about that.