Making Traffic Use ALL LANES in Cities Skylines - Understanding the Traffic System

welcome in everyone and greetings from yumblecorp thank you for attending this presentation on traffic management and city skylines if your trucks are stuck and your cars can't get far you're in the right place so stay where you are real funny mister laugh it up oh look it's the local troublemaker billy billy i heard you just got city skylines how's that working for you it's going great thanks for asking it's the perfect city it's got hospitals cops tall buildings i even put in a school there's just one thing the perfect city you say that's great billy but what's wrong well mister it's just it's this darn traffic i hate it the cars don't do anything i want it doesn't make any sense there's an open lane take the open lane what's wrong with you i built the perfect road network and they won't use any of my roads i just don't get it oh billy sounds to me like you have a lot to learn about the traffic system in city skylines what traffic system they won't do anything i want it doesn't make any sense i think the game is broken oh uh hey characters from an educational video made in the 1950s is that what this is yeah okay i get it my name is yumble and i think i might be able to help you a youtuber gross and that is the last time we're doing this bit [Music] ah traffic and city skylines where to begin i hear a lot of complaints about the traffic system in this game and i want to i think i want to demystify it today and talk about my experience with how to manage traffic and ultimately how to understand the system so that you can eventually game it and make it do what you want the first thing that i would recommend considering when thinking about traffic in cities skylines is actually thinking about the simulation in terms of agents rather than in terms of vehicles when i say that i'm talking about thinking about the origin point and the destination of each citizen instead of being at a path by car think of it as a world of different modes that they may choose if the business or or a commercial area that they're going to go to to shop or work is within walking distance of their home they will walk there so a mixed use area can be really important in in curbing traffic in your city you can also have luck putting uh transit within walking distance of sims or putting bike lanes in to increase the the range of their bikes but don't think of it in terms of cars and and don't assume that everyone is going to spawn a car when they appear if there's a pathable option that can be walked or biked or taken by transit the sims will do that so encourage that as much as possible fundamentally another extremely powerful option when trying to get sims to walk or take transit can be an inner city connection so in this case i'm showing a train station it could be an inner city train station it could be an airport it could be a a harbor but anything that allows sims to move into the city or come visit the city without driving if you don't have an external connection you're essentially forcing them to drive cars in from the highway and no matter how good your highway connections are it may not be enough so external connections are a really good way to get pedestrians into your city that can then take an internal transit network or walk or bike to their destination avoiding the car altogether so you get it i know you get it walkability bike ability transits all very important things same goes for cargo a couple well-placed cargo connections can save your highway interchanges and arterials a lot of trouble speaking of arterials though the next thing to worry about would be road hierarchy road hierarchy is this concept i have another video that covers it very well a road layout tutorial something to that effect i'll link it in the top right corner and also another video about city starts ranked those two videos combined talk about how to start a city with solid road hierarchy this concept is is just the the idea that roads have an order and as long as you respect this order things will work out when i talk about road hierarchy just in in brief terms this is a highway this is top dog here highway free-flowing no lights on the highway a highway connects to an arterial arterials are the major routes through your city so you'll see this median road up here and split apart and turn into additional median roads and that thus far is good road hierarchy then after the arterial you'll get these uh what are called collector roads collector roads should be maybe a step smaller than the arterial in terms of lane width but these roads job is to connect your local roads which are the smallest roads which which actually connect to the places that people live in and work in and shop in and that is that is road hierarchy the opposite applies where your your sims start off on a local road generally and then they connect to the collector and then they collect uh then they connect to an arterial which is the big median road once again boom there it is and that arterial system can take them all over the city so here's just an overview of it highway arterial collector local road as long as you respect that in combination with walkability bike ability transit all of these things that is optimal in my opinion this can look like a lot of different things this is how it happens to look in this new england based build but it could look like roundabouts being used as well it could look uh like a small town up here you can still have a hierarchy of roads without even changing the size of the roads so a two-lane road can connect to uh other two-lane roads it's all just context it's all context the through road here i upped it to four lanes because that makes sense but contextually we're still going from highway down to a collector and local road system in this area one other fact about road hierarchy is you generally want uh higher volume roads to have lower access and what that means is less that the highway will have the least connections be it intersections typically interchanges on the highway the arterial will have more intersections more connections but still it's fairly limited you have to be on a collector road to get to the arterial the collector road will have more connections than that but it still won't be as many as local roads and then local roads can have virtually unlimited connections if you're smart about it that is the is the reality of road hierarchy it's it's very it works very well in reality it works very good in city skylines too um don't forget about road hierarchy and be sure to watch the videos that i mentioned earlier here is a fine example of a backed up intersection in city skylines and you'll notice something about this this is a common critique of the of the traffic system in cities they're only using one lane really and there's a reason for this and we can understand that reason and potentially overcome it but the way that city skylines works the way that the traffic system functions earlier i spoke about agents and pathing and how city skylines will spawn a sim and that sim will either decide to walk or bike or use transit and if those aren't available they're going to spawn