I am really curious how this will pan out for the casual city building enthusiast.

I liked everything about Skylines a lot, but I always ran into a roadblock (ha!) with traffic. I never designed well for it, resulting in my cities locking up by mid game. I briefly tried to learn, but it seemed almost impossible to retrofit a solution and trying to design from day 1 with traffic in mind wasn't really enjoyable. I always wish there was a mod that just abstracted traffic simulation out because it was the one thing I didn't really want to deal with.

Dealing with parking and accidents sounds like kind of a headache, but the smarter lane changes and path-finding hopefully alleviate some of the load as well.