Building a Perfectly Imperfect Highway System in Cities Skylines 2 | MC #14

some people look at traffic and see progress all the people queued up are simply evidence that business is booming that the place is desirable and it's doing well and in some instances there's truth to that nobody wants to be in a downtown that's a ghost town completely devoid of traffic we want our cities to feel active but this this is not activity this is parents losing time with their kids after school this is a business losing money this is a problem that can tank a politicians hopes of being reelected if not taken seriously and Governor Johnson knows this she's heard Rumblings that businesses and residents in Magnolia County feel that their community's been underinvested in from a transportation standpoint and they're beginning to organize against her and truthfully this makes some sense nicolay Bay got a new interstate highway connection and numerous upgrades to its ferry system and Clearwater County got a brand new interstate highway that even included a pricey Wildlife overpass that some called a boond doggle and Magnolia County well they got this bir directional Highway everywhere and they get traffic lots of traffic and to add insult to injury they don't even get areas to safely past slow-moving Vehicles so to solve this problem Governor Johnson instructs the superior Department of Transportation to seek out Federal Highway grants to bring an interstate highway to Magnolia County at the same time she forms an interstate highway advisory committee which is aimed at learning more about the community's vision for their new highway system and a number of prominent business owners are invited to participate in the committee including jam and James Jones Nick King and even Chuckles further a number of residents are invited to participate including Daryl and keran Williams the business is Lobby for a system that serves the industrial park with multiple interchanges and completely avoids downtown Ben by converting University Avenue into an interstate highway James in particular expresses optimism that this new Interstate could lead to Rapid growth something that would help out his growing development company darl is immediately offended and says that the county doesn't need any more roads it's fine just as it is and it's getting too big already he says he'd never sell any of his land to make way for an interstate and he'd get the other Farmers on board with blocking it his face then turns red as he proclaims that it's all been a sham nobody really cares what he thinks they're just going to build whatever they want and take whatever land they need to do it Jam attempts to calm the situation but darl and keran storm out of the meeting never to return but the committee continues their work ultimately recommending a sweeping network of controlled access highways with interchanges providing access at key locations throughout the community they also include a number of pedestrian Bridges and other amenities to ensure that the highway doesn't lead to the community losing its walkability but unfortunately for the committee the dot was only able to win enough grant funding for the creation of a limited access highway system one that has some inter changes but still has many atg grade Crossings it's a starting place but it's certainly not where anyone wants to end up so ultimately nobody is happy with this outcome and many are worried about how safe this new system will ultimately be only time will tell in this episode we'll build this new highway system and we'll attempt to control cost by reusing RightWay and minimizing the use of eminent domain we'll also minimize the number of interchanges that we build since they are very expensive instead we'll focus on access consolidation where possible and if you've ever built a less than perfect highway system on purpose hit the like button and if you usually build the most beautiful highways that you can hit the like button for that too and let me know what you do down in the comments or leave an emoji that represents highways for the sake of Engagement without any further Ado let's Jump Right In hello and welcome back to Magnolia County now I'm really excited to start with this build today I think it's going to really transform the county but before we do that I want to talk a little bit about what you're not seeing right now all of the complaints about high rent this was an issue that I was really afraid was going to tank the build I was starting to see that there were buildings abandoning because the rent was too high however a mod was just released that completely resolve the issue that is the land value overhaul mod so this particular bug is one where if you have a nice mix of uses you'll end up seeing certain uses dominating the land value if you have a lot of offices or a lot of commercial or a lot of industry in a particular area they will max out their land value and that will spill into residential areas making them unaffordable so I felt like I had to add this mod into the build if I wanted to be able to continue building it because I was seeing all sorts of our single family residential buildings abandoned now with that out of the way let's move on to laying out our highways we are going to kick things off right here on the edge of the map near charity Bay and my main design Philosophy for this entire project is going to be to attempt to reuse as much of our Old Highway alignment as possible at least in this section where we actually have an old highway so the way that we're going to do that is we're going to attempt to use the parallel Road tool as much as we can I'm going to give one unit of Separation this is very specific so that we can add turning Pockets where it makes sense and then I'm going to go right over the top of the old alignment now it's worth mentioning that if you are to go like this with the parallel Road tool away from you you'll end up with the road on the left hand side if you pull it towards you the road will be on the right hand side so that is something that we are going to need to keep in mind as we're drawing this and I want to go right over the top top as much as I can like I mentioned I also want to turn off things like Snap to zoning grid 90° angles zoning cell length and even sides of the building we'll probably just keep on Snap to guidelines and existing geometry and obviously our contour lines because we've got to respect the [Music] topography and there we go the first segment of our Highway complete and now for the next segment I want to look ahead and it looks like it's fairly straight so I'm going to attempt to use the Straight segment find the middle and just go all the way down so if we were to continue down the path that we're going this side of the road heading towards Bend would be in the water so I think we're going to rebuild this entire thing and the way that this could occur is you can have Bridge segments