Solving Traffic the RIGHT WAY! - The Macro Level - Solving Traffic Ep 1 of 2

hey there you are thanks for being here welcome to my city of 45 000 inhabitants it is small but growing and already it has some major major traffic issues today i want to look at some of those trouble spots and see if you can tell what needs to be done to solve the issue so here's trouble spot number one take a good look it is a t intersection there's a vanilla traffic light in there maybe the vanilla traffic light's the problem maybe it should have been a roundabout perhaps what are we thinking let's uh let's look up the way a bit it's very well backed up all the way to the highway interchange hmm interesting and the areas leading to it are also backing up as a result very strange let's go to another area this is looking very similar to that first area a t intersection backed up on all sides into the neighborhoods leading to the highway well let's go right onto the highway it is backed up well onto the highway on both sides in both directions all the way to another interchange okay okay now i see what's going on let's check something else out okay now we're getting to the big picture on this northern side of the highway which is still backed up of course you can see that we have six neighborhoods and they're only connected by individual roads and even the the north and south direction they're only connected by this t intersection here you may laugh but i see this pretty uh pretty often zooming out further to take a look at the highway there it is welcome everyone welcome this is a common scenario that i see posted on reddit all the time or asked about in the discord why why am i having a traffic backup oftentimes it is an issue with connectivity road hierarchy and or traffic reduction today i want to talk about these three big picture issues as you can see here we're forcing all of the traffic through this one intersection which isn't the problem on its own really but then we're forcing it onto this one interchange to get on the highway to go to the other interchange and neither of these are actually the problem really it's not so simple and then on this side it's identical i just want to show what what a bit of connectivity and road hierarchy and traffic reduction can do in your cities without even worrying about the individual junctions don't sweat whether it's a roundabout don't sweat your traffic light timing don't worry about replacing your intersection until you've looked at the big picture and tried to try to solve the issue holistically in your city before we actually implement this fix in the city i want to brush up on what road hierarchy really means you can get lost in all the terms very quickly but this graphic shows it pretty plainly the through traffic movement speed which i would equate with capacity and access are on two different planes here on this graph so the lower the access the higher the capacity and you can see the names freeway arterial collector local as as uh capacity goes down access can go up so you can have more connections to your arterial than a freeway you can have more connections than that to a collector and the most uh connections can be found on local roads nature i've found is extremely good at organizing itself in this way you can think the human circulatory system or you can think in this case a tree or a leaf now this is just how how the universe has decided is the best way to do it and that's i think why it works so well in cities when it's implemented correctly but this major uh looks like a highway to me right that's going up the center of the leaf and then you've got these arterial roads coming off the sides of the highway now in a city these would be connected by interchanges to handle that amount of capacity but if you look at the access it's fairly limited there's a limited number of real large connections to that large road but then it breaks off further and you've got these collector i'll call them roads collector uh ventricles going down and then the local ones are very small very low capacity but tons and tons and tons of connections let's bring this concept into our city and see if we can't fix our connectivity and road hierarchy i suppose the best way to start implementing road hierarchy and connectivity in this area would be to look at the largest road and see where it's lacking which means bringing this one all the way in and ultimately connecting it here maybe we'll just go to here ultimately connecting it to unify all of these neighborhoods so they're not all forced through this one place so let's look at connecting it here and possibly again at the end i would also like to connect these areas to one another without just this connection here so let's let's look at these sort of missing connections on all of the neighborhoods and let's get the small road i'm not really going to name any of these you could say that it's the arterial and the collector and the local i'm not really going to give them names but intuitively we're kind of going to try to pull off what nature did with the leaf so a little extra connection there extra connection here let's finish that one off same thing up here excellent i'm gonna make that change on both sides for starters and we'll go from there now that we've helped improve the local connectivity on both sides i think it's probably even more important that we increase the connectivity between each of the sides to one another so this entire connection here is missed until we make it so let's do it i'd like to make three new connections here let's do something like this and we'll make a bridge now this will be the shortest and fastest route between the two sides without even having to go on the highway that's not the only change i'm gonna make but let's see what effect that has within a few minutes of unpausing the game hundreds of cars flocked to this route instantly it freed up a bit of space on this intersection on both sides but uh the change is not sufficient what we really need to do is is fix our highway entrance and exit access so what we're gonna actually do is get rid of this interchange but i want to stress the interchange isn't really the problem it's the lack of connectivity between the sides that's the problem and that's really just because the interchange is a is a three direction interchange in keeping with the first vanilla interchange we used i'm actually going to throw in a vanilla clover leaf [Music] [Music] i'm gonna do that same change on