Road Hierarchy Tutorial | Cities: Skylines | Ep. 10

hey everyone and welcome back to our city in today's episode we are finally going to be expanding across the highway into the next tile over here i think i've been talking about that for a little bit too long now it's been at least since episode 7 when we did our highway interchange here and this will be actually episode 10 i believe when it airs so i took a little bit longer than originally planned but that's the way it works sometimes so the objective today is going to be designing a high density residential suburb just across the highway and to do that we are going to be using the principles of road hierarchy on our road network and the reason for that is that if we can design a good road network at the very beginning here we can hopefully avoid all sorts of traffic problems in the future and it can be quite a hassle to adjust a road network in a fully developed section of our city so if we have a good layout to start with we can hopefully avoid all those problems in the future i'm going to do a quick recap of the principles of road hierarchy that we're going to be using to design our high density residential suburb at the top of our hierarchy we have our six lane regional highway below that we have a six lane road that will act as an arterial road and the difference between these two even though they have the same number of lanes is the speed at which our citizens can travel on the highways they can travel at 100 kilometers an hour while on the road here the six lane road they can only travel at 60. below that we have a four lane road that will act as a collector road and then lastly below that we have a two lane road that will act as a local road so within the hierarchy roads can only intersect with roads that they are beside so our two lane road here can only intersect with our four lane road but our four lane road can intersect with both the six lane road and the two-lane road our six-lane road can intersect with both the highway and four-lane road but our highway can only intersect with a six-lane road i hope that sort of makes sense i'm going to show examples as we go but that's basically the general idea of the principles of road hierarchy that we're going to be using the first thing that we need to do is figure out how to transition from our regional highway network to the arterial road of our high density area we're going to do something very similar to what we did in our low density area here and use this y pattern that i've come up with it's going to be slightly different so i'm going to go over it with everybody here again real quick we're going to use the two-lane road to extend our highway and eventually we will upgrade it to a highway but for now i like to use the two-lane road because it gives this grid pattern on either side that i can use for reference for anything else so what i've done is i've gone two grid spaces away from where our highway currently ended and then i'm actually going to connect these two roads together and the reason for that is it gives me this grid pattern right here that is kind of perpendicular to the direction of traffic and what i can do is i can use that to find the exact center between those two lanes i'm going to extend another road down here just a little bit and then from here i can connect one lane of the highway to that single road and then back up across to the other lane of the highway and from here i can just delete that original segment connecting the two lanes and then upgrade all of our roads to highway roads and then upgrade this little segment at the end here to a six lane road now another reason that i like to use the two-lane road is it's a little bit tricky sometimes to use the highway to do these sorts of things so if we delete these segments here for right now and we try and use a highway to connect up to here we can see that it's actually not going to let us to do that because it is already says the space is already occupied however if we were to do it with a two-lane road as we did before and then upgrade our two-lane road it's actually going to let us to do that so it's a little bit of a trick with the game that you can use to kind of get around some of the uh some of the things that it won't let you do now next what i want to do is i want to upgrade this three-way interchange to a four-way cloverly interchange so i'm going to pause the game real quick what i'm going to do is delete a highway segment on either side of the interchange here and then the interchange itself and then it should be the exact size that we need to put in the cloverleaf interchange without having to reconnect any of the other roads so put that right in there and then we're going to do the same transition that we did over here on the other side and i'm going to just take a two-lane road and extend it up a little bit two grid spaces we're going to connect those two together and then use the grid space at the end here to find the exact middle between those two lanes come down a little bit and then connect into our y pattern here and upgrade everything to highway and then six lane road so i'm going to use this as the transition from our highways to our high density area over here and then what i'd like to do is i'm going to curve this road around and i'm going to connect these two together [Music] [Music] i figured it'd be easier to show everybody a time lapse of my design and then talk about how it relates to the principles of road hierarchy afterwards so we started with the six lane regional highway and we transitioned into the six-lane arterial road this arterial road will act as the backbone for our high-density area with all of the other roads branching off of it the next road that we have in our hierarchy is the four-lane collector roads and i've placed the first intersection a little ways away from the transition to the highway and the reason for that is if we ever have any traffic issues at the intersection here the cars don't back up onto the highway and cause even more traffic problems for us so this road segment between the first intersection and the transition to the highway here is going to act as a little bit of a buffer for us now if we continue to look along the arterial road here we can see there aren't very many intersections and these intersections are placed a little ways away from one another the reason for that is i'm expecting there to be a large volume of traffic to be traveling along this road and each of these intersections is going to be controlled by a traffic light now in general the marked cars that you have the fewer number of traffic lights that you want so i'm hoping that these intersections are going to be placed far enough away from one another that it's not going to cause any traffic problems for us the next road that we have in our hierarchy is the two-lane local road and the two-lane local road will be intersecting with our four-lane collector road i've placed the first intersection a little ways away from the intersection of the collector road and the arterial road and the reason for that is if there's ever any issues at either of these intersections that it doesn't affect the other as you can see along our collector roads there are more intersections than there were along our arterial road and then if you look at our two lane local roads you can see that there's even more intersections along those roads there and they're actually quite a bit closer together now the reason for that is the basically the whole idea of the principles of road hierarchy is to have our road network pretty much act as a funnel so as i mentioned earlier i'm expecting there to be a large volume of traffic entering our high density area here along the main arterial road and then the road network is going to funnel the traffic from that major road to our four lane collector roads and then funnel it yet again to our two lane local roads so basically it goes from six lanes to four lanes to two lanes and so the number of cars that are going to be traveling along this uh road here along the outer edge of our our high density area is going to be quite a bit less than the amount of cars traveling along the major road here in the center of our high density area another thing that i've added to the north here is just a continuation of the design that i have on the southern side of our major road here i've actually added a second six lane arterial road and again it's