actually shifted and that's how I would imagine this would happen we would decommission this and then the bridge could be shifted that's obviously not going to happen in the game so we'll do it the way that we have to which is spreading this out I think we're going to make this about 80 units we'll use our slope terrain tool right Mouse click up at the end and then we're going to spread it out from here all the way up and now I'm going to use the level terrain tool on the other end so we're grabbing the same height that's up there so it's easy to make our bridge and we'll do the exact same thing I'm no God no God please no no [Music] no [Music] got surrendering now surrendering now this got really complicated near this bridge because it didn't want to mirror this appropriately and that happens so now what I'm trying to do is find a spot where we're not going to get that overlapping items warning seems like that's just right and now our bridges are more or less mirrored for whatever reason the nodes are just a little bit off this one's dipping down and I shouldn't let this bother me but you guys know who I am and it's going to bother me so we're going to do our best to fix [Music] it okay that is not perfect but it is pretty darn good and we're going to leave it we have to leave it I can't I can't go crazy here so now I want to switch the alignment of the highway because we're way too close to the end again so what I'm going to try to do is angle this over just slightly and then we're going to reuse this highway to go into Bend so we'll go with something like that where we kind of get that jog over and then right here oh that looks pretty bad thankfully we have extended Road upgrades so we can maybe do a key wall along all of here and clean things up a little bit and now we're about to hit the interesting area so I want to sever this connection here because the highway is going to turn and go towards the university but to do that we're going to need to purchase a couple of tiles and I want to get this one right here and this one as well so I'm going to level this and create the path for our Highway and then we'll draw that in right away and honestly I think we could probably add this segment right across to the university right away too and now let's take a break from this new segment and link up our old segment to our new one up here so once again we are going to attempt to reuse this Old [Music] Highway and there we go that's looking pretty smooth I think let's just make sure it's always helpful with highways at least I think it is to just take a step back and take take a look and yeah that's looking really really good so now we enter what is likely the most controversial part of what we're going to do so we are going to completely change what's happening through the university right here the first thing I'm going to do is Sever Eisenhower Street momentarily and then get rid of the Myrtle Circle and hopefully I don't upset Myrtle we're going to have to see and we are going to sink the highway right here so that Eisenhower can just go up over the top [Music] and there we go and that's not too invasive although it is pretty funny to see that row of apple trees straight in the middle of the highway we'll get rid of that and before we go into the invasive part let's make this connection right here and I think we are going to need to change our farm just a little bit so one more case of eminent domain and now's the invasive part so we are going to be basically blowing this entire area up and we be severing much of the connections or many of the connections through here the one that we're going to keep is right here so I said this is limited access and what that means is that there will be some direct roadway access to this highway which I'm guessing that many of you rightly are going to be a called by I'm going to leave it paused while we attempt to work the highway through this [Music] area and now we're going to need to take out University or now Hawthorne and just try to go right in the middle of this now I think I can resume this again but I just want to talk about what a disaster this would be for this neighborhood over here can you imagine being able to walk to your friend's house and now you've got this highway this loud highway right in the middle and all these pedestrian connections are severed we are going to reestablish some of those but it won't be nearly the extent that we had before now this is an interesting space because you can see that we are not perfectly aligned with the center here it's almost as if University had a jog in it so we are going to attempt to shift this over and I think that we'll do that by basically ignoring what we've been working on we'll build this where we think it needs to go and we're catching something oh shoot I think I know what it is yeah there is a power line it's really tough to see but there's a rural power line right along the road right here wow I don't know how we manage that it's right in the center so got lucky in one spot but not so lucky in the others so we're going to need to take this back quite a ways I mean honestly as a part of a project like this utility bearing is something you would absolutely expect to see I'm going to take that back to there for now and I just want to make sure we don't we're not disconnected I think we're [Music] fine and now we are going to once again replace University all the way through here now I think this connection right here will be the one that we save because we're going to extend this all the way Ong the coast that's going to become the really important Road through here and with all the connectivity that we're severing it's going to be even more important than it ever was before and now's the tough part because we're by Daryl and car an's house they live right here and they don't want us to encroach upon their property at all so we are going to do our best now these trees would likely be in the right of way so we are going to take this right back to here and look at that we can't actually fit this in there so I'm going to take this back to half and see if we can fit this through at half oh we're overlapping something and I got a sneaking suspicion power line once again so once we get rid of the power line oh it's still a little bit tight so if we take any property it's going to be from this Farm because we don't want to rock the boat at all and now we need to find a way to get back to our full unit of separation and honestly oh shoot if we don't play our cards right it's more eminent domains so we're going to take this all the way back and we'll handle these [Music] individually and you know for all of those attempts to try to save this house look at how close it is to the highway there is no saving that house that is well within the zone that the dot would take it so we will take it as well so the one thing about what we've done here that I don't love is you can see it is super lumpy and