Traffic Manager Explained! Mod Tutorial

everybody welcome back my name is yumbl and i'm here today to talk to you about traffic manager president edition so traffic manager is a mod for city skylines the version on pc and it's downloadable from the steam workshop for free and many people consider it to be a fundamental mod to the game i just want to show you some some basic uses for it and maybe even a few more advanced options that you might enjoy so i've included a link in the description of this video to the current labs version of traffic manager labs is essentially kind of a beta or a or a trying ground for the the latest and greatest features of traffic manager i'm on 11.5 some of these things may have changed in the meantime but currently this is where we're at this is the current version of the labs version of traffic manager when you subscribe to it you'll get this toggle button and that can be moved anywhere on your screen i choose to keep it in the toolbar and just use it as like an icon the same way you use any of these and i've actually turned up the menu the menu you're looking at here is turned up to probably 200 percent just for visibility reasons but i want to go over all of the different settings and options that there are on this menu and we're also going to go into the settings and options in the in the game you know the pause menu there's an entire options menu dedicated to traffic manager and that's very important as well um but for now let's just go across this menu and we'll we'll see what we can do to our traffic by default the first button in the upper left hand corner is toggle traffic lights and by default the game will add city skylines by default will add a traffic light at major junctions so anytime you cross an avenue type road or a four lane or bigger type road i believe it automatically adds a default vanilla kind of traffic light which they don't tend to be very good if you're going to use traffic lights i recommend deactiv deactivating the initial traffic light which will cause a mess initially but eventually i recommend going back and using the second option which is a timed traffic light time traffic lights are quite involved so i think we're going to revisit a timed traffic light in just a minute and i'll show you how that works i don't ever use manual traffic lights um i i'm not entirely sure of the difference but i've had much better luck with timed traffic lights in general but moving across the lane connector allows you to specify which lane a given lane is forced to go into so let's say this one has a right turn arrow so it's going to turn right by default this truck can go into any lane it wants this car that's now backed up can go into any lane it wants if you wanted to tell it to go to a specific lane you can specify that with a lane connector i've found that lane connectors are crucial for interchanges if you want things to work correctly there's another setting that i recommend turning on in traffic manager that's important as well but lane connectors are are very important for like a diverging diamond like this to work correctly less important somewhat less important when you're dealing with regular junctions maybe you'll find occasions where you want to add lane connectors but generally i recommend using lane arrows which hey guess what conveniently lane arrows are the next button as i said before if a lane connector tells the vehicle which lane to turn into specifically or which lane to pass into across the junction or which lane to go left to or whatever the case may be a lane arrow tells the car which way to turn or tells the vehicle which direction it's going to go to whether it's straight left or right there's only three different ways to go straight left and right if you don't care which lane it's going to go into on the other side like in most junctions at least in the u.s people will turn just like that taxi did where if you know that you excuse you if you know that you have to change lanes up ahead and you have a green light here and it's solid green you can you can get into whatever lane you want it can actually be beneficial to leave that open to leave people open to turn in whatever direction or go across into whatever lane they choose if they have say a left turn coming up or a right turn coming up but there's no node there on this road as cars can only change lanes at nodes so if you want to leave that if you want to leave it up to the vehicle and the pathing system to determine where the car goes use lane arrows frequently that's what you'll use at intersections like this whereas lane connectors i believe are better used for highway intersections and places where you really want them to to keep to their lane and not not change lanes erratically moving on this button i went over this in realistic cities in our realistic cities building video or ways to make the game more realistic using mods this toggles automatic vehicle despawning i always leave this on what that means is that the vehicles won't disappear if they're stuck in traffic by default in in vanilla skylines vehicles will automatically despawn if they're stuck in traffic for too long and if you've ever run into a problem where let's say your police can't make it through or your ambulances or your hearses or garbage trucks and you're losing tax dollars because citizens are moving out and you're losing population that may be