Top 5 Cities Skylines Tips for Beginners (From a City Planner)

[Music] hello and welcome to a city planner place city builders and today i want to give you my top five tips and tricks for beginners but really these tips i'm going to give you today they could be used by anyone who just wants a healthy thriving city and these tips are coming directly from a city planner based on city planning expertise and my knowledge of the game so let's dig right in so first of all utilize proper roadway hierarchy what i mean by that is there are different classifications of roads the one we're all familiar with to start out with is a highway going down from there are arterial roads and that's these six lane roads from there collectors and that's the four lane roads and from there local roads that's the two lane roads uh you don't have to necessarily use all of these but if you're going to use a art an arterial you should make sure that you're connecting the arterial to a collector and the local road to the collector so in this case i actually haven't used any arterials at all but if i were to do so i would take from the freeway my access to the arterial connect a collector to the arterial and a local road to the collector and really the theory behind this is the arterial is serving regional trips the collector is serving trips between multiple neighborhoods and the local is serving trips between neighbor within the neighborhood and that's why it's never good to link a local road to an arterial that's linking a local trip to a regional trip you want to disperse the traffic appropriately and in some cases like i mentioned it might not be appropriate to use arterials at all in fact when you're beginning the game you have to remember that this is a small geographic area and there aren't regional trips so to speak just yet until you go and purchase multiple areas and if you only have this one area local roads might do the trick in general um and uh that kind of segues into the the next topic which is uh not having more roadway junctions than you need so minimize the number of roadway junctions on collectors and arterial roads so what you see here is that i've built a road that has uh relatively close junctions on an arterial and what this means is that you have cars that would travel at a fast pace straight to a stop light and then travel again to a fast pace at a stop light and the way that things are laid out in city skylines is local roads have lower speeds collectors have higher speeds than local but lower than arterial and arterial have the highest speeds of any road that you would that you can zone so cars are basically drawn to the highest speed roadway in the shortest trip length and they do a calculation to figure that out and in real life people do the same thing they want to go to the road that has the highest speed the most direct connection generally arterials are that but if you have a small city you're introducing lots of junctions with stop lights and that can really cause a problem so maybe a good place to demonstrate this would be in an area that i already have a lot of activity in so let's just say i introduce a bunch of junctions here [Music] there is a potential to stop at all of these junctions now and they're not benefiting traffic at in any way so minimizing these either by simply reducing the number of roads that you're putting in place or by going into your traffic routes looking at junctions and toggling the traffic lights can really improve traffic within your city but really you should think about how much road you need in general if you take a look every single cell of a road requires 32 cents a week and up upkeep and a better way to think about this is it would take you three dollars in between three and four dollars a week to maintain 10 cells so 10 cells is that is the distance between uh this particular collector and this local road so that's not very far and that will start to bleed you dry and if i were to add extra roads all the way through this neighborhood you know it's three six nine dollars a week just to have those extra roads that aren't benefiting me and are actually taking away from the land that i can zone so minimize those connections when you can particularly on uh collectors and arterials on local roads it's not such a big deal because you don't throw in stop lights there or stop signs and it won't mess up your traffic nearly as bad tip number three do not locate residential districts in between your industrial districts and the highway what you can see here is that uh industrial trips are for the most part heading towards the highway um for trips that aren't directly serving the city but if i were to eliminate this access all these industrial trips will funnel through the city and if i were to have a direct connection between the industrial area and the residential area like i used to what you'll probably end up seeing is that many of these trips that would have otherwise gone directly to the highway will go directly through the city and that's one of the reasons why when i built this city i actually built it with two accesses to the highway in mind i didn't want the industrial trips to travel through the residential neighborhood lowering the desirability of all of the homes that the truck traffic is traversing through you can see it starting to begin now you have all these truck trips deciding that this is the best path because of speed and distance and as a result all of these neighbors are going to have sound pollution and it's going to lower the property values and make those less desirable make your city develop less quickly so avoid this whenever you can avoid having your residential area in between the industrial area and the highway and related to that do not concentrate your trip generating uses so what i have right here is you know basically a really high trip generation area and it's okay because this is a relatively small city but imagine if i were to continue expanding this industrial area and i went uh and added up north and uh east over here and i added let's say i added a whole bunch of landfills in the same area well all of these trips are now originating from the exact same location and as a result all of the traffic is focused on these local roads so it's in your best interest to have multiple smaller industrial areas and to spread out uses like landfills recycling centers and things of that nature so that you don't end up with clogged up roads now you're going to see all of this traffic funneling down this road and going down roberts street right into the industrial area right into the residential area rather and you already see this road has a lot of pressure now all because we've concentrated these uses so spread them out whenever you can your city will function a lot better if you do so [Music] next and our final tip our fifth tip is to provide other ways for people to get around other than driving so that's bike lanes and uh and pedestrian paths so what you'll notice before uh is that i had a pedestrian path connecting this residential neighborhood to this industrial area and the reason i did that is you can even see it on this local road there are people that are willing to walk to work so provide that option and one thing you might not have realized is that the game makes it a really simple choice a two-lane road uh takes 32 cents a week of upkeep and it costs 40 cents a cell to construct compare that to a two lane road with bike lanes it is 32 cents a week and 40 cents a cell to construct so why not construct a network of bike lanes in your city draw those people out of their cars and get them biking and you can actually set policies to encourage biking which will get people out of their car and onto a bike and the results are generally pretty fast and i bet you within just a couple seconds we'll start seeing bikes showing up and you know they're this is this is highly beneficial to you because these bikes would sim as cars and clog up your roads and this is a way that i'm able to maintain incredibly high traffic flows just by ensuring that there are ways for people to get to where they need to go outside of a car so i hope that you found these tips incredibly useful if you did please drop a like for the video subscribe to my channel hit the notification bell if you want to know whenever i release new videos i want to release new tips and tricks tips and tricks videos each week and i'm still working on my city building series uh the link should be above so thank you so much again for watching my channel and i can't wait to see in the next one thank you and bye

Channel: City Planner Plays

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Id: LzCmTjAgalU

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020