bumpy and though I should be okay with a little bit of imperfection I am not you guys know who I am so we are going to regrade this [Music] out and I don't know how much better that made it but it made me feel better honestly we could probably go all the way back and redo a whole bunch of this but we're not going to we're going to we're going to accept some imperfection it's going to be just fine I'm going to keep telling myself that and now we are going to need to figure out where we go from here so let's get past the Williams house and we are going to be taking this highway and rather than heading it towards the city we're going to continue up this way and sweep around here so let's pause for one more moment we're go back to our one unit of Separation so I'm going to leave a little Gap here and now we need to find a way up here and it's telling me that I have some overlapping item which again is it this power line that's impossible to see it is this thing is just everywhere and then I'm going to reestablish our connection to this facility in a different way and we're going to do something that's not super realistic I'm probably just going to spin this around reasonably I think that that you know changing the fence would not be the craziest thing here and then we'll send that up that way but here's the thing I don't want this to continue to run into our city we're going to buy some more tiles and cross the river over here before we attempt to reuse this road as our Highway and there were really two approaches that we could have taken here we could have definitely taken University and continue to convert that all the way along here but I think we're going to continue seeing urbanization pressures through this area we'll preserve this land and send it across into the town of Benson and then we'll have to loop back around and find a connection up this way so let's buy a couple more tiles and we're going to buy these two and these two and hopefully that's enough to get us around this way and then I know I want to connect up with the highway over here so we're going to buy a bunch of tiles for our highway so 13 more tiles we only have 48 available to us now so I want to see some traffic on this highway for now so I am going to establish a connection right here and then I also want to reestablish this internet [Music] connection now as I think about this there's no reason not to urbanize this connection so what I think that we'll do is we'll upgrade this bridge after upgrading the road on either side and this is going to help us because we'll be able to carry power and then we'll upgrade this segment and now we should have power right here now coming up this way rather than turning into town we're just going to go straight back and now we've got one more River Crossing and this one is likely going to be diagonal because I want to sweep around and pull this a little bit closer to town and why don't we add a nicer Bridge through here this is a long bridge so we'll make this a signature piece of Magnolia County and now we just need to reorient this highway so that it's a nice gentle turn right in there and now I'm going to draw the next segment of our highway so that we can connect up to our bridge and I'm going to make that as straight as I can we'll drop that down straight to ground level and again we want to reuse our existing Highway where we can but it will be difficult here because there's not a lot of space without using eminent domain if we're going to use that I'm going to use it right in front of this top and we will need to bump this back or something of that nature and there we go that is really really really tight I'm not sure that that flies I think it looks nice I just think that that could be a little bit sharp for a highway turn I think that we might need to I just I know it's not good so rather than taking some Liberties let's just get it [Music] right that is more sweet even if it takes up considerably more space so I think that we could probably get away with this or maybe get away with this if you are a highway engineer let me know certainly not my area of expertise now we've got these power lines again that are going to create some issues for us so I'm just taking these back and we're going to need to replace these but that sounds like a problem for future Phil cuz Phil right now just needs to get this going so we won't worry about that and I believe that we were grabbing power for this entire area from the bridge so I'm just going to turn off all of my snap twos and try to grab it right here and then we'll just run this along the side of the highway and I just doing that because I didn't want to take out the tree line for the farm and then we can connect it right here and we still get the connection into both our internet service and those Farms right there and now for the final bit of layout here this is all new alignment this would be very expensive because there's a lot of grading that needs to occur so let's make sure we do a good job and then finally we need to find out where we're going to connect up here and there's a actually a surprising amount going on up here so this is Rel relatively easy I don't think we even need to grade but then we get right here we're going to basically sweep back around I think we're going to upgrade this right here to four lanes right down the middle and then we'll take this back grade this steep slope [Music] out and then I'll grab this four lane segment what I care about is getting underneath the power lines and then we'll reestablish this connection right here and whoa I went way further back than I wanted to and we're almost off the map I will reconnect this up with the two-lane road and here's one of the things that always trips me up so I want to have this connection make a logical uh amount of sense I don't want it to just kind it looks weird if you have both lanes beginning and ending at the same time now what I think about this I I think that you'd want maybe you want the the extra two lanes on this side while you go uphill because there would be folks attempting to pass on the way up the hill and then you end it right there and you want to begin the two-lane segment a little closer to the highway so I think that's how we'll handle that and after going through the entire network everything is looking good so let's move on to building some interchanges and now that our Highway has been constructed I want to build five interchanges and consolidate a whole bunch of accesses so this is the first one that we're going to build and I think this is probably the most important change on the entire map so we are going to call a little bit of a mulligan here because as I look at this I think that the most reasonable way to construct an interchange here would be to have this road go over the top of the highway because then we'd have one Bridge span instead of two so while this was being constructed we're going to say that it sunk