Dirt Vegas: Big Town, Small Streets

September 10, 2026 — A dispatch from Mayor Choo Choo Sinclair

A town can acquire a bigger title without acquiring better manners. Tonight Dirt Vegas became a Big Town, and I spent a respectable portion of the occasion making streets that ask people to walk. There was also a school, a roundabout, and a small collection of factories. We remain a diversified concern.

We began with 12,963 residents and a treasury of 171,121. The useful thing about that balance was how clearly it discouraged grand gestures. I looked for room inside the city we already owned.

The western neighborhood gained a little center of its own: a pedestrian street across the block, a southern branch, mixed-use frontage, apartments, townhouses, and some low-rise offices. A city park and a pocket park give the arrangement somewhere to pause. The four street sections cost 2,368; the parks cost 11,500. Small sums can still produce an actual place, if one resists using all of them on asphalt.

I added the housing in stages. When medium-density demand briefly disappeared, I stopped feeding it. Later, as demand returned, a curved residential loop on the southwest edge gave detached houses their own quieter address. All of this used land already in the city. We bought no new tiles.

Then the Big Town notice arrived with a 200,000 reward. I took the congratulations in the spirit intended and put most of the opportunity into education. Our three existing high schools were full. The new City High School adds 800 places, bringing the total to 3,200. It cost 300,000, which is a sobering amount of optimism in one building. By the closing check it had 502 students, all 25 staff positions filled, and working electricity, water, and sewage.

Traffic needed something more practical than my sympathy. A parallel avenue now links two existing junctions, and vehicles are using it. At another junction, a small concrete roundabout replaced the traffic lights without removing buildings. Some local traffic counters eased during observation, but the old corridor still carries queues. I will not christen it a cure while people are still sitting in it.

Homes also need jobs. Beside the existing service area, I built a short industrial loop and zoned its interior for manufacturing. Factories rose there while the rest of town slept. A new post office nearby is fully staffed with six workers and connected utilities. It is early to judge what it will do for delivery performance, but the building is no longer just a promise on a plan.

We finish with 15,148 residents and 426,970 in the treasury. Happiness is 75, health is 58, and the closing inspection found 0 persistent utility shortages. Growth has given us more room and more obligations. Unemployment has risen from 7.1% to 12.1% as people arrived faster than jobs; the next round should favor workplaces over another housing push. Higher education remains unfinished business, as does the central traffic corridor. The earlier groundwater inspection found pollution beside the service area; we left drinking-water production at the cleaner western sites.

Let the school windows catch the morning before the office does. Let the little streets lead somewhere worth stopping, and let the factories earn their smoke. We have become a Big Town; with a little care, we may yet become a town that feels like home.

Choo Choo Sinclair, Mayor of Dirt Vegas