FIX TRAFFIC and make Interesting City Layouts with Road Hierarchy - Cities Skylines 2

it is finally here City skylines 2 you buy the game you download it you fire it up and you open a new map pure potential you start drawing roads zoning things in you've got trucks driving around you've got cars pedestrians everything's intermingling 10,000 population 15 20,000 population on the way to 30,000 population you start to notice traffic isn't flowing the way it used to there are some areas that are having trouble some traffic backups Services can't get through entire blocks of traffic all waiting to move maybe a roundabout doesn't solve the problem this time what do you do in this situation what went wrong and how could your city have been planned differently to avoid these problems I'm yumble and today we're going to discuss planning a road layout for your city in City's skylines 2 this is the first episode of of a series I'm calling cities player plans and we're going to go over a bunch of different topics but I figure the best place to start is your road layout as that is how the game begins when you start a new game this is what you're presented with it's an open unlocked area of tiles and that is where your city must begin but before I actually start building roads we have to talk about a concept known as Road hierarchy oh no not a graph he's showing a graph I'm showing a graph it's a useful and important graph for what we're about to do so the important points here are that we're dealing with four types uh types four classifications of road I would say freeway at the top arterial collector distributor and local now these are plotted on a graph the Y AIS is through traffic movement and speed I'm going to sum that up as flow so traffic flow essentially and the x-axis is access to property so access as in how many connections there are on each of these types of Roads so you'll notice that freeway is at the top so it has very high flow and very low access access once again is connections so freeways have the least amount of connections and the most amount of flow progressively going down to local which has the highest access the highest number of connections but the lowest value in terms of flow and it progresses up through the ranks there so freeway high flow low access arterial still high flow but higher access collector distributor is lower flow somewhat but rather High access and local I'm just saying stuff at this point can I show you what I mean please let me I'm going to show you what I mean all of the available Maps in City skylines 2 come with a freeway at this point so that is the first order of road it's already established for us that's not to say one couldn't expand that in the future maybe uh a big bypass that goes around this way to connect to Future developments up here but that is the first road so I'm not going to be building freeway today because it is already established so the next step down is arterial because we have another connection coming from the top here this is actually an external connection going to another city I would say that's probably a fairly major road so let's actually unify the two to [Music] start you might be looking at this and thinking that is just a little two-lane road how is that an arterial and I want to say right now that context is everything when it comes to Road hierarchy so the number of lanes is not necessarily related to how major or minor a road is changing the number of lanes is useful for increasing capacity as may be necessary on an arterial or a freeway but that's not what makes it an arterial Road the arterial road is determined by the context in which it is used in relation to its connection to the highway and its connection to other roads in your city I've added in another arterial Road that connects to our original one that will serve as kind of a mimic to the highway so that traffic going from west to east or east to west doesn't have to get on the highway to travel through our city to go that direction now I'd like to explore the collector system and see what that might look [Music] like [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now it's time to fill in the spaces in between with our local Road Network you'll notice I'm actually using the the largest road to represent the arterial a what I would call maybe a medium-sized road to represent the collectors for the sake of continuity and for the sake of understanding and visualizing what's going on I'm going to use the alley to represent all of the local roads now this is rather messy and and organic because I've opted to try to follow the contour lines as often as I can you can you can't even see them under the zoning squares but I'm really trying to follow the Contour of the land to make a more natural and possibly historic layout but as a result it's very busy and messy another thing you'll notice is that it looks like some of these roads were possibly severed by the arterial or maybe Disconnected by the arterial that was intentional that was by Design uh part of Road hierarchy is that your local Road shouldn't intersect with your your arterial road that would be a break and Road hierarchy just like your collector Road shouldn't intersect your Highway your Highway should be connected to your city exclusively by strong robust arterials so you know that's something to keep in mind but as an emergent result of that you'll notice that there's this funny uncanny space surrounding all of the Anor uh all of the arterials where I opted not to make these connections happen in this case what I want to do is encourage some pedestrian use in those spaces so let's go through with our pedestrian path and kind of reconnect those historic neighborhoods that were severed by the arterial I've