into the ground we send a bridge across and this bridge will actually lead us over here where we will send the highway back and we'll have it merge in with this road right here so this will consolidate in access and create a completely controlled access interchange so to begin this I want to lower this into the ground so let's add a couple of nodes and I'm doing this so that we can delete the highway in a very controlled and methodical way and now in the center here I'm going to shift the terrain down and run into whatever that is that oh that is a water pipe it was underneath the road right where it belonged and that's going to be a problem for us so I'm going to try to go as low as I can and I guess we'll have to boost up this road a little bit and I think I can probably get away with that and what we'll do is we'll spread this out as much as we can then we'll SL slope to it and let's reestablish our Highway and now I want to grab this terrain height over here and make sure it's the same on both sides of the highway we'll bring it right up to the highway and then I'm going to draw this road first and now everything's on the ground and then on the other side we'll do the exact same thing and now if we add this bridge it should be nice and controlled and I had to play around with it for just a little bit but it worked and the easiest way to create an interchange in my opinion is to add an extra lane and then remove them when you don't need them anymore so we'll add those right there and then come in and I want to make sure that I have snapping to existing geometry 90° angles and to guidelines [Music] on and we'll do something like that and one of the reasons I was so concerned about this being just right is this is a really busy area and I think that you're going to want to see enough capacity not just for now but for in the future as well now one thing I do want to improve is at the end here I want to add turning lanes and to do that we're simply going to upgrade this one lane segment as a two and that'll give us extra queuing distance it'll double our capacity right there we'll do the same thing on either side now I'm going to take this and spin this around towards our rail yard and this will consolidate an access so now this is completely flat it's hard to see with all the snow but we're going to basically Loop this around and then I'm going to switch this right away to a two-lane road we need to figure out how exactly this is going to work what I think we're going to do is sweep back this way and then using our continuous tool we'll just grab this road over here and do something like that that seems like a fairly reasonable way to connect right into that road and then we're going to allow more queuing heading torge charity Island just figuring that that would be the dominant movement through the area and I like the way that this has turned out looking very good now for our next interchange we're going to be focusing right here near Bend and our industrial park and I think that we're going to need a lot of capacity right here because we were seeing some significant backups and it's only going to get worse so let's go ahead and we're going to mirror this existing Highway going back a little ways and I'll back this out and now we need to figure out how we link these together we'll try to keep this realistic and we'll build this up with a bridge and we'll come to right about there now I'm going to think about each of these movements one by one and for this one for instance I just want us going out of town so I'm going to convert that to be a on lane road because I'm going to take this and merge into the highway and you'll notice that the only snap twos I have on right now are snapping to existing geometry and the 90 and that will let me snap directly to this lane and then I can send this over and then down here let's add more lanes and gently connect in beautiful one down next one's going to be a little bit more challenging whoa whoa this one needs to spin around and link up over here so let's add our lanes to begin and then for this one I'm going to use the continuous tool and I want to basically find my way over the top of this highway and as low down as I can go and this is going to be important because we actually are going to have multiple Bridges going over the top of one another now that we have that just link this up and wow it already is accepting of this it doesn't get much better than that that was really a simple connection there now I talked about the need to go over the top of this one and that's actually going to be for this Next Movement we need to be able to get from here to bend so let's upgrade this to have three lanes once again and reasonably I'm hoping that I can get across this with maybe 15 M so let's give that a go [Music] not quite enough so we will try once again I double clicked there to add a pillar because I think the pillar was too close and I think we should be able to get across at this point and now I'm going to turn on Snap to guidelines so I can find that lane and I will attempt to drop as much as I can and it looks like I can go to 13.75 M over here let's make our connection in and we'll just take it back as far as we need to go and truthfully I think we're going to need to replace way back here oh my goodness what is it doing what is it doing I don't like this at all I don't know why it's this unhappy but I have a couple of potential Solutions I don't know what's going on we'll at least get the directionality right right here and then try to fix some of this okay so that's looking okay I would to to fix this I think what I'm going to try to do is key this mods to the rescue there we go that looks so much better we just needed to have a key wall right there and that fixes it feeling very good about that we've got one more movement and again this is the easy one and there we go all we've got to do is a little bit of cleanup work but I think that that gets all of this taken care of the lane math looks correct Biff is not going to yell at me we're go we're doing well feeling good about this looking very good the last thing I want to do is focus a little bit on this area before we move on to some of our access consolidations so we are going to again parallel this one and out right here is where we are probably going to need to start merging in so I'm going to increase this capacity here to four lanes oh it's mad at me again it's mad at me again and I think that basically preserves the right of way and we will say that the bridge was just something that was was upgraded along the way now the thing that I didn't account for that I wish I would have is the lanes are in the wrong spot so we're going to need to meander this highway over and if we send it off like that we should be able to make fairly simple connections right in here easiest pie absolutely wonderful now for this we are now disconnected from our water source so that's not good we should