because vehicles aren't getting through this isn't a solution to the vehicles not getting through but it is a solution to them disappearing because they can't get through i recommend i i do recommend disabling automatic despawning vehicles don't despawn in real life they wait to get through you know you don't just disappear and wind up at home if you're stuck in traffic and certainly you don't why would you want your services disappearing leaving this off will not solve traffic problems it'll just make service vehicles disappear and and buildings kind of die and close as a result of the vehicles disappearing so i definitely recommend disabling automatic vehicle despawning you can tell it's checked it's blue by default i haven't clicked it it's already blue moving on um priority signs fun fact about about a lot of these if you hover the tool tip you'll actually find that control clicking will enable automatic functions of each of these buttons so let's say let's go to this somewhat lesser you know less important junction if i control click it'll set up a priority junction here that's no good if i shift click it'll definitely set up a priority junction so it's determined that this road is the main road and we've added yield signs or give way signs depending what part of the world you're from on these crossing roads which is fine that's that's a totally legitimate way to set up a low flow junction like this yield means that for those of you that aren't drivers or hopefully if you are if you are a driver and you don't know this i'm about to enlighten you you have been upsetting people the upside down triangle at least in the u.s and probably other places means that you'll pull up to the junction and you don't have to stop but you do have to look both ways and make sure that you're not going to hit anybody because they have the right of way which is what this triangle this um diamond denotes you know the diamond means specifically it means you can click the trashcan to get rid of any of these settings in any of these buttons but the triangle means uh priority so this these areas have priority you can click manually to add a yield on both sides if you click again you'll add a stop sign the distinction between yield and stop is that a stop sign means all vehicles will come to a complete stop once again if you're a driver and you don't know this my goodness please the vehicles all come to a complete stop which may be unnecessary in skylines it's arguably completely unnecessary unless you want ultimate realism you can do yields at most junctions and and be totally fine and the vehicles will stop if there's a car approaching if they're going to conflict or they'll coast through if there's no conflict see that one because of the yield that ambulance cut it a little close to the bus but that's that's what the yield does and you can get rid of those settings by clicking the the trash can the lane arrows if you control click using lane arrows check this out well i've already done it i've already done it a lot of these if you control click it'll actually toggle through you can see that these arrows are changing and these arrows are changing by control clicking the lane arrows tool at a junction it'll cycle through different options for automatic lane configurations but it'll really try to separate the lanes by dedicated left-hand turns dedicated straight through and dedicated right-hand turns so that there's not so much of this this is a four-lane road so of course we're gonna have something's gotta give if we're gonna have all three directions available one of them has to be shared but this one has a dedicated left-hand turn which i generally recommend and a shared straight through and a shared right-hand turn those two are combined keep keep your wits about you with each of these because you can set up a timed traffic light really quickly that way you can set up yields very quickly with control or shift control shift clicking this is what makes the roundabout work i'm not going to explain what needs to go into a roundabout to set it up because i've actually got a whole nother video dedicated to that but i will tell you that click the priority signs button shift control click and it will set it up for you i didn't even have this one set up correctly until just now these these yields weren't in place or these giveaways were not in place but what we've done is effectively turned this into a priority road this three-lane road that doubles back on itself eternally has now been converted to priority which means the incoming traffic all has to yield and it means that the the this traffic all has the the right of way all has priority to go it also sets up the junction or these call junction restrictions so let's do that next junction restrictions are things like um these these options here so i'm going to click this uh this little intersection here this button allows traffic to enter a blocked junction i don't know if it'll say that if i hover it but that's what that symbol means it means can this car this lonely vehicle who desperately wants to go hang out with his friends can he enter this junction even if his friends cannot make it through and the answer in this case as it's set up automatically is yes we want we want these priority vehicles to keep moving forward at all costs at other intersections you wouldn't really want to do that if i if i were to take this one and