It makes sense that Apple Arcade's Mini Motorways asks different things of me than Mini Metro, because cars are very different from trains. Still, it took me a while to understand quite how I had to approach things, and it took even longer to let all my Mini Metro instincts fall silent.
Mini Metro is a game about making underground systems, creating various coloured lines that link together stations marked by a variety of shapes. The point, I think, is to encourage diversity. You want a line that can take any traveller to its intended station, which means a line that covers all the shapes for all the different shapes of traveller. It's wonderfully positive in this regard: it sees cities as places where diversity is a strength, and there's a certain understanding that if you're using public transport you're not going to go directly to your destination anyway - everyone is in it together, which means you can all expect to go around the houses.
Cars though! Mini Motorway initially looks kind of similar to Mini Metro. You have stores and you have houses, and you have to lay down roads to connect the stores to the houses. Basically, the stores make requests and people in the houses have to fulfil them, by sending cars out to the stores and then back to the houses. Rather than dividing things up by shapes, the game sorts by colour. Pink houses to pink stores! Orange houses to orange stores.