As you build your city, the game will force you to upgrade your roads. Unlike the PC version of SimCity, there really is no rhyme or reason to it. They will force you to upgrade every road no matter what. There's a couple of tricks to postponing it
- Add a short segment of cross street intersecting the road it wants you to upgrade. The upgrade demand will go away temporarily. The game will eventually ask you to upgrade again, but it might be a different segment.
- Play the game listed above of temporarily postponing upgrades until it requests a really short segment of road with very little to no population. Let it go abandoned. I had this happen once and was able to let it sit like that for several days. I knew it had a minimal to no impact to my population and it kept further requests away. I'm not sure if that would work permanently because I eventually did go and start doing road upgrades.
Like everything in this game, the road upgrades get expensive. The higher the road classification, the higher the cost. I've summarized the upgrades in the table below. To test this out, I built the shortest segment of road possible and requested road upgrades all the way up to the maximum level.
| Road Type | Unit Cost |
| 2 Lane Road | Free |
| 4 Lane Road | $ 300 |
| 6 Lane Road | $ 1,200 |
| Avenue | $ 1,500 |
| Boulevard | $ 2,000 |
| Streetcar | $ 2,500 |