Timed TRAFFIC LIGHT Tutorial! Traffic Manager: President Edition (TMPE)

everybody welcome back my name is yumble and today i'm here to talk to you about timed traffic lights in city skylines there are default timed traffic lights that kind of come with the game and automatically appear anytime you connect two major roads or any collector road to an arterial or anything like that and i recommend getting rid of the default lights entirely and i'm going to show you why and how you can use traffic manager to add your own traffic lights and time them yourself it's really rewarding and really useful i'd like to welcome you to rolling waters this is the city that i'm building on twitch currently there's only about maybe 1900 people living here but i think it'll work fine for our purposes today um so we're talking about manually timed traffic lights using traffic manager essentially and before you even begin doing this i would recommend going to traffic manager and changing a setting so we're going to open up the settings menu here go to traffic manager go to the policies button there and there's an option here that says automatically add traffic lights if applicable this is what the game does by default and it means that anytime two major roads hit one another or anytime like this would cause a manual traffic light and it actually did cause a manual traffic light we'll see it there there we go so this is a um this is a default traffic light this is a what i would call a vanilla traffic light with vanilla lane settings so this is all default and it can work fine for now but once this city grows a little bit this intersection is probably going to get hit pretty hard with industrial traffic coming all the way down to this area so in preparation for that let's see if we can't get this up to snuff so if you haven't already turned off that setting you can always go into traffic manager and hit toggle traffic lights and i'm just going to turn that off entirely we don't we don't need any traffic light there right now we are going to show this intersection some love though before re-adding the traffic light ourselves you know a proper time to traffic light first i recommend going to your lane arrows and generally depending on the lane configuration that you have you can take the control button hold ctrl so click lane arrows hold the control button on your keyboard and then left click the intersection and you'll see what we have now is dedicated turning lanes so i think that there used to be some arrows that were pointing straight and left and right and that's kind of a mess think about yourself in traffic it's really nice if you're if you have a dedicated left-hand turn lane or a dedicated right-hand turn lane and this and the cars going straight through if they don't have to wait for the left turn and the right turn then that's great that frees up a lot of headroom for traffic so always start with your lanes in my opinion before you go to set up a timed traffic light a little a little hack you can do the same thing with timed traffic lights almost rendering this video useless almost i have i have an index finger in the air right now it's almost useless but it's not this is this is important this is a good place to start hold control so click your timed traffic light this is a timed traffic light button in traffic manager hold control click and voila much like the uh much like the lane arrows that we just set up by control clicking in traffic manager we just set up a timed traffic light automatically so the great thing about traffic manager is it knows when you have a four-way intersection or a three-way intersection i'm sure there's a three so like over here you i could control click this one and it would automatically know how to set up a three-way intersection assuming that there's no extra transit in it or anything like that if it's just normal with with pedestrians maybe some bikes and cars that's that's a really good option that's a really good place to start and let's go into what that actually did let's let's talk about the actual menu here and the counters and what everything means so this is the timed traffic lights manager window i guess we'll call it you can hit the show counters button on an already set up time traffic light if you're curious about how long the the light is counting down or counting down from red or green and how long the traffic flow is how long traffic is allowed to flow from one direction but the real anatomy of what's going on here you have to actually stop i'm gonna pause the game and hit stop on the traffic light and these are the the states so this is what actually matters think of a traffic light at a four-way intersection think of their as being phases and the first phase that this is set up automatically i didn't do this once again if you control click an intersection set up your turn lanes by control clicking with the lane arrows and then set up your time traffic light by control clicking with the time traffic light button and this is what you'll get in a four-way interchange a four-way intersection rather so state one you can see it there two three and four right uh when you initially set up a traffic light i'll show you this later a more manual way to do it but i figured we'd just get an overview real quick state one if you hit the edit button you'll actually see what's going on here so state one is this light over here all three arrows turn green uh pedestrians are not allowed to cross here i generally leave pedestrians on auto i haven't really done a too much of a study on on how pedestrians fit into this whole thing i have done intersections where you have to accommodate for cyclists and that's fun too at a phase for cyclists a phase or two for for bikes um but but anyway looking at phase one this is primarily an auto interchange so let's focus on that the minimum time is three seconds the maximum time is eight seconds that's a good starting point i'd say so that means that this let's imagine this intersection has a sensor on it where in real life there will actually be cameras or sensors that that kind of count vehicles or sense vehicles as they approach or as they