Which is THE BEST Highway Interchange Layout? Freeways!

hello fellow engineers and welcome back to freeways i had an absolute fantastic time playing this last time at this time i wanted to have a little go and just sort of work out how efficiency works in this game so this is a cloverleaf it got us a 430 efficiency score on this little stopwatch and so i wanted to try out a few real life all the way into changes and see which ones are best so the one on the screen now this is the cloverleaf interchange it's quite it's quite a common one mainly because it's really cheap so in highway design the most expensive part of road building especially on designs like this where you're sort of trying to have an individual road for each route it's the amount of bridges and not just the amount of bridges the length of the bridges so you can see this one has just got two very short bridges in the middle spanning these two lanes everything else is at ground level or at grade as we like to call it in the uk however this design isn't that efficient in some directions is so if we say we start on the right and say we're a red car go north we just turn right and we go straight up and then merge back in there so that's a very efficient route now if we're coming from this way and we want to go let's say we're a pink cast let's follow this pink car you're under the two bridges we go round this loop we then merge back on with these guys cut off that creek then we go over the bridge and straight back down however you'll notice we had to merge with a green car that's because this this length of road between the merge and the diverge and emerge is where you join a road and a diverge is where you leave the road so this length in the middle with the bridge has got two sort of directions of traffic coming along it so we're going to get mergers with cars coming from the right coming from the south both along that stretch under there but you're also going to get cars coming from the right that don't want to go left they want to go all the way around there so so basically a simple rule is you never want a merge before a diverge because it doubles up the amount of traffic in the middle you always want diverge first and then merge like we go on this little bit so yeah this stretcher rode bad this stretcher rode good but anyway so this efficiency score is 438 that's what we're going to try and beat so if we come down here and boosh we've cleared the level and we're going to try again with some different designs so i'm going to stick with the cloverfield sort of shape but this one's going to have something that we called distributor roots so if we come straight down and we go straight up on this one and basically the problem that we had before was everyone was using this middle bit of road to go in all the directions so what we do we actually come off here we do like a parallel road and then we'll do the same on the right hand side come out and then back in not the most parallel of designs yeah i'll give you that we then want to do the same for the left and right east and west directions but of course we want to go up into a bridge and now i know i can right click i can just right click so over there i knit did you see that i nearly bloody clicked that one i did that so many times last episode no down and then we'll do the same so we'll do a slip road off here it's there up across down merge back in and the same for that so you can see already we haven't even done all the routes yet we've literally just done north south and east to west uh but we've got four bridges and they're very long they span four different lanes of traffic and we're not even done yet we are not even done yet so to get the cloverfield thing back in we do say you're coming from 101 east and you want to go to 17 south you're actually rather than going along this road with the blues you'd come off here so you're on your own little road and then you'd come over the bridge and he gets to this point and then you gotta loop around like that now you can see can you see all the pinks they're coming around over the bridge swing a hard one get the old back end out the handbrake and they go under the bridges and they're coming down on their own road they're not merging with these guys that are coming north to south until this point where they merge back in uh so we basically just wanna do that for all corners so we can do the same for this corner down here do the same people under there coming around like that so that's network complete but obviously we've still got to do the extra routes and that basically just involves coming off earlier going around and then merging in there so now people coming from the north if they want to go to the west to the blue you can see he just takes a turn off there and he doesn't have to mingle with any other traffic again we'll come off here mingle into that slip road the trouble this is all jammed now because i haven't put these arms in yet so everyone is they're basically going like around a massive roundabout to try and get to where they need to go now they don't need to though they don't need to just be patient just wait for me to build my roads right and there we go so i put all the arms in we've unfortunately got to wait for all this car it's probably just stuck now now they get one sensible green car good one i'm trying to work out who we're waiting for i don't think we're waiting for anyone i think it's literally just stuck yeah it's jammed follows solid there you go i press simulate and we'll see is this better oh it's not better interesting and i imagine it's not better because this is an efficiency number so it's not just getting the highest traffic flow it's also about the amount of concrete you've used and the complexity so compared to the original cloverleaf design the traffic flow and complexity are actually the same a little bit surprising i thought the traffic flow might be slightly higher but i think it's because everything sort of it did get a bit cramped in there but the concrete used obviously with these massive bridges and like basically two extra lanes in each direction a lot more concrete used so efficiency was worse okay so we've still got our original score to beat this one was no good so we'll clear this and we're gonna go with another one that you may have heard of before it's called a diverging