Can Roundabouts Be as Good as You Think? (Cities Skylines)

so this video is a response to jumble's video entitled roundabouts are not in capital letters as good as you think full experiment and explanation where jumble compared having four roads coming together with traffic lights in the middle lots of traffic coming through them to a roundabout and he tried a couple of different versions of a very simple and basic roundabout and as the title suggests came to the conclusion that roundabouts are not as good as you think compared to traffic lights in this situation and i watched that video very good i always enjoy humble's videos check out uh yumbel's channel leave a like on the video as well and put your comments whether you think jumble is right or not but what we're going to do is run my own experiment i've downloaded the same map so here we are this is the interchange test map and you can see it's been set up with all these different outside connections eight of them coming through an interchange here and then leading to the center now what we need to do is set this map up in the same way that jumble did um so we know what we're doing so i'm going to mark this as the north there we go just so we know which is the top of the map in our test and then i'm going to set this map up in the same way because without removing some of these roads what will happen is the cars will all just go around this humongous ring road so let me just delete some of these roads okay there we go so we're just going to use the four cardinal directions and i've deleted groups of roads here so what we've got is these two roads coming in from the edge of the map and these two intersection using south we've got these two using west these two using north and these two using east excellent so let me just get these roads nice and close together and let's do some testing with some roundabouts okay so jumble used a three-lane asymmetric road if four lanes coming in i'm gonna do three lane and three lane because that's what we've got coming down the highway we're gonna do but if you go there to make sure everybody has a lane each and that will come directly down to our center point so we'll do that for the northeast south and west we're also going to turn off traffic despawning as well okay so while we're waiting for our traffic to build up in the background i'm just going to jump into my traffic manager settings so to set this up the same as jumble we had this one set on low under gameplay disabled spawning as we already saw and advanced ai set to 20 now i will come back to these traffic manager settings once we get into building our roundabouts so this is what things are looking like very very quickly this is just the standard default traffic light that comes with the game when you put uh how many put junctions together like this um what i would do even just to improve this is let's just zoom out a moment we'll pause the game there so again we'll copy jumble steps he decided to put in a timed traffic light you can do a quick setup control left click like that yumbel change the timings i'm just going to leave them at default for now and then i'm also going to take our lane arrows because if we just sort of get the game going a couple of cars are going to disappear because we've made changes we do have lane arrows that are being used for more than one thing or is it automatically been changed because of the traffic lights no it's automatically been changed because of the traffic lights before we did that we had the middle lane doing left and straight on and right and all sorts of weird and wacky things so now we've got just the default bog standard time traffic light and dedicated turning lanes let's just see what a difference that makes i'll just run this for a minute or two [Music] now things are moving but as you can see they are backing up horrendously um why don't we just adjust these traffic lights as jumble did so if we come into here click on there uh we'll just pause the game for a moment stop the light and i'm just going to change these steps here to 15 and 25 and we'll save that and we'll do that on each step there we go excellent we'll start that up again which is good and then also what i would do is i would just add in some lane connectors so the node just before the traffic lights i would say if you go through uh don't switch lanes there and i will do that on each side because those nodes are quite close you could even remove them if you want i might even because the traffic is so bad just go another one back i mean just bear in mind this isn't realistic for a city this is a setup for testing intersections okay so there we go let's just zoom out a bit so we can see what's going on and maybe just keep an eye on this slightly tweaked setup for a moment okay so you know things are moving things are working okay bear in mind i don't have the same uh four three asymmetrical road that yumble used so this isn't going to be exactly the same but really we're here to see how we can make the roundabout set up better so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use the roundabout builder here uh we'll put it as a two-lane road uh yum will set this as 7 7u i think that is going to be correct let's just pop that in there okay yep that looks about right to me now the reason i wasn't using the asymmetrical roads is because one of the i say rules it's just something that i do myself that i think works very well is for every lane that you've got coming in i would normally have one more lane on the roundabout and i tend not to go above three lanes because the ai in the game tends to struggle with that but we'll see what we can do so we've got three lanes coming in uh which means we can put on here if we wish a standard three-lane road like this and at least we've got an equal amount so let's go with that first of all there we go so three lanes coming in and then we can do the standard traffic manager setup we'll use priority signs control shift left click there we go so what we've got here is we've got giveaway signs coming in on each of the connections we've then got no lane switching on these nodes in the middle they will pick their lane as they come in and then every time they