say hey come on in even if the intersection's blocked come on through perfect example wow um you really don't want these non-priority vehicles to just to just head out into the intersection but that's a very very powerful and potentially dangerous and debilitating button if you overuse it improperly in this case we would not want the traffic from this direction to enter the blocked roundabout imagine that if traffic if this is blocked by the by the priority traffic we do not want vehicles just cruising for a bruising like if all the vehicles will come in it'll fix your traffic on the temporary but it won't really fix your traffic problems in a bigger sense so i recommend leaving that off unless you're sure that you want traffic to enter the blocked junction the other options are crosswalks you can see that i've also got a mod installed that visually deactivates the crosswalk so by default if you find that you can still see your crosswalks get rm crossings i believe it's called rm crossings has some dependencies i'll try to link this in the description remind me if i forget to but that pair is great with crosswalk deactivator here in the junctions the other options are u-turns so if you wanted someone to make a u-turn in this roundabout honestly i really don't usually recommend making u-turns available unless you have a major median road and you'd really like for them to turn left to turn around somewhere else like let's say you don't want anyone to make a left at this junction let's say you've you've got the left turn arrow deactivated here and you think it would be better this generally wouldn't be a thing but maybe they want to come down here and make a u-turn and come back you could use the junction restrictions options here to make u-turns available the arrow button here the crossing arrow means it's saying do you want cars to change lanes when they're going through the junction so it's kind of like a an alternate version of lane connector imagine lane connector but with all available options connected when crossing through the junction do you want them to be able to change lanes when they're going through the junction i generally recommend leaving that off as well mess with a roundabout make a roundabout shift control click the roundabout with uh with this and it'll set up the lane connectors properly it'll set up all of the all the turns properly this one's easy i've clicked the speed limits button here that that 30 logo with the european speed limit sign i've got us speed limits listed here so wow miles per hour interesting if you click an amount you click one of these signs and zoom in you'll notice that the roads all have certain um they all have predetermined values set for speed limit so the the asset creator who made this road not this road that's a poor example but some of these like this is a 25 mile per hour road that's fine you know that's great if you wanted to change that to 30 hey go for it why not i think if you want to de-emphasize certain roads or emphasize certain roads for the pathing system your arterials should be a little bit faster so that vehicles are drawn to it because vehicles i believe the game factors in speed limit where if i make a little side road five miles per hour vehicles are going to avoid that little side road maybe i don't want as many cars on this on this little stretch here so we'll turn it down to 10 miles per hour and what i did there to select the whole road you can see how i'm kind of toggling if you shift click you'll select the entire road the entire segment of road all the way to the next junction and try to get traffic moving on your bigger roads to respect road hierarchy by kind of manipulating the system uh moving on another one banning traffic vehicle restrictions right so let's say let's say on on this road here we definitely want to allow traffic to come here because this is a residential area but i don't really want trucks using this road to get to the mall this is a mall over here there's a loading dock back here and there's deliveries at the front and whatnot and maybe we don't actually want trucks to come through so this is for commercial vehicles banned commercial vehicles now cannot drive on this road um and the options here if i remember correctly are sos are your services so like emergency services the recycling is your trash trucks the truck there is commercial as i said taxis are next the little light on top buses have their own category to the game so buses are allowed here that's a bus route and then these are vehicles just regular i want to call them consumer vehicles citizen vehicles we'll call them so the cars and trucks that drive around for for the citizens you can ban all of those and the same rule applies where if you shift-click on a given road if i click this and then shift-click you can see this whole segment will light up so shift-clicking sos means no emergency vehicles don't necessarily do that unless you have a stretch of road where you really don't want emergency vehicles to go but a useful tactic with this or a useful approach might be to make a road that's for service vehicles only or make a road that's for buses only by banning everything except for buses and then you've made your own bus lane you don't have to rely on whether the the bus lane road that you want exists you can make a bus only road that looks just like any other road but vehicles are banned on it so