wait at the intersection and it'll actually increase in efficiency by changing the cycle once the once the phase has completed so once this angle is out of cars once this direction runs out of vehicles to pass through the intersection there's no point in this staying green you can have another area start moving so that's where the minimum time and the maximum time come into play if you find that vehicles are not clearing entirely from one side you can either increase the amount of lanes and let's say if there's a left turn that's sticky and there's a real back up on the left turn maybe add a second left-hand turn lane i don't think that's the case here but if there were a disproportionate amount of vehicles trying to get from here to the left add a second one you know go back to your go back to your lane arrows and you can change uh you can change them to a left-hand turn dedicated left so that's that's fine you know just as an option uh so this is back in the traffic light menu phase one is all three of these green so this this side gets a green light and also this side just the right hand turn gets a green light so there's no conflict there i don't have u-turning turned on so this vehicle is not allowed physically cannot it in terms of the rules of the game nobody can make a u-turn here in this in this what would potentially be a dangerous situation of an intersection they're all going left to here so these guys can go right into this uh into whatever lane they want here just to get them out of the way because why not and generally when you let one side through there's another side that can be making a right-hand turn conflict-free so keep an eye out for that when you're setting up a manual traffic light uh the second step here so state two i'd like to call it phase two looks like they're going left this is the default traffic light i've never actually looked at what the default traffic light does but i know they work great so let's see let's get the y the why it works great so it moved one to the left all lights green pedestrians stopped this light this this right turn lane here can go same deal three seconds eight seconds uh the minimum time of three max time of eight i meant to say this earlier forgive me for the disorganization this is all very off the cuff and i hope you're enjoying yourself here but uh the maximum time let's say you don't want to add a second turn lane you can also increase the maximum time on a given phase and that will allow time for the backed up traffic to find its way through so if this if uh you know if this left here was finding itself backed up and you didn't want to add a second turn lane to it increase the max time to 12 or 15 or 20 seconds or however long it takes just know that if you increase the maximum time and traffic is still trying to get out of this side as the sensor as it's waiting to to clear or 20 seconds whichever comes first this side is going to be waiting over here the uh the side over yonder these guys are going to be waiting to get out because so far they've waited two cycles one two they're probably gonna have to wait a third cycle before they're allowed to get out and this is already full so every time you add time every time you add time to the max time you're potentially shorting another one that probably is backing up so keep that in mind and once you've made these changes you can always hit save i've never actually changed this i don't know that i'd recommend messing with with these things too too much um more for special situations you know it's okay and flow sensitive flow sensitivity i i recommend keeping it low i would say i think that's how quickly it recognizes that it can change before the maximum time has run out so anyway on to phase three i'm if i had to bet i'm gonna hit save if i had to bet state three is going to be these all green and these guys are allowed to turn right ready wait i lied phase four excuse me state four and lo and behold we've got um all of these are finally allowed to go so this left will finally have its day and these guys are allowed to turn right because that's been the trend for the whole thing so that is a very default traffic light i'm going to hit start it doesn't actually start you can't edit it without hitting stop and you can't run it without hitting start so now that i've hit start we're back in business and we can hit show counters to see the result of this very very default traffic light and hit three speed so this side can finally be allowed to enter the intersection and the default one is clearing all i look for in a successful traffic light is does the intersection clear does the car at the back waiting get to go and that's that's all that really matters everybody gets their turn it looks realistic the pedestrians get to move cyclists can be accounted for it's great and if you want to check a specific phase you can always hit the skip button to skip through you know to skip through to see what the next phase looks like or the next state looks like so the next thing with this to take this to the next level this is an automatic traffic light i've shown you what all of the buttons do over here for the most part the ones that i know how to use advanced users please feel free to use the uh to use the advanced options down here i've never had much luck with that but this is a default traffic light they generally work well but check it out you may come to a situation where you want to set up multiple intersections that work in conjunction with one another this is just a single isolated deal here this is just a single um i think i've turned off the traffic light this is a single four-way intersection what happens when you have something like a like an interchange where you want a specific light that you have to set up manually or what happens with um there's another interchange let's say this one here there's actually two junctions that need to work in conjunction with one another there's actually two uh two intersections we'll say in this interchange in this partial clover leaf that actually need to work together and i'd like to do some stuff to set up a a functional uh a functional partial cloverleaf