come to one of the four cardinal directions they will change lanes if they need to so keeping everything else equal there should be no traffic lights or anything like that no let's just get that going as it is and see how that works it's probably going to take a few seconds to get going but let's just watch that for a moment so here we go did you just see that little problem up the top here i'm just going to slow this down let's put it on medium speed we might see it a few times so cars coming on should give way to cars going round but every now and again if we look down here they force their way out here we go look perfect example they're forcing their way out before the trucks have gone round and that can be a big issue that can make the roundabout not as effective as it could be and what could be causing that well as far as i'm aware it is the level that you have your ai set in traffic manager so why don't we just adjust that ever so slightly in our game settings so we go into traffic manager here we go so generally speaking i normally have my cities on medium and i would also have my ai on at least 70 and we hover over that there we go 70 percent so i put this in a comment in jumble's video that that would be a change worth doing so why don't we just again keep an eye on this we can see some of them trying to do it still and see whether that makes enough of a difference now i'm not expecting that change alone to make roundabouts suddenly the most amazing thing since sliced bread but i'm expecting that to help with traffic not budging out when it shouldn't as much definitely already it's looking better i'm sort of looking at the four different directions and i can't see them budging out certainly in huge amounts as much as they were before we're gonna have a lot of traffic backing up because it can take a while to go down but i tell you what i'm gonna do is jumble did a straight comparison of these four roads coming into each other traffic light set up really well worked really well and then put a roundabout in he had one more lane on it i'm having one less lane so you might sort of think well that should be harder but we're going to make this work hopefully i mean i don't know this is i i'm recording this as you're seeing it you know so i'm going into this with my preconceptions and i'm doing some testing the same that jumbo did and we'll see what happens so on an intersection like this you would never put a roundabout this would this this would not work you're basically taking a huge amount of traffic coming in from four highways coming into an area and you would just not put a roundabout into a place like this you would have a proper intersection uh something like this you know or better to keep this traffic going but let's see if we can make this work any better so certainly i've spoken about this in quite a few of my videos when you're coming into a roundabout like this to go from this position facing into the roundabout to actually moving on the roundabout is a very sharp right-hand turn so there we go that tractor finally made it out he picked his lane and off he went that is a very slow way of getting out onto a roundabout what i would certainly do is not set it up like that is i would set up an entrance to a roundabout like this okay here we go so you can see the difference to the entrance to the roundabout uh instead of it being a 90 degree turn as we can see on our right hand entrance here it is now a more angled turn so it's quicker and easier for these cars to get out to speed up and to head off where they are going now just to set that up just to help you to show you how to do that we have car of course are using mods so i added in an extra node just about here i'm eyeballing it between these two nodes here i then deleted these roads i've used the picker mod to pick this road and i've drawn out here and was it 10 or was it five i can't remember 800. so yes that was a complete 10 all the way out and i've made sure that there is a node in there and we can delete all of this and then we just want to connect those up so i just use the highway road here and i've turned off toggle road bending so we can go into the roundabout and out of the roundabout and then for this little junction here this little node we're going to use our lane connectors here you go there so they just go straight through each direction and then also we're going to make sure they don't stop in there by using this option and this option so they go straight through and then we double check the roundabout with our priority signs control shift left click and we get all of our giveaway signs and such so let me just do that on all four sides there we go that's set up all the way around that's left us with a lot of extra nodes on this roundabout so just because it's the way that i'm building it i am going to remove some of these extra nodes we really only want them where these roads are joining so i'm going to remove these other ones in here there we go we've got an extra one or two tucked away in the middle here and that should be it one two three four five six seven eight nodes yep excellent and then you just want to do a final check control shift left click that your roundabout is all set up as it should be which to me it looks like it is okay so let's run that for a few moments and see how that goes in fact as we've made such a big change and jumble did this uh in the video as well is i'm going to clear all the traffic there we go we'll get a level playing field and we'll just let that run and wait for the cars to come in okay so things are moving reasonably well let's just zoom out a bit and take a look and oh my giddy aunt yeah there is a lot of traffic there is a lot of traffic over here isn't too bad this is a bit further down for some reason up here is pretty rough and up there is pretty rough as well so there is another downside to using a roundabout as compared to a traffic light in this extremely heavy situation where a roundabout certainly would not be the choice this is basically four highways all meeting in one space and that is space um you could fit as we saw before a traffic light in this little spot here we are taking up more and more space with this roundabout