probably fix that and actually it's the power source here that is now broken because that was a lit Highway let's see yeah it basically stops right here now I'm going to remove actually I'll add lights all the way up and down here and that should bring power right back over here and then for our Industrial Park while we're over here I am going to increase capacity so that we'll have turning lanes over here which should help us out considerably we're basically doubling the capacity right there I'll take this back a little ways and because we're not consolidating this a access I'm also going to add turning pockets on the side here and in the middle here and then I'll allow a free right right here and there we go I've added some traffic signals right here to try to clean this up a little bit reasonably these should be linked the only way to do that is to do a whole bunch of node work here that I just don't think is worth it right now the potential to ro and everything is very high but I've gone through and I've controlled where all the turns are occurring and made sure that we've got this dedicated merge Lan to keep that movement through there very quick so feeling very good about well I don't feel good about that but I feel good about everything else I wonder oh that's ugly that's real ugly we'll have to see how that functions that is something that we might have to fix down the line but for now I'm going to leave this alone and we're going to move over here because we have some access that we are not going to provide so this this would be a really touchy situation I have a feeling that these businesses would be fighting tooth and nail to get their access back to the highway but reasonably it just doesn't make sense to give it to them so rather than doing that we are going to provide them a frontage road connecting back to this area which is not going to provide them the customers that they need and my sneaking suspicion is that this business would fail the three of those would all fail and sometimes that happens uh for the sake of safety and it's stinks I will I will I will readily admit that I've seen this happen but sometimes the choice is between safety and access to an individual business and safety should probably win the day and then the very last thing I want to do over here is is re-examine this this shows a bit of history but knowing the type of traffic that we have being served by this road I think that we would revisit this as a part of the highway project as well and gentle up the turn here and ultimately what that is is a much nicer connection for any Freight traffic that we'd have going through this area and in my estimation this is a huge improvement over what was here before our next interchange is going to be right here right by the university and you might be wondering where is this thing going to go there's no roads in this area and honestly that's where we have to begin we are going to be adding a connection right here to this road over the railroad tracks and then we'll connect up to this road right here and this one right here and this will begin to serve as this major arterial through this area that we lost when we converted University into a highway so to begin now that I look at this we can't actually go up and over we don't have enough space at least I don't think we do we'll give it a shot but we may need to take a couple of Liberties here yeah it's not going to have that so I think there are two options we could either attempt to get the railroad to bridge over the top of this that's not going to happen we're going to have an atg grade crossing here which is isn't wonderful but we're going to have to deal with it and then we'll run this right along the coast and then I think we just want to go up and over the highway right here but I'm going to back this a little ways off from the coast over here so the road will turn down and the main reason for that is it'll be a lot less complex of an interchange if it's a little bit further down we'd have to have a partial Clover Leaf if we were over here if we're over in this general area we should be able to have just some simple ramps in either direction and not worry too much about it so now let's link up this side I'm not 100% sure where this road is going to go likely down the coast right down here truthfully we might even make that connection just to provide some redundant vehicular access I am going to purchase this and we'll create a highway connection over here and coming as a part of this freeway project I think it actually makes quite a bit of sense so let's go ahead we'll link up here and we'll send this off and I'm going to convert this to be a high Highway and then we're just going to run this down to that Highway that's already over [Music] there that'll do the trick for us I'm going to add some turning Lanes here and there we go very good we'll leave that we'll have to see how that functions so this should immediately get some traffic coming from over here it's another way to get from downtown bend over to charity Bay but let's go ahead and add our ramps but this time I'm going to do something a little bit different we are going to add roundabouts down here and that where we will link these into and now let's add some Lanes to the [Music] highway and then from our roundabout we'll do something like this on all [Music] sides and there we go a little bit of an iterative process but truthfully I think for interchanges it's completely fine the one thing that is not fine is we are seeing a lot of backups right here and that's kind of leading me to wonder if we should just upgrade this to a highway all the way through here and then secondly wondering if we should increase the size of this roundabout and potentially add more Lanes through the middle here and the reason why we would do that is it would give folks the opportunity to get in the correct Lane for their movement within the roundabout and you can see that if you are in the center lanes here you have the opportunity to go left and I think that that would be a big help and then I think leading into the roundabout I'm going to give that extra Lane as well and hopefully that gives us all the the full range of movements that we might expect to see in here and there we go I gave longer deceleration Lanes on both sides and I think it looks a ton more natural and now with this one done let's move on to what is probably going to be one of the more challenging ones and that's right about here so this one is challenging because we're working within a very constrained environment and I want to minimize the use of eminent domain if at all possible we are going to probably need to use a bit though so to begin we are going to take Center Street and elevate it over the top and I don't even know if that's the right name for it anymore it's actually Main Street and I want to elevate that over the top of the highway and then we'll create a partial Clover Leaf right