with lights give me just a second to see what that might look like before we start setting up this junction i'd like to show you what we have prior to the junction being established right now it's it's pandemonium let's look over here we've got cars weaving into traffic we've got we've got uh left-hand turn lanes that that are nonsensical we've got um this marking is actually not relevant so we're gonna see vehicles driving over it i'm gonna have to fix that probably but like all these left-hand turning vehicles key example just chaos this is not how this is supposed to work uh this intersection needs a light this is what's called a partial clover leaf very popular in in canada the us you know north america uses a ton of these uh in in europe they'll often do kind of a partial cloverleaf and then they'll end it with a roundabout which i think is a really cool trick as well but in the us in in you know in north america we're using a light for this left turn and in this case i think that this intersection should work in conjunction with this intersection which is what a junction is that's a you heard that word i just use right conjunction would it be a suffix i don't know word word nerds tell me is it a i think it's the suffixes junction in conjunction right so that makes sense to me what i'd like to do is set up a timed traffic light this is what it looks like when you start cold we're starting from the start from the beginning from scratch i've selected the time traffic light button i've clicked the intersection that i really need to fix i'm going to set up timed traffic light so here we go this is what it looks like initially and if you know that you're going to be setting up multiple intersections that work together like in an interchange i would recommend doing this first hit add a junction to this traffic light select this one so now these two are on the same timer i'm going to have to figure out exactly how they work together and why but i i would really like to have these work together you can add a junction in other situations too like let's say you wanted this light to work with this light to work with this light um in a real city with real three four etcetera direction interchanges what they want to happen with their time traffic lights you can see my traffic generator over there over on the other side ignore that ignore the man behind the curtain don't look at what i'm doing to make the video just enjoy the video please what you want is packs of vehicles roaming down the street all at once and you want them to kind of hit green after green after green if you've ever driven in in manhattan you'll know that if you do it right if you're coming down a main a main drive you may be at one light and you stop for a minute and traffic is passing and then you see a green and you go and then you hit another green and then you hit another green and people think like oh it's i'm so skilled no that's the the whoever designed those intersections and whoever designed those lights whoever planned that that street and timed the lights set it up as a junction so you can have it so this turns green and then right when the vehicles reach this one this one turns green and just have it all work um in my case i'm not really going to be doing that so much maybe maybe to a degree but the idea here is we want we want to separate this traffic this conflict so that cars aren't running into each other so let's let's set up some timers now that we've got our junction set up what i'd recommend doing is probably now that we've got our two our two things selected hit add step now this will take us to our fir i'm gonna pause the game because it's distracting this is gonna take us to our first screen here i don't recommend setting these up automatically by holding ctrl and clicking i would strongly recommend doing this manually you know this is this is a very specific situation the automatic traffic light is not going to take everything into into account um part of what we have here is a light that can always be green this can always be green because this is a in this situation this is a free-flowing uh situation for this side of traffic we have two lanes here that will stay in their lane if we tell them to using using like a lane connector here i'd recommend lane connecting in the interchanges if you don't want cars changing willy-nilly so that's great and that means that we can allow this to always flow freely i'm going to set up the other the other side to flow freely as well now that we've identified that so now we've got our free-flowing lane coming in that will always be green throughout every single cycle and we're still on the first phase i haven't even added this phase yet what i'd like to do is say that this phase is going to be the green light for left turns and the green light for straight through and on this one we're actually gonna have to change modes yes we're gonna have to change mode so this one we're gonna allow the straight through traffic to go and the left turn to go as well so we're gonna have this this ramp of cars coming across the interchange or turning left they're all allowed to go and these folks will merge as they do and let's do the same thing on the other side because this is a junction we're setting it up all at once they're all allowed to go that's awesome this is a good phase so far i'm leaving it at a minimum time of three maximum time of eight i'll probably end up upping that eight at a later time but for now i'm really focusing on these lights that's that's really what it comes down to now let's think is there another lane that could go at the same time as these cars turning left and these cars going straight and these cars coming in is there another one that could go the answer is yes so let's do it uh this is this is the the lane we can do these cars are all coming in and turning right yes so we're gonna hit the green light button for that i don't think we'll have to change modes because there's only one way that they can go so while these cars are turning left they can't make a u-turn so no harm in allowing these cars to come in while these are stopped these vehicles are still stopped