you can have like a bus terminal that's just one one use of many uh but moving on no parking parking restrictions all of these roads are parkable unless there's no parking on the side of the road so this road just does not have parking spaces there's a bike lane there's a median and there's lanes so there's no toggle for this road nor would they be would there be a toggle for this road over here but if you find that one of the roads that you're using has parking enabled and you don't want it to you can you can ban parking for that section and those cars will move to a different part of the city if there's cars parked there they'll they'll move away the last one is clear traffic i unless you have a glitch going on in your game or unless they're it's backed up and gridlocked so hard that it won't fix itself i don't generally recommend clearing the traffic barring those things i just said if you've got massive problems then clear the traffic go for it do what you got to do but generally i recommend kind of playing it out and fixing the traffic using the traffic manager tools or using better road hierarchy and then letting the simulation run maybe on three speed to get it done faster but if you find there's a glitch or an error or the vehicles aren't pathing correctly or there's a pop-up on your screen that says like cannot find path or something of that effect feel free to clear your traffic in emergencies and kind of reset your reset your expectations you know reset you're not expectations reset your game reset all of the simulated traffic back to uh back to zero so that it can all spawn again and see what happens moving on to our options settings for traffic manager in the in the menu here so this is just the the regular um click the gear in the top right corner you know or hit escape go to options traffic manager can be selected by pressing the t button over and over until you see traffic manager and that goes for all the mods so get get down with that don't go searching scouring for mods just press the first letter over and over and eventually you'll find traffic manager this is really probably underrated i think like traffic manager has some amazing settings and some stuff that i think should be changed by default i have not found a way to make my settings default in the game so every time i start a new map or a new save not a new save but every time i start a new build i go in and i make sure that the settings are correct in here and they never are so i go through and i change them to to be my liking um you can you can lock the the button you can change the user interface scale i'm gonna go back to 100 i turn it up to 200 for everyone's benefit or whatever that is 250 uh transparency options tutorial messages leave this on if you're new to the tools in traffic manager um but but if you're once you're familiar with things turn it off uh notify of mod conflicts display things display your speed limit signs as us miles per hour instead of kilometers per hour u.s signs all that kind of stuff the simulation is very important you can uh you can wreck the overhead of your cpu very quickly you can overrun your cpu and lose frames really quickly if you crank this too high i tend to run it at low i think by default it's probably very low but i run it at low apply changes right away so you don't have to reload the game um but at your discretion crank it up if you'd like and see how it's working maybe in a bigger city you're not gonna like that as much probably reckless driving percentage this is like how how many drivers do you want to disobey your laws basically if you set up a timed traffic light how many people do you want running that light uh in reality i don't know how many people run lights if you run lights and you're listening please stop please don't do that i don't recommend it um so i'm going to turn this to two percent just so for a little realism so there's a few cars that are kind of driving too fast you'll you'll see them zooming around periodically so either two or five percent are what i'd recommend individual driving styles are on by default uh road condition is cool if you're if you're into that sort of thing if you're into building the road there are trucks that can go around and maintain the road if you build the road maintenance building i don't really do that so moving on to disable despawning this is the same toggle as we spoke about earlier i leave that on i strongly recommend leaving that on advanced vehicle ai i do it to 20 i think yep dynamic lane selection to 20 people wonder how to get vehicles to use all the lanes on their highways and i think one a few ways to do it this is this is one way to do it is to turn up the dynamic lane selection so that cars change lanes if you crank it too much the cars will change lanes kind of unnecessarily and you'll notice that every node it becomes like a free-for-all lane change thing on the highway but 20 seems good for my purposes at least i always also use next one realistic parking parking ai turn that on if you want realistic parking in your city but be warned that your traffic will go up if you don't supply your your traffic backup will become more prevalent if you don't supply parking so make sure to get parking garages and parking lot roads or big parking lots or whatever mod you need to make parking lots from the steam workshop as there aren't really parking lots in the default game