here and then I think if we get about 7 and 1/2 M up we should be able to clear this highway there's a power line there and that's what's causing all of our problems truthfully I yeah 7 and 1/2 m is perfect to get across here and then we'll come right down now we will begin with what will be our easiest set of ramps right here and that's going to be right in this area so I'm going to add a lane all the way through here and then we'll go into our continuous tool and just do that so basically what I've done is I've created a half circle here and then we'll use our on Lane Highway find the middle of this we'll go into our curve mode tool come down to this Lane right here select this and then merge this right in and half of that par CL is done that is completely fine we can leave this as is if we wanted to I do think I'm going to pull this back a little bit further although power line in the way once again as always and then because I love roundabouts We'll add a roundabout right there and I just want to make sure that we didn't disconnect a whole bunch of people from power it looks like we're okay and now we need to create the other half of our parl because now you can get to and from what is now being called the m highway but there is no way to get back onto the Sunset Highway so to accomplish this we're going to probably there's there's a couple of approaches that we could have we could simply do a ramp onto this and off from this instead of this partial Clover Rel Lea right here that's probably the most minimally invasive way now that I look at it I think we might do that it's going to look super ugly but I think it's it's fairly reasonable and realistic so yeah I'm going to I'm going to call them all again on my original plans and we'll do this instead so we'll add a Lane right here and another one right here and we've already got to add sound walls up and down here so I'm not overly concerned about that I'm sure there would be people fighting tooth and nail against what we are about to do and I basically just want to boost this up so that we can have a nice connection right here into the side this Park's got to go this is going to have to be moved and rebuilt but it's much better doing that than I think taking someone's house and then we will quite unfortun do the exact same thing on the other side and reasonably I think that it probably makes some good sense to add some turning Pockets here and now I want to take a look at the axis in this area and we're going to consolidate some of it so this is an absolute disaster that middle is pretty bad though I can't tell what's going on we're going to call them Mulligan here something's not right with our Highway segment so let's get that fixed and I'm going to add this road back through here make sure we get that capacity and it's already added in our lights and now you can see the issues that it is given us two sets of signals it's a bummer there's not a lot that I can do about it so I think that we're going to forgive it and then I'm going to resume this and let's add a few extra Lanes to the highway itself and this is basically to give us dedicated turn Lanes but we've lost a lot of connectivity in the neighborhood so one thing that I think we are going to do is I spent some time on this trying to get this to be just right we're going to get rid of this so we'll lose those businesses and what we're going to do instead is send a local neighborhood Road up and over the highway and unfortunately to accomplish this we've got to call a mulligan on the highway once more so we are going to continue the grade right here down then we are going to grab these Heights and mirror them on either side so that we do something like that and have a nice local connection right over the top of our Highway and the game appears to be deeply concerned about this connection and how it impacts the bridge so rather than starting here I actually decided to go a little bit further back and kind of cheese the game mechanics a little bit to make it work and then last but not least in this area I want to add one more pedestrian Crossing because we had two of them before and we removed one so I think this is an opportunity to add one back as part of this project and there we go that is looking really really really acceptable so I think over here we want to do something very similar we'll probably skip All The Pedestrian Crossings but right here I'm going to upgrade this road to urbanize this as a part of this project actually actually now that I look at this we've got these two Crossings this is probably the one that if we are going to convert one to not have access to the highway it's this one because of how close this is to The Interchange so I'm going to actually remove this one and we'll syn the highway here once [Music] again and then I drew in this bridge first and woo that is real bad that looks absolutely horrendous so let's give this another go and we have mods at our disposal that might help with this as well and we'll just Elevate that and then we'll clear this out right here and now we should be able to Des send this highway right underneath so I'll just slope from here to right about near the bridge we'll do the exact same thing on this side that looks really good and that maintains that connection now as far as pedestrian connections through here I think we're going to skip them because we'll have a number of Road Connections maybe we'll add yeah maybe this one right here for this area we are going to leave this at grade crossing and then right here we're going to sever this one so for this I'm just going to add a node right near the highway or a bunch of nodes and then we will delete those and we'll just leave it separate like that very very good and then finally I think we have one more connection that's already been broken so we're fine there I am going to add a crossing right here we do have our Transit so I think it does make some sense to add that bridge right across here and there we go I really really like that I think for this area we are mostly cleaned up so let's move on to our final interchange now I will admit that initially I was just going to have an atg grade connection here but I do think it makes sense to have something great separated so we're going to take our little mistake here and turn it into an opportunity so I want to have a very simple interchange right here that links us up from this highway into this one so once again we will add l just like we did before and then we'll just connect up all of our ramps and for this I'm unsure of how I want to handle this we might actually extend this over the top of the highway here and actually yeah let's do that so I'm going to take this and we'll bump this up so that we're at a 0% grade which should get us over the top or I guess it'll be a 4.5% grade so we get over the top here and we will grab our ramps and try to make fairly simple connections now for this one there will be a signal