Ideas for design/game

Hey this is Kelsey from the Lantern event last night! I recognize that this is obnoxious Github etiquette, but I didn't want to drop a whole slew of ideas issues, so please feel free to ask me to break out the ideas you like as their own issues.

1. For the commute overlay, I think what I was expecting to see was not just to/from, but a set of colored paths coming out of the hovered area: not just destination, but how people get there.
2. If you were to do ^, it would be useful to color the paths not just by absolute number, but by e.g. waiting time—implying an objective of reducing commuter frustration
3. And/or ^ color by transportation type, with an objective to reduce car traffic. Ofc this starts to get very handwavey since it means diverging from the existing sim model, but I think it would be not-crazy to build in an assumption that a given commuter would make a switch to whatever gets them to their destination fastest. This is probably my favorite part of playing Cities Skylines: I'm always trying to build a design that maximizes pedestrianism by building up transit. This would massively change the game—but I think per your objectives? After all, a big part of the appeal of improving transit is that it should change people's behavior; it's not going to make much difference in your sim to improve transit if nobody gives up the car commute to ride it.
4. Since it is turn-based, I'd imagine being able to see the whole day all at once in simulations like ^. Of course, you'd immediately want to change your streets and rerun to see the whole-day difference, which gets compute-intensive pretty fast, but perhaps since it's game-based there's a way to design around that, e.g. in a challenge you have X budget corresponding to X # changes? (Thinking that in games, frustration can be part of the design)
5. Just to document it here, color gradients might be more helpful if absolute, if what the player is trying to do is identify problem areas. Instead of a transparent-to-red gradient, maybe more of a blue-to-red, so it doesn't just wash out in low areas? Or since you already have various map subsections, maybe the scale sets by map
6. For survival mode, instead of playing from midnight, what about slicing the day into X-minute chunks and rearranging them in order of difficulty (# of wait times above 12 minutes across the city in the vanilla sim?) (no idea how hard it is from your end to set initial state, but seems plausible to save it at intervals?). This lends itself to levels: you survived the morning commute! (Also avoids the mini metro sour feeling of: you lose every single time)
7. In general instead of playing from midnight, maybe make the day start at 4am? This is a more human-oriented cutoff point; I'd assume that midnight to 3 is people still awake from the previous night. Would also let you get to the more interesting commute hours faster.

Might have some more ideas, will add if I think of them. Thanks for the demo, obviously you have me hooked on the concept!