except built into assets incidentally but yeah that's that's a good one very cpu heavy keep in mind every time you make changes in this you may be taxing your your cpu in your computer a little bit harder or a lot harder potentially but yeah i recommend that if you're looking for a more realistic realistic experience and public transport i've not quantified the difference this makes but it's called prevent unnecessary transfers at public transport stations i haven't noticed a difference with that but i always tend to turn it on because why would you want unnecessary transfers moving on policies something i recommend turning off right away i typically leave all of these default except this one is always checked when i start a new map automatically add traffic lights i do not want it to automatically add traffic lights at junctions what that means is all of your avenues all of your arterial roads will have traffic lights on them and they're going to be the vanilla traffic lights they're not going to be the timed traffic lights that i spoke of earlier so i turn that off and if a junction is getting backed up or if for realism i want to add a light i'll go in and i'll add that light myself i'm going to have to make a video about about timed traffic lights that deserves its own video really but i leave that off for sure it's bad you know i don't i don't want the vanilla lights they're not good uh vehicle restrictions aggression i forget what the default is on this i would recommend either normal or high probably just to allow a little flexibility for for cars if they want to use a bus lane real quick or something like that normal or high probably and i always check these off ban private cars or trucks and bus lanes contrary to what i literally just said if i'm going to have a bus lane i typically want that to be for buses but there may be other restrictions that this affects enable highway specific lane merging and splitting rules check that off for for good results i'd recommend it it means traffic stays in its lane and exits the highway and enters the highway without changing lanes it's a good thing it's a good thing i'm not going to explain it more than that it's as if you've added lane connectors we'll put it that way it's as if you've just added lane connectors to go straight through heavy vehicles prefer outer lanes on highways i always check that off as well that's great just let the let the trucks stay on the outer lanes and let the other cars pass if possible these are your default roundabout settings pedestrians can't cross to the middle unless there's something in the middle that you want them to get to like a park i would leave that checked pedestrians shall not cross roads approaching the roundabout that's if you want to turn off crosswalks when on the roads that are approaching the roundabout all those perpendicular roads that are facing the roundabout if you want them to be able to cross before reaching said roundabout leave that unchecked stay in lane inside the roundabout automatically adds lane connectors stay in lane on the roads approaching is good i recommend that allocate dedicated exit lanes yes all of the above this will affect your control shift click when you're using the uh the yield sign button i forget what that button is called but the uh the stop sign button the yield sign button this affects that when your shift control shift clicking around about to do it automatically that is all correct there for the way i like it at least um i never change any of these things this is optional uh maintenance is if you want to reset stuff or you know reset configurations or what have key binds are for hotkeys i'm not very good at hotkeys you know that's okay though but yeah i recommend going through all these settings and making sure everything is correct whenever you start a new build closing notes on traffic manager if you ever want if you ever know that you want traffic to stay in their lane at a given node click on the uh click on the lane connector option click the node and hit control s is the default uh the default option there ctrl s will let you toggle lane connectors for a given node so if you find that people are changing lanes they're a bunch and you don't want them to change lanes and you don't feel like drawing each of these by connecting the lane manually control s that is it that's traffic manager as i know it as i understand it there's probably a bit more that can be found in the the wiki surrounding this there's definitely a link to that in the asset itself in the steam workshop so i'd recommend looking at that if you want to see some of the higher functions of it but that is the way that i use traffic manager to improve traffic in my cities and get traffic to flow the way i want it to thank you for thank you for hanging out i really appreciate it guys the channel has been um i suppose helping some people learn some stuff and i've really enjoyed making these videos and i intend to continue let me know if you have any feedback for me in the comments or if you have any questions also feel free to check out my my twitch stream at twitch.tv tv thanks for being here and i will see you in the next stream or the next video

Channel: YUMBLtv

Views: 22,146

Keywords: City skylines, tmpe, traffic manager, mods, steam workshop, tm:pe

Id: TERVATwI9uo

Length: 26min 30sec (1590 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021