Yeah I've never had a problem with Sim City 4. I start out with low density everything (except industrial) and build with that until most of the map is full. Then I start incrementally replacing city blocks with medium density. I stop after a few blocks then work out all the traffic problems. After transportation is adequately provided to a block, I start working on the next blocks. I don't built hospitals or police until my first medium density blocks start coming in. I build schools a little bit before then.
Here's my big list of tips:
One common mistake is starting off building a complete school system. When people move into your city they start out at age 0 and won't start attending high school or college for a few decades. You don't need libraries for probably 30 or 40 years. You're just dumping money into something nobody's going to use. Same with water. People don't need water until there's like 10k of them.
You don't need police or health care at all until you want medium and high wealth people, which I don't bother attracting until the medium/high density stages.
You're going to hit hard population caps without neighboring regions. If you just develop one city by itself it's going to be very difficult. Developing two cities side by side is also great because you can put all your industry in one and all your residents in another. Then you'll get no industrial pollution in your residential city, which is great because you're already going to have enough trouble managing air pollution from traffic once you get highways.
Industry produces an obscene amount of water pollution that will shut down all your wells in a mixed development city unless you're on a huge map. Water treatment is also very expensive.
Leave a lot of space for a university and don't bother placing colleges unless you're playing on a huge map. Also leave space for other huge improvements, like airports, stadiums, and golf courses. The bonuses are very important. They're not just for decoration, they alleviate population caps. You're going to need pretty much every bonus.
Contrary to popular belief, low-wealth isn't bad. You can easily make up the drop in tax income with bus faire, and I'm not exaggerating. I had bus stations making hundreds of dollars a month, and multiply it by a couple dozen bus stations... You can easily support a very complex and expensive highway system with mass transit and still have a net income every month on your transit budget. Which is good, because I've hit highway capacity with nothing but bus traffic. Car traffic in my cities is usually outnumbered by buses 3:2.
Rich people hate buses. You have to give them stupidly expensive mass transit like monorails. It's easier to just zone some high tech industry or huge corporate offices down the street from them.
Landfills take up too much room and incinerators are expensive and produce a lot of pollution. Interestingly enough though, you can reduce funding to incinerators to 0 and they'll still burn trash but produce no energy. That solves the cost problem, since incinerators are a stuffty way to produce electricity anyway. Doesn't solve the pollution problem (especially water pollution), so stick them in another city.
There is no reason to send school buses out to collect children in your commercial district. Individually tune the school bus fund so it only covers neighborhoods.
Similarly, schools start out overfunded. Capacity is directly proportional to funding. If you have a high capacity school and only 1000 students, cut it's funding. Don't forget to adjust the budget every few years because the population will change. Same goes for hospitals.