a car or a truck or whatever the whatever type of vehicle is necessary if they do that they will pick a predetermined path and that path will will include where they're going to turn at intersections it will also include what lane they're going to use so the reason that vehicles all use the same lane in city skylines is because they don't path based on each other it's not like your your gps where it's going to reroute you based on traffic or tell you what to do based on any activity of someone else they are disregarding each other entirely though there's another open lane here and this this backup could be half as far probably if these cars would use this lane that lane doesn't suit their needs because this inner lane is taking them all to the highway now we can observe this by clicking on one of the problem vehicles and checking the path this is called the toggle traffic routes view and you can see that this entire line of traffic is all going to the same the same loop to get onto the highway because we know this because we know that cars will vehicles will always run a predetermined route and not adjust for one another we can then ask these questions and decide is this a a chronic problem are the vehicles backing up constantly and consistently because maybe there's not enough options for them maybe there needs to be a different route available or a different mode of of transit or walkability available or just a different road it could be an entirely different uh there could be an entirely different connection that's necessary that you haven't made yet perhaps um one common thing that i see is people forcing vehicles onto the highway when really there should be an overpass to help get them over the highway i've seen situations where builders will build one interchange and then another interchange down here and then not connect the areas via a local road so it forces all this traffic onto the highway and you get backups that look an awful lot like this another question to ask is is it a breakdown in road hierarchy could there be another connection that helps out and can that connection respect road hierarchy if everyone's being condensed down to one lane for no good reason or because you're connecting a teeny tiny local road to a major road and all the traffic is pathing to that well then of course they're all going to back up in one lane that makes perfect sense right it's just a matter of recognizing these things and ultimately asking the right questions to see where your your road network might be lacking as part of this example i wanted to point out that i actually induced this demand for for this left lane artificially by deleting part of the highway so i i promise the city is healthy otherwise i've not i've not built a city where that's the case if i reinstate the sections of highway i deleted they will actually path fairly normally it's because this is inner city traffic that's actually trying to get to the other side of the map so please don't say it's the intersection's fault um a roundabout would work well here you're not wrong i know that's what you're thinking but this is a north american city and a light has been functioning great here thus far one more point that i really want to make before before the conclusion here i mentioned chronic traffic earlier what i mean when i say that is traffic that exists after letting the simulation run for a while every now and then you'll induce a wave of of incoming vehicles or incoming sims or you know any incoming body of any kind by zoning a bunch of housing like let's say i zone this entire area in we do have residential demand and i will do this eventually but if i zone this whole spot in that is going to induce a bunch of demand and they may come in by rail which would be great i would prefer that or they may come come in via highway also fine whatever whatever works but if you zone in that whole area all at once you're going to cause a a lot of vehicles that are all going to the same place like i said earlier you got to ask are the cars going to is there a reason for them to use alternate lanes in this situation there wouldn't be they'd all be coming off the highway going to the same place so this right lane would probably back up with traffic coming in to move in here the thing with that that i would call that temporary traffic maybe a temporary backup of some sort which is distinct from a chronic backup that that stays forever that's going to end at some point so i do recommend running the simulation and letting it letting it kind of settle because there is an equilibrium it will reach if you zone a large area all at once that will cause a traffic backup that is absolutely distinct from from a chronic traffic problem that lasts over time here we go i've reinstated the highway and now the intersection is back to equilibrium there's no overload in that one lane forcing traffic to all go to the same destination through the same route is always going to cause that so keep in mind make other connections respect road hierarchy i have heard the claim as a side note i've heard the claim that road hierarchy doesn't really work and that sims will always choose the shortest route and that's actually not true the pathing system causes the the vehicles to factor in the speed limit of the roads so keep in mind part of why road hierarchy works so well is that the larger roads have higher speed limits starting from local the collector roads will be a little faster the arterials will be a little faster and then the highway will be the fastest so case in point in my example here starting from the local road 25 miles per hour uh the collector is 30. the arterial is 40 all the way up to the highway which in my case is 70 miles per hour by default so it does factor in or it is factoring in what's the fastest route that they can take sometimes i think most often most often the fastest route is the shortest route but you have a much better shot of it working as intended if you respect road hierarchy and go from small roads to medium roads to large roads to highway that way you can really control the path that the cars are taking so you don't get an asymmetrical backup anywhere everyone thank you so much for hanging out i think that that is going to cover everything i intended about the traffic system and city skylines i really hope that these ideas and and tips and this approach can help you get the traffic under control in your city my name is jumble i make a couple youtube videos a week feel free to subscribe here i also stream on twitch several times a week so feel free to follow me there if you'd like and i recently made a patreon so for those of you that have been asking how they can support outside of youtube and outside of twitch patreon is certainly the best way i cannot express how much i appreciate it this youtube journey has been amazing and i'm glad that people still watching the the the builds that i do as well as the tutorials 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: 156,576

Keywords: road hierarchy, intersection, traffic, city skylines, yumbltv, all lanes, backup, tmpe, traffic manager, skit

Id: AQMnjuPLWVQ

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021