at the end of this and it's not wonderful but truthfully the traffic on this is probably not going to be high enough that it's going to matter a ton we'll do something like that right here same thing on this end and then over here that is again that weaving movement that we're going to have so we'll do something like that on this side and then we will cross over the top which is not super desirable on the other side but it will be much cheaper and now last but not least this final Connection in right [Music] here and there we go now the one thing I want to do is there's some crazy stuff happening right here and I think if I get rid of this maybe that fixes it I'm not sure that that is any better it's very messy we need a signal there to make that work so hopefully that resolves it truthfully the reason why I think we can get away with this is there's just probably not going to be all that much traffic heading down this highway anymore right now we've basically bypassed it so it should be that this stretch between here and here is relatively sparsely traveled so we'll have to keep an eye on that I did sever this power connection though so we got to reestablish that and there we go I think that that is looking pretty darn good the one thing I am going to change is we're going to modify this bridge just a a little bit so that we have a longer deceleration Lane than acceleration Lane so the deceleration Lane being the lane coming off from the highway so you have more time to merge in and then over here I'll do the exact same thing give a little bit more time for that merge and over here I'd love to do more but we've gone about as far as we can and now I want to do a little bit of access consolidation so near the farm we currently have this interesting situation where we've got three accesses within close proximity of one another and that's just not okay so what we're going to do is create a frontage road right here and then a new bridge across the highway which I think would be the way that you'd want to handle this so we'll keep this right here this will be the one access that we maintain to this part of town at some point this could become a controlled access interchange but for now we use eminent domain along the side of the highway and I'll pull the Farms back just a little ways [Music] and I think we're going to start the frontage road over here and we'll just grab this Alleyway and we'll basically seek to parallel the highway more or less and now this spot's a little more interesting so I think that we need to give some consideration to how we are providing access to this so I initially thought that we' just do something at grade but I don't love this at all [Music] so instead we'll add this new bridge right across the top of the highway and then I want to slope up to this location and slope down from it as [Music] well and I decided to upgrade these dirt roads as a part of this process as well and then we'll make our final Frontage Connection in here and that should reestablish our power and water connections as well [Music] well now I don't want to leave this just like this because right now this is a fairly large call disect we've also got this connection here that I don't want so what I think we're going to do is try to create another Bridge connection over there and I'll figure out this power line too there we go and I can't leave this like this the the highway looks absolutely terrible so we'll get this fixed real quick there we go so now what I want to do is basically create another bridge and I think we might go right about here so I was initially thinking back here but it is a significantly longer span and again we want to keep our spans as short as we [Music] can and there we go I don't know that I love this bridge connection right here I probably want to do something a little bit more ornate in the future but for now it's going to do the trick and it provides two accesses out of the town of Benson which is really what I would was worried about now this is mostly controlled access but these couple of interchanges that we didn't build would have saved tens of millions of dollars and provided access in places that maybe it shouldn't exist now in the future we're likely going to change this but for now this will do the trick for us I am very interested in seeing how it's changed our traffic flows though and here's our flow it's pretty good in most areas except for right here holy cow lots of backup right here so this is another candidate for an interchange in the future right here lots of backup this is where I thought that The Interchange should probably have been didn't get built there and as a result lots of congestion and then if we look at our volumes holy cow tons of traffic on this little road right here this highway is carrying a great deal of our freight traffic and you can see it's even dissipating that traffic through the rest of our region right there so many reasons why this may become a highway in the future but for now at least it seems to be functioning well and now that we've completed our interchanges let's move on to a little bit of landscaping and detailing and here we are right back by this first interchange that we created and we're going to be doing some very light landscaping and detailing this time and the main reason for that is we have a very rural Highway and I don't think it makes a ton of sense to do a whole bunch of detailing of the highway as a result so I basically want to remove trees and soften edges and make sure that if we have any imperfections in our Highway we fix them so I'm noticing right away way that we've got a little bit of a lip right here we want to fix that so smooth this out oh that is our water pipe so we're going to need to move our water pipe the other thing I'm noticing is we actually have a little bit of an overlap right here so we'll shift things over I think something like that will likely do the trick for us and where you have those merges is a really nice place to move things around now for the water pipe yep it's right underneath the road and though I like that generally I I think we're going to need to to relocate it just a bit and there we go and that should resolve all the issues that we had in the center of here with all the bumping up yeah looks a lot better and then because we have the ability to key a bit of this so it looks like that I'm going to do something very similar we'll just add a node We'll add a key to both of these you get to see that key there as well it's not perfectly balanced I don't have move it so we're not going to be able to make it 100% perfect without a whole bunch of work and sometimes you got to be okay with a bit of imperfection one thing I'm not going to be okay with though is all the landscaping that's kind of randomly strown throughout here and now I'm going to go back into the scrub brush that we have because of the extra landscaping tools and I'm going to just gently knock