Yeah, seen this on a lets play from someone. They had a grid style city but built with large roads that had a lot of junctions with traffic lights which was causing big traffic issues. He didn't spot that at first so when he had garbage issues, his response was to lay down more and more landfills. It didn't help at all.
Read through
this guide, I followed it last night, got a city up to "Grand City" size (on my map was ~32k) with absolutely no issues with any service thanks to the road layout*. It's awesome. I only experienced issues with population balance once I introduced lots of high density housing and commerce and office zones, loads of industry shut down due to lack of "uneducated" employees, so I built loads more low density residential and it soon sorted itself out.
The only problem is I picked the Lagoon Shores map and I have yet to unlock an area with a decent location for a dam, or somewhere I can build a port.
* Might I add, I have a motorway running through the centre of my city with multiple ramps leading to dual lane two way roads everywhere, hardly any traffic lights and no traffic build up. Will try and get some screenies up later.