only intersecting with our four lane collector roads and the reason for that is i'm basically just providing another option for our citizens to get into this high density area as we fill it out one of the things that you need to think about when you're designing your layout here is that you need to make sure that you give plenty of options for your citizens to get into any sort of different areas so if we only had one or two roads into this area here then all of our traffic all of our citizens are going to be pretty much bottlenecked by those two roads so the more options we have the more different routes that they they can take and the more spread out our traffic is going to be so that slightly influenced my design a little bit um so if we look over at our low density area here originally i had this four-lane road and i had it going underground just take a look at it and the original idea was to have it come up and connect up to this intersection over here that's going to be the first intersection of our high density area now when i was looking at it i also noted that this entrance here is going to be another major intersection part of me major entry way into our high density area so that would mean we're going to have two of the major roads coming from the low density area meeting up at the same intersection and i didn't want to have that because that would cause a bit of a traffic headache for us so what i did was i simply just curved it and now it's going to come up to this middle intersection over here something else that we need to take a look at before we start adding buildings to our high density area are all of our intersections if we go to info views and we go down to traffic roots and then we go to junctions we can see that the game is actually automatically added in a number of traffic lights to our intersections now these traffic lights are good on major intersections such as collector collector and collector arterial but it's not so good on the collector local road intersections now the reason for that is as the name suggests these collector roads are designed for collecting our citizens and what they do is they collect our citizens from the larger local road network and help feed them into the arterial road so that they can get in and out of our high density area so we want to make sure that the traffic going along these collector roads is as smooth as possible so in order to achieve that what we're going to do is we're going to go back to the junctions tab here and we're going to change all of our traffic lights at the collector local road intersections to have just stop signs on the local roads and lastly i've also started adding in the public transportation network for a high density area most of which are pedestrian pathways but i've also added in a monorail going from the transport hub of the low density area here up to another transport hub that's going to be in our high density area so i'm hoping with all these different options i'm also going to add actually more as i go along here that our citizens will choose to either walk or take public transit rather than driving their cars through our high density area and so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to zone this off camera and i'm going to skip ahead for everybody so that we can easily check out how our road network turned out using the principles of road hierarchy to design it it took about seven years to develop but as you can see i think the high density area turned out quite nicely we have a mix of high density residential commercial as well as offices and our population has doubled from about 29 000 to 58 000. now it's important to remember to gradually develop an area to avoid a massive influx of people all at the same time and you should keep an eye on your demand and wait for it to adjust after adding a few buildings before you add any more now it's a little bit rough around the outside edges but once i actually decide what i want to do in those areas we will continue to fill it in together but for now if we go back to the developed area and we can go into the info panel and take a look at our traffic we can see that the traffic in our city is sitting at about 89 88 percent it does fluctuate a little bit and if we look at the high density area we can see that we actually do have a couple red intersections but zooming in we can see that each of these intersections is actually still performing quite nicely now it was kind of expected that these intersections would be quite busy the three intersections at the top here are along the artperial road and the intersection at the bottom here is the main entryway from our low density area into the high density area so the reason for them being red is that they are as i said quite busy because they are along the major roads that we have in our network here and the traffic actually at each intersection does technically stop due to the lights at each intersection so there will be a natural ebb and flow of traffic as the light goes through its cycle we can also see that the traffic at each intersection is actually not backing up and that after each cycle of the light that the traffic waiting at the light has enough time to go through and start all over again from having no traffic waiting at the intersection so the only other major things that i've added to the area is i've added a tram to go around the outside uh four lane collector road and i've also added a monorail stop in between the last monorail stop of the low density area and the transport hub of our high density area so accessible public transportation and pedestrian pathways play a major role in controlling the traffic in any area of your city so if we also take a look at the pedestrian pathways going between our low density and high density areas we can see that there's actually a significant number of people who are crossing in between those two areas of our city so that's even less people who are traveling by car between each of the areas of our city so now that we have our area fully developed here what i want to do is i want to give a quick recap of our principles of road hierarchy so we started with the regional highway and that is the road with the highest volume of cars which i have highlighted in red and it has no intersections along it we then transitioned into a six lane arterial road and i've highlighted that in orange and after the six lane arterial road we had the four lane collector road that i've highlighted in blue and that intersected only a few times with the arterial road lastly we had the two lane local road highlighted in green that intersected with the collector roads a bit more often than the collector road intersected with the arterial road the network of two lane local roads was a bit more forgiving in terms of the number of intersections and how close they could be together because these roads have the least volume of cars so we went from a six lane to a four lane to a two-lane road to funnel our citizens through the high-density area the number of intersections along each road type increased as the volume of cars decreased now if you're still unsure of some aspects of the principles of road hierarchy don't hesitate to leave a comment down below and i will do my best to answer but i've also linked two steam guides in the description that were extremely helpful for me and with that i think that will be the end of the video thank you all very much for watching if you enjoyed it please leave a like comment and or subscribe as i will have more city skylines content on my channel in the future you

Channel: jester.Gaming

Views: 279,394

Rating: 4.9655328 out of 5

Keywords: cities skylines, cities skylines road layout, cities skylines road hierarchy, cities skylines roads tutorial, cities skylines roads, cities skylines road planning, citis skylines road network guide, cities skylines road design, principles of road hierarchy, road hierarchy, road hierarchy cities skylines, beginners guide to traffic, cities skylines layout, unmodded cities skylines, cities skylines no mods, cities skylines lets play no mods, jester., jester.Gaming

Id: lJYPcXB8PcQ

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/twopandinner]

Good illustration of the concepts.

[u/jester-Gaming_YT]

I was just looking through the subreddit and thought that thumbnail looked familiar! Thanks for posting my video emoprincess_! I hope the traffic in your city turns out well :)