a few of those through here and these won't obstruct your vision as you're driving through here and they won't interfere with the power lines at all so I like that a lot now down here the very first thing I want to do is look and see if there are ways that we can improve the coast here and I think that is once again adding a key wall to some of this and then I think we're going to add more Forest along here and then once I oh whoa whoa whoa and then once again I wanted to add some landscape or some uh some key walls to make this look a little bit better but I instead decided to make these gigantic Peaks we'll just need to do a little bit of work to fix that looks a lot better and that I really did enjoy the feature that we had here with the key walls in the past and to try to repeat the past we'll add that back and there we go I like that quite a bit and for the rest of this I think we can basically leave it as is through here not much to do and then right here we are going to do some more significant landscaping and this might look a little bit different off camera I made a couple of changes the main one is I neck this down to two lanes through here which fixed our roundabouts and made them a bit more logical so that seems to be a good Improvement in this area I've also readjusted these Lanes a little bit to keep them a little bit tighter to make The Interchange much smaller than it was before so now I am going to remove the Landscaping Through The Interchange and we will reforest the outside area and then near the university we are going to add a row of trees through here it seems like because of what this area is and how important it is to this entire area it would make a ton of sense to do that so we are going to add in a line of these hickories and I'm just going to try to mirror the highway [Music] here and then I want to add sound walls basically everywhere so there are a whole bunch of places like this that would be really in a rough spot because of all these highways and this is a way that we can fix it and then along here I just want to make sure that we've got a ton of landscaping so let's go with our line tool and we'll use the spruce and I'm going to try to have a nice dense row a kind of a fence of spruce along [Music] here now that I think about it the commercial may be upset that we're blocking their view from the highway so let's call a little bit of a Mulligan on this and we're going to actually remove the sound wall right there I'll add a node right here reestablish that by the residential and then we have the view of all the [Music] commercial and that leaves us with the township of Benson where we just have to do a little bit of uh terraforming here to clean up some imperfections that we left behind nothing serious but a little bit of grading like this can really go a long ways and and then we'll probably reforest this area a bit as well and then I was going to reforest through this area but now I'm realizing we've actually got power lines running through here and we've got a bunch of trees underneath though so I'm going to remove the trees underneath these power lines while I'm over here and thinking about it and we'll leave the trees in between the highway I think that looks pretty darn good and with our landscaping and detailing complete there's only one more thing left to do take inventory of what we've done with a brief City [Music] tour [Music] w [Music] and before we wrap things up today I want to make a couple of fixes based on your feedback and the first one is with surfaces there were a number of comments that suggested I overdid it a bit on the surfaces so if you recall I went through and I basically added these textured surfaces to all the homes Parks schools everything in this area so to remove this you could just go ahead go into the surface tool in the dev UI and find every single edge and click on it that would eventually delete it but I've decided to add another mod because one more mod bro and we've added the better bulldozer by yangyang so this allows me to select surfaces only and delete them and you can see it just immediately deleted everything over here we can do the same thing here and that was a mistake I actually got rid of the surface on this home which apparently was supposed to have a surface so we'll get rid of you home rebuild you'll have a surface again and I think that we'll leave it like this and I'm very curious how you all feel about that so let me know if you miss the surfaces if you think that it looks better I am really curious to hear what you have to say and the other fix is going to be right here so this is one of those things where Maybe wow that's some traffic uh where I thought that maybe this was the right choice to make to pedestrianized this so that kids would be forced to walk to school rather than driving across the bridge to get over here but I didn't really think about how that would impact the transportation network over this area and I forced everyone to drive down Harbor Street through this kind of sketchy Industrial Area up to the stadium so just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should and we already had a bridge here so let's just reestablish it and then I've converted that pedestrian street to a normal street now I would love to take this and convert this to a normal street as well let's see how it turns out and I had to redo this bridge it looked terrible much better this also gives us an opportunity for a bit of landscaping to make this place look a little bit nicer so that is a good Improvement all of that said I'm not going to remove this access because I don't want to call theck this area and this would be a monster of a call Tock so what we've actually done is deall Tock this neighborhood and deall Tock this so excellent suggestion really appreciate the feedback and with that I think that we're going to leave it here and I really hope that you've enjoyed this episode I've enjoyed bringing it to you if you did please hting the like button if you're not subscribed to the Channel please consider doing so and I really want to thank you for your time today there's a million things that you could have been doing you decided to hang out with me and play some cities and I really appreciate you and I can't wait to see you in the next one thank you so much take care [Music] bye-bye

Channel: City Planner Plays

Views: 352,758

Keywords: cities skylines, city planner plays city builders, City planner plays cities skylines, city planner plays, cities:skylines, cities skylines 2, city planner plays cities skylines clearwater, cities skylines highway, cities skylines highway interchange, cities skylines highway entrance and exit, cities skylines highway tutorial, cities skylines highway entrance, cities skylines 2 highway interchange, cities skylines 2 highway, cities skylines 2 highway exit

Id: rkjbYS9TM2E

Length: 58min 50sec (3530 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2024