probably taken The Pedestrian path reconnecting initiative a little bit too far on this occasion and I've probably added too many Pelican Crossings pedestrian light controlled Crossings to this what I've said is an arterial road but the effect that this will actually have in game is really really good on traffic what it does is it makes a direct connection between these two areas that people can walk across so the person on this side of town trying to get to this side of town probably isn't going to spawn a car and drive the whole Long Way Around they're probably actually just going to walk to one of these Crossings so the the effect is minimizing on traffic so I think that'll be a net positive for this layout in the long run combine that with the fact that I said earlier this is going to wind up probably being bypassed eventually we will have a a highway bypass here which will in effect make a ring Road around the city core so this arterial will be undesirable to use to cut through the city if you've ever driven around a city on a Beltway or a Ring Road or anything like that you understand the draw if you're trying to just go around the city you're going to take the art the uh Highway the freeway around the city rather than going through the city for this exact reason you're going to want to avoid all these smaller Crossings uh but I'm happy with that overall there's certainly room for adjustment over time and I think that adjusting your build as your city grows is absolutely crucial in City skylines too so expect to be changing connections deleting connections adding connections uh and also upzoning buildings to increase density in a given area now I'd actually like to show you what road hierarchy can look like in a few other builds that I'm working on it doesn't always look like this it takes many shapes and many forms some of you will recognize this city as the city of sequentia bit of a city skylines 2 pre-release series that I got to record before the game came out but I think it's a fine example of North American style Road hierarchy so starting at the top we've got interchanges 1 2 three freeway interchanges connecting to the only freeway coming through the city and each of those uh very few connections just to point out on the freeway uh those turn into arterials which have more connections you can see these wider roads generally represent the arterials here connecting to the interchanges and those will ultimately connect to the collector roads repeatedly a lot of uh or more frequent collector Road Connections across the whole thing which then connect to the local roads which have a ton of connections all of the little local roads in between the collectors and arterials have many connections so that's a great representation of Flow versus access so the highways the freeways are high flow low access all the way down to the local roads which are lower flow but much higher access here's an example that is completely different from the previous two though all of the road hierarchy principles that I've spoken about thus far remain exactly the same this is actually the city that I'm building over on Twitch live so a couple times a week I'll go go live and work on the city and we'll have a chat with the community it's it's a good time so feel free to come check that out but today's today's assignment is Road hierarchy so let's look at that there's two interchanges connected to the free way that's snaking through the valley here which is good and the arterial is currently a loop let me see if I can highlight it I can't in this view but you can see this larger road that loops around the city core you can see this is kind of the downtown City Corp it loops around and connects to the highway and connects to Industry and then comes back uh connecting to each of the collector roads which are headed towards the city center or away from the city center in a bit of a spoke and wheel fashion then then connected to local roads many Connections in the downtown area and in the more suburban area um all of this will probably be downtown by the end but the uh as I said the principles remain the same I also don't want to forget about Transit I'm just going to mention Transit going over the whole scope of Transit is not within the scope of this video but don't forget that road hierarchy is not the enemy of Transit what I'm really recommending here is having a rob a robust Road Network in terms of Road hierarchy and managing your connections very very cautiously and carefully and then also giving as much Transit support as possible to influence traffic to not use those roads or to to walk as much as possible or hopefully one day bike as much as possible uh ability allowing within the within the game of cities skylines too but yeah this is the same idea variation on a theme the hierarchy principle is identical everywhere here though it's a completely different shape I hope you found this useful Road hierarchy is pretty fundamental to the game since it starts you out with a highway interchange a highway connection and an empty plot of land so it seems that we're all going to have to start this way for now and uh build out a road Network before we can have population move in uh if you did find this helpful feel free to like the video or subscribe certainly come by and check out a twitch stream if you want to see how this city is going and have a laugh or two uh but that's all I've got for today everyone thank you so much for hanging out I've been yumble I'll see you in the next stream or the next video

Channel: YUMBL

Views: 138,428

Keywords: road heirarchy, city skylines, inspiration, creative, functional, traffic fix, biffa, city planner plays

Id: AwnLb2g6iKI

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023