both sides and let the game run to see the result [Music] [Music] i think that looks pretty good we've actually got it up to the low 80s in traffic flow percentage just by adding a few extra connections and paying attention to road hierarchy now let's zoom in a little closer and see what else we can do to influence connectivity i think this is such an awesome statement the sims in city skylines are so willing to walk and bike places this is the only walkable path between the two areas of the city it is the only walkable path to cross this highway insane there are tens of thousands every hour crossing at this one location what i'd like to do is extend that bit of walkability to other areas for instance here there's not much that needs to be done really we've already got great connectivity because of these smaller connections so this is also highly walkable between these two areas these two areas however are are kind of um hung out to dry in that regard so what i might recommend doing would be something you could do an overpass network it gets a bit unrealistic pretty quickly but just taking walking paths and going to the end where crosswalks are and kind of just throwing them over is incredibly powerful now it's even more powerful if this is walkable if this were a proper service interchange it would be extremely walkable so until that happens what i'd like to do is just put something into to simulate the service interchange that our that our little city deserves [Music] [Music] awesome further walkability measures that that we could take would include i mean looking around i like these spots without mods you can add a crosswalk by creating a road with mods we can just add a crosswalk in these locations and that would further increase connectivity massively [Music] so for instance i can go add a crosswalk with node controller [Music] right there and another one please [Music] excellent that allows this area to permeate to this area without having to go to these major intersections so that's going to help a lot i would probably do something similar about here in real life these might have a traffic light at these uh crosswalks i believe it's called a pelican crossing or perhaps just a lighted pedestrian crossing would suffice naming naming-wise we'll convert that to a crossing and we'll also convert this one to a crossing very good as i said before the final piece of the puzzle looking at the big picture is really just uh transit i'm gonna unpause the game and let the people start walking and start considering where transit might go in a layout like this now the traffic flow percentage seems to be hovering in the mid 80s pretty consistently we've got a lot of walkability next to the interchanges we've got great connectivity with with crosswalks in the middle here and that extends over to the other side the other interchange just lots of walkability and connectivity if you've done it right eventually rather than the pedestrians getting in the way of the cars it seems more that the cars are getting in the way of the pedestrians and i'd say that's kind of a a healthier city rather than a traffic jam in my opinion i've added this train line going down and i'd like to give the city another macro traffic change if you will [Music] i'd like to throw in a central train station and hopefully with a with a little bit of luck i can get this uh i can get this to work out in such a way that our transit situation will will improve uh improve our traffic percentage much much more it's not very pretty i'll admit but it's okay this connection should service serve us well i'd like to also install some bus lines i'm going to keep these real general real simple just going to throw this in wherever it fits beautiful it's the bus depot and no train line required just bus lines here and i'm going to create a new line one that goes up into this area and maybe we'll try to hit every neighborhood so at least a stop in every neighborhood i'm also going to make a clockwise line to go along with our counterclockwise line and we'll see how that affects uh the overall traffic of the city at this point traffic seems to be bouncing from 84 to 87 sometimes a little lower sometimes a little higher but it's kind of high 80s mid to high 80s is uh the equilibrium that we've reached so every little change has yielded better and better results for our city transit is a form of traffic reduction just like walkability and bike ability adding all of the bike paths excuse me walking paths things like that my rule of thumb is to create a very strong road network which i would say this is hierarchy wise and connectivity-wise build a strong road network and then decentralize anyone from using it i think that's really the best way to make a completely functional city in city skylines and of course transit is a great way to decentralize people from using their cars cargo station would be another one to add for all of the industry that i have lining these main roads which is also kind of bad a cargo station would help alleviate a lot of the trucks coming in off the highway but as you can see the highway intersections are looking good the interchanges are fine the main inner intersections in this city are these two here without a doubt but overall every incremental change has helped traffic tremendously i'm glad it worked out that way i'd like to continue this with a second epis episode today was the macro of traffic in city skylines so a zoomed out look and thinking holistically of the whole city and really thinking of it as connecting different parts and effective transit things like that the next episode will be the micro so we're looking at the the small things we're going to look at these individual intersections and think about what can be done to help now that we've helped the city overall everyone i really appreciate you hanging out thank you for talking transit with me and talking traffic with me at the end of the day city skylines is a really great traffic simulator and i think it's probably the hardest part of the game and also the most interesting to learn so i'm glad to kind of lay it all out in a in a structured way for you hopefully you find this helpful everyone thank you for being here i've been yumble i'll see you in the next stream or the next video

Channel: YUMBL

Views: 64,906

Keywords: traffic fix, transit, walkability, hierarchy, road, connectivity, solve, yumble, city skylines

Id: BuGMnkwFaOQ

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022