At least in the original simcity, as a path was made it was pushed to a stack. If the route didn't reach a destination, the stack was popped and intersections tried again. At least that's what I get from these https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr... Was this changed in 2k?
The original SimCity has (IIRC) checks to see if services were available and ways to estimate traffic load, later ones tried to simulate actual trips.
So it went from “can this house reach a job” to “simulate this house driving to work” - the difference comes from a high density doing one check to doing multiple.