so yeah that is something else to take into consideration so i'm now going to make one more change to my setup as i mentioned before something i always say with a roundabout is to make sure that you've got one more lane on your roundabout than the lanes coming in that is just something that i've always done i'm not i haven't sort of tested it so i'm gonna do a test now we've got three lanes coming in let's just pause our game and we are going to upgrade our roundabout to four lanes now i never go to four lane roundabouts i think the game struggles with pathfinding and i don't know quite what ai type stuff when we get to more than three lanes on a roundabout but let's give it a try i just want to make sure that this is all still set up there we go so let's just leave that running for a few moments and see how that goes what's interesting as i'm watching this we seem to have a directional bias as to the way the traffic is working it's odd i've never sort of watched it like this so down here they always go into these two lanes and they will use this lane here because they're working their way out mostly to go over here some are going back again very rarely am i seeing anybody from these directions use the the inside lane that extra sort of four flame perhaps that we've added i mean you know i might be wrong sometimes but it just seems oh there we go that one did it there and he came from up here very very strange the way the traffic and the ai works in this game of course we've added to the normal game haven't we with mods as well which does affect the traffic but yeah very interesting experiment i have to say so just for the sake of the experiment even though i would never do this under these circumstances with what are basically four highways worth of traffic merging into this center point here i am going to downgrade this roundabout two three lanes and then because of biffers made up rules that i always seem to use and they they should work they sound like they should let's just do a test we are then going to make sure we've got one less lane coming on to the roundabout or let me just phrase that a different way one more lane on the roundabout then there is lanes coming in so that means these need to go down to two lanes instead of three and then that means that these rows that are connecting onto here need to be four lane roads instead of six lane roads as we've got here so that means i need to go through and adjust all of these and that then means at the ends here we're going to have to make a little tweak as well so yeah i don't want that to be the tweak what i would like the tweet to be is for you not to go there it's gonna cause a little bit of traffic maybe at the end but that doesn't really matter and you've got that extra lane for leaving so let me do that on all these different roads coming in [Music] okay there we go so what do we see well we see the roundabout is functioning well as a roundabout just here you know the cars are coming on they're moving around but of course the traffic will start backing up over time yeah so what have we actually learned from those tests well what we've actually learned in my humble opinion is not that roundabouts aren't as good as you think they are actually no as i've said that unless you think the roundabout is the solution to every traffic problem if you think that you are wrong roundabouts are not as good as you think they are but if you can just apply some extra thought to it and think well actually there are certain circumstances where a roundabout is good and there are certain circumstances where a roundabout isn't as good where it shouldn't be used and this is one of those circumstances where a roundabout should not be used you shouldn't bring in four highways like this into a roundabout you should have a much better intersection in the middle here maybe something like this here we go something much more practical perhaps you could say certainly not space-saving but what i would expect to see if you've got four highways worth of traffic coming into one spot a little bit of lane mathematics on the entrance and the exits on each of the four directions but it's keeping up with the traffic no problem at all and you know what it actually looks a little bit like a roundabout haha so it does but if you zoom out that it's not backing up at all nothing is gonna phase this thing this is gonna work absolutely fantastically so the other question is should you put a traffic light in this situation well again in my opinion i would say no if you check out yumble's video and see how far back the traffic backs up even though i would say maybe 95 98 of what cues up at each light change gets through on a change it does back up so far that actually in a working city that would also be a complete disaster so a roundabout or a traffic light in this situation no as you've seen something like this works much much better so can i suggest that you go over to jumble's channel check out his video on this subject be sure to leave a like on it and a comment letting us both know what you think about our experiments and also while you're there please give jumble a subscription i absolutely love his videos he does lots of different tests like this experiments with the game engine and different intersections which i really enjoy watching a plus a city build as well so let's see we can push him up give him a few lovely subscribers over there thank you for watching this experimental video if you want to see more of these leave a like on this video if we get enough likes we might do some more i will leave that up to you have a fantastic day i will see you soon bye

Channel: Biffa Plays Indie Games

Views: 94,218

Keywords: cities skylines how to start, Cities Skylines best mods, Cities Skylines, how to fix traffic cities skylines, cities skylines how to fix traffic, biffa plays, cities: skylines, cities:skylines, cities skylines how to fix your city, biffa2001, city builder, cities skylines traffic, cities skylines traffic fix, cities skylines fix your city, cities skylines 5 tips, cities skylines top 5, cities skylines roundabout, cities skylines roundabout tutorial

Id: IUpY4ibVrfI

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021