Road Layout using the Principles of Roadway Hierarchy. (No Mods)

[Music] today i want to discuss the basics of roadway hierarchy this is a really important concept to master if you want to make sure that your cities have traffic that functions correctly and that acts predictably this is something that's not just important in the game but it's also important in real life in fact the federal highway administration keeps track of what they call functional class what functional class is is it's a way to categorize the most important roads to the nation's economy defense and mobility and to do that they look at all freeways interstates tollways highways arterials and collectors and classify them on the national highway system now the reason for that is because those are the types of roads that prioritize mobility over access and in the case of an emergency or in the case of trying to get someone to their place of work these are the roads that would be the most important so what i have here is all of the different roadway classifications offered in cities skylines categorized from the roadways that prioritize mobility or getting someone from point a to point b quickly down to those that prioritize access or providing someone the greatest ability to reach a destination so it's important that you're using local roads for instance for access and highways and arterials for mobility and collectors as the roads in between that connect a neighborhood to a an arterial that is prioritizing mobility and if you use these incorrectly what you'll end up with is traffic jams so i've created an illustrative layout for a community and what i've done here is follow the principles of functional classification we have our highways which connect up to our arterials which connect up to our collectors and our collectors connect up to our local roads and what you'll see that i've done here is on our highways there aren't a ton of exits there are two exits here that meet up with this arterial that rings the community and the arterial has one two three four five six points of access to it the collectors have more points of access but still fewer than the local roads which basically provide access everywhere and this is some an important concept to master and that's access management you want to uh really think about the number of access points that you're providing to these different roadway classifications based on how high they are in the roadway hierarchy the higher the classification highways arterials the fewer access points you're going to want to have and the greater distance between those access points as you get to lower classification such as collectors and local roads you can have access that is more frequent and closer spaced and so you'll see that with the collector roads here i have you know what looks to be a 30 uh 30 tile spacing right here and i have multiple local roads connecting in between that's okay because of functional classification and roadway hierarchy so i've already zoned this area and what you'll notice is that along arterial roads i'm placing no housing you can have some you'll probably want it to be higher density housing but the important thing to recognize is that with these higher roadway classifications you're going to have more traffic that's going faster that is prioritizing zooming past the building and thus creating more noise so uh that sort of density of traffic is good if you're a business and bad if you want to live on next to that road as you get to a lower classification road a collector this might be more appropriate and it's certainly appropriate on a local road so i've zoned these things with that in mind so what i'm going to do is i'm going to run this simulation quickly let it build out a little bit and we will see how our traffic looks [Music] okay so i think we've let this build out enough let's see how things are functioning so we have 85 percent traffic flow without really doing anything we have 9 500 citizens and generally there are just a couple areas where there's a great deal of traffic and these are things that we could remedy with roundabouts or if we had a modded version of the game we could certainly do some lane management and and remedy some of this stuff um the other considerations were that you could look at routing and and see where people are going and try to make key connections either with overpasses or underpasses or or just connections to other uh local connecting local roads the collectors or things of that nature that would would help improve traffic flow let's take a look at a couple other things so noise as you can tell the noise is concentrated around the arterials and the collectors which means that these local roads that have residential can level up a little better and they'll be happier as a result so things are functioning pretty well and that's because of some of the decisions that we've made there are things that we could certainly do that would could improve things and there are things that we could do that could make things worse one of the things that could make things worse would be funneling so you really want to avoid this so let's say this ring road around the industrial area were an arterial instead of a collector well if you're following the principles of roadway hierarchy you should know intuitively that there's a couple things you'll want to do such as eliminate all of these local roads that connect into that uh that arterial but now a savvy player would notice that there's only really one way out of this entire area so that's something that you're going to have to be aware of this will obviously completely break our traffic flow let's take a look [Music] not working great in this particular area interestingly the average traffic flow is bouncing in between where we were and a little bit worse but i assume that the longer we let this sim the worse it will get because and you see it now it's backing up because we haven't allowed enough ways out of this neighborhood so as a result you want to really make sure that you are respecting roadway hierarchy so let's take this back to where it should be ah that's so much better i won't lie that gave me a bit of a panic attack as a planner zone some of the things i didn't do that could improve traffic flow would be making sure that we have road maintenance depots and do not place these depots on arterials remember this is a building that needs lots of access so you'll want to place that on a local road now i know it can be really tempting to place some of your major ploppable buildings on arterials if you take a look at let's say a police police station if you place it on the arterial you'll notice that the access that you have to wide swaths of the city is higher and that makes sense the arterials have higher speeds we have less intersections and as a result the impact is greater than placing it on a local road for instance however these buildings have lots and lots and lots of sims loading from them so if you place them on an arterial you're going to have all of that loading taking place on an arterial and remember the purpose of the arterial is mobility not access so what you'll see that i've done i have a hospital here but the hospital is facing the local road and the local road is close to a collector and connects directly to an arterial so that i still get those benefits of being on an arterial while still getting the traffic that i would hope to receive in terms of traffic flow so there are things that you can do like that that will improve the functionality of your game the other thing to think about is that there are certain types of roads that are collectors like this road right here but function as a local road or can function as a local road if you maintain them correctly so let's give this road priority as well as this road and then we'll take a look at our junctions so if we go through and treat this like a local road it will function more like a local road and as a result your traffic will improve and what you'll see here right off the bat is that things are already getting better so we could do that through the entire network and my guess is get our traffic closer to 90 maybe even 93 94 95 percent just by making targeted adjustments to our roadway network there are other things you could do that might make a local road for instance a one-way local road in couplet function as a collector and if you were to do that you'd want to think about the number of roadway connections you have to that road maybe you want it to function as a local road if that's the case that's fine but if you want that paired couplet to function as a collector you need to make sure that you're not having too many access points and intersections on that local road so with that i think that i've given a good overview of functional classification roadway hierarchy and how it impacts the game please let me know what you think about this in the comments and if this is something let me know if this is something that you use when you play the game it doesn't have to be gridded like this i could have very well taken a collector and tried to follow the landscape and built my neighborhoods off that and they would function the same way i did this for simplicity's sake but it works well you'll notice that all utilities are functioning as they should be and one of the reasons for that is functional class roadway hierarchy respecting the uh the purpose of the road ensuring that these facilities are acting as they should so even though you have intersections they're still working right because we're using them correctly thank you so much for joining me i hope that you've learned a lot and let me know down in the comments if you do indeed use roadway hierarchy principles thank you so much bye

Channel: City Planner Plays

Views: 262,303

Keywords: cities skylines road layout, cities skylines road hierarchy, cities skylines road planning, cities skylines roads tutorial, cities skylines no mods, principles of road hierarchy, road hierarchy, road hierarchy cities skylines, cities skylines gameplay no mods, beginners guide to traffic, cities skylines layout, citis skylines road network guide, cities skylines road design, city planner plays cities skylines, urban planner plays cities skylines, cities skylines

Id: O2y2GjTezCI

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020