over here as far as i know and i think they'll stay stopped because these guys are making a left into a single lane situation i would have these right turning vehicles stop or at least yield to them but yields here's the thing just a side note yields and stop signs apply to the entire row not just the lane that you want it to apply to so i'm going to use lights to to solve all of this so that looks good to me while these vehicles are turning left as evidenced by this guy observe these guys can go right i love that so let's go make that same change over here these folks will be allowed in and i like that i'm going to leave the uh i'm going to leave the pedestrian light on auto and just hope for the best there i really don't want too many pedestrians in this anyway so i'm just going to leave that on auto and we'll see what happens so that i think is a good first phase so now we've got our state 1 established state state 2 is on the way hit add step and what do we know we know that we can leave this one green because this is free flowing they're coming in they've got their own lane they'll merge with these guys no problem what i know is that these folks have not gotten to go yet so this lane this set of lanes here is waiting for these guys to turn left and these guys to turn right and there's no reason to look at this mess here ignore the mess that'll clean up but i know that these vehicles need to stop so these guys can go so let's let's use logic here and and follow through let's turn off the that left turn so now there's a red light here i'm okay with these cars continuing to go i think that they should keep on keep on moving straight through merge with these guys free-flowing love it i think that this one should be entirely allowed to go now i think that no problem there these can go so these cars are making a right conflict-free because this left is no longer coming in and these vehicles are going straight across and we don't even need to change modes because we want to stop all these vehicles at the same time because they're all hitting the same conflict i will say while these cars are coming in i would prefer if the if the interchange vehicles actually stopped for the lane math that i have set up here we've got we've got two lanes coming in this way and we've got two lanes coming around here and i'm not going to make these two lanes merge together so we're actually going to force these vehicles to stop and i think that would be a smart way to do it so let's make that same change on the other side just to reiterate we're gonna stop the left turn that's important let the let the the through traffic go through that's fine but stop this left turn we're gonna go over here and we're gonna allow these cars to have their turn to have their their day so the straight through can go because now there's no left the right turn can go because there's no left coming in there into the one lane and these vehicles are gonna have to stop for now and that i think is the two phases let's let's see if i'm correct i'm gonna i'm gonna add this don't forget to hit add don't forget to hit start and let's see how it works [Music] so far it seems to work wonderfully i think we've got it so the free flow lane is flowing the through traffic here will always be flowing let me hit show counters to show you what that means so this will always be 99 this will always be 99 because it never actually changes this being the straight throughs when the left turn goes these vehicles all stop then these vehicles get to go once the lefts are completed and the cars coming in from the highway get to stop and part of the beauty of this it's identical on both sides but the way the timing works out actually the left-hand turn will sometimes turn green right when these vehicles get to it so on occasion i'm sure i could really micromanage this to ensure that it happens but you can see those last vehicles they just get to go right away which is kind of nice so now these vehicles are being allowed through let's see if the left-hand turn opens up in time oh it changed early i could probably be a bit stricter with the timings to ensure that this happens but i'm confident that this type of arrangement would would work great with much higher traffic once again this is a city of 2000 um but we're we're only serving a fraction of what this interchan this interchange could handle this interchange could dump many many vehicles on and off the highway very very quickly and for realism it's good to add a light because otherwise it's just pandemonium at the at the spots also don't don't uh don't be shy with with node controller and uh intersection marking tool intersection marking tool can allow you to kind of beautify the interchange in a nice way to fill in the the empty space that's usually in the middle of an interchange but i'm going to call this a success so today we learned how to do a we learned how to do timed traffic lights in city skylines using traffic manager we learned how to how to set up junctions using timed traffic lights i think that's going to help with realism a lot in your cities and it gives you a ton of control especially if you're into creating traffic problems that you then have to fix like i am i find myself dipping into timed traffic lights and creative junctions and creative intersections a lot feel free to check me out over on twitch i play games uh i play well this game i play skylines two days a week on twitch um you know let me let me know if you have any questions in the discord feel free to join definitely subscribe here if you like what i'm making i've got a lot of other tutorials and other like interchange builds and things like that let me know if you have questions in the comments as well i tend to respond to everything i literally respond to everything so hit me up come say hi uh guys thank you so much for watching looking forward to see you seeing you in the next stream or the next video

Channel: YUMBLtv

Views: 52,015

Keywords: traffic manager, city skylines, traffic lights, timed traffic light, junction, traffic fix

Id: 4cqBZuH0zcc

Length: 24min 21sec (1461 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021