The road plates are great because if u have carpet you cant stand minifigs on carpet without trying 5 min for one stop motion pic, and it will look like buildings placed randomly if you dont have roads.

If you collect any of the City/Town sets, eventually you find that having road plates are an absolute must and essential with the City planning and layout. And they certainly enhance play.

On these new plates, the roads are a bit wider to accommodate the newer City vehicles that are in turn larger too. It means that there's fewer studs on the sides for building on. That doesn't really seem to bother me too much except with trying to connect up the older road plates, you can see the differences in width.

How many will you need? It depends on the size of your LEGO City. Start with just a couple to begin with and expand out as the City grows obviously.

My only real complaint is the overall price at $15 for two plates. So avoid resellers that jack up the price as buying these directly from LEGO is the best deal unless you've found a large lot of numerous plates for a good value.

This item is great, however as compared to the other baseplates this one is quite simple with not much colour. For the price I paid I expected there to be a bit more detail, Lego could easily add Drains or anything else onto the road.

Also the roads are wider than the older green plates I am used to, this means there are less studs for building on. I think the price of this should be no more than £6.

I got this because I needed a T-intersection in my city. The new shade of gray is nicer than the old one. If your city has too much grass, this set is perfect. These roadplates are compatible with the ones before these (ie. the ones released in 2003), as they (and the 2003 ones) have the same road width of 20 studs wide. To create a fairly large city you must buy at least 5-10 of these, but if you're like me and want to fit a compact, high-rise city onto one street you'll only need one or two sets of roadplates. I wish each set came with only one kind of road plate. Pricewise, this costed 17.99 CAD and I think it sucks because the price used to be a third of this a couple years ago.

I'm joining in on the side of liking the all grey plates. The dark grey does fit in better when building a modern town. I personally prefer this set of one "T" plate and a curve and recomend more of these if you are on a limited buget. The curve plate both makes for a more interesting and less blocked layout and gives you more building area. The "T" plate is great for the turn off's into the various set's you've bought like the hospital, fire department, or police station. The crosswalk adds detail and a break for those sets. My only down side is I can never build a good corner building to put near the curves so often I make flowerbeds or place trees on grass made with flat green/brown tiles outlined by single thickness grey bricks. Either way the wider roads allow for more play with the modern vehicles though most construction vehicles are still too wide. Now if all the sets driving areas would just line up well with the roads.