diamond interchange so i'll just sort of draw it up and then you can see how it works so essentially from this one we're gonna swap over to this side so now you can see we're actually on where this lane goes we're gonna go all the way down and then we're gonna swap back to that lane so now those guys are coming like this over here we're going to go like that do a little bridge over the top back down again and again just hop over the top i may have caught that it looks a little bit wonky let's see what this red car does at the end he lost his back end a bit but it was fine that was fine so you might be looking at this and being like what the hell are you on about matt that does not look sensible yeah but just wait things will make sense so the east to west are simple they're just literally straight across so come over here oh god i started drifting upwards there bridge over those two same for this side connector in so there are straight throughs and then where it gets its name from the diverging diamond so if you want to come from the east and you want to go north you can literally just diverge here straight onto there fantastic if you want to come from the south and you want to go east again you can just diverge pretty cool you want to come from north to west you've guessed it we're diverging and of course west to south is also a diverge now we have a nice diamond shape if we click on these signs you can see where the flashing one which root are still remaining we've only got one more to do on each one and essentially from these diamond arms i just burned you just do like a little curve and the reason why we did this swapping over in the middle so we can literally just do like that in the middle come along this diamond diverge up there curve around there oh boy looks i drew it wrong i drew it wrong i did that bit wrong we're gonna have to do the entire thing again because there's no undo button so from this one we want to go around that way you saw what it's quite easy to see like the shape so this one is obviously going to go off there and onto there i don't know for some reason i went from this diverge around that way but no you want to come from that onto the diamond all right so there we are there's our diverging diamond interchange now the good thing about this one is there's only there's only four little bridges so we've got these two bridges which are pretty much the same as the cloverleaf interchange and we've just got these two little additional ones now they only go over one lane each so quite small really and then everything else is all upgrade we sort of still have the same problem as the original cloverley fins change but not as severe so you can see these middle roads under the bridges you got two different movements of traffic merging along one lane now but these straight over ones they're now just just the one direction so i imagine the traffic flow should be higher but let's press play let's simulate it and see how it ends up our traffic flow is actually lower that's surprising so our efficiency for this one is six efficiency points lower than the original cloverleaf so i am i am surprised by that again that could be my drawing skills yeah and if we break that down the traffic flow was slightly slower we actually used less concrete on this one that's that's quite surprising actually but if we're using less concrete that probably explains why the traffic flows lower and then the complexity was the same did i see we unlocked a picture there is that this is that gonna be this one no it's still the cloverleaf okay fair enough i think these just unlock like for each level they don't necessarily unlock depending on if you used a realistic one which is a bit of a shame but uh otherwise you might never see some of them i guess all right so we'll clear this and now we're gonna look at some of the sort of a bit crazier ones i quite like this one but it's not the most sensible solution you've ever seen in the world now we're gonna do our straight throughs east to west so this sort of takes a bit from the diverging diamond and that we do the straight overs and then we put our diamonds in again so we go from here straight across up to there so we do that for all the corners yeah i cocked up the bottom right one a bit i'm pretty sure we'll still have space labels still have space uh but essentially say we're going north and we want to get east people will come off this diverge and then they'll diverge again off here so we'll put a little arm down bridge over the top and that actually curves round and then we go down and merge before these two bridges because obviously we don't want these bridges to be longer now you can see green cars they come along here diverge off over the bridge round back down and merge in there lovely now we can do the same on the opposite side so people coming from the south if they want to go west and come off there up and over and merging just before the bridge so we should see some blue cars they go blue car coming around lovely jubbly and then people coming from the east if they want to go south they'll come off this diverge so we come over and this one we have a choice we can choose if we want to we can do a quick like that and merge in there but i might just merge in with the bridge on top just because space limitations so like that's this one we come around here and that's the network complete and this is called the windmill interchange because it sort of looks like a windmill you can see like you can really see like the movement you can imagine this rotating as like a fan uh let's simulate we got 438 to beat efficiency score oh yes not as good this one you can see the traffic flow it's our highest yet 85 but we used a lot more concrete that's well that's pretty much 33 percent more concrete that's because we've got six bridges and four of them are really long but the traffic flow was the best so that's our most efficient design in terms of traffic so far another solution for this would just literally be a roundabout so we could draw our roundabout in and then just connect all of these up and there's our network complete the roundabout uh interested to see how this one's going to cope it's probably not going to create very well at all oh yes that is not good or it's blocked out pissed blocked up it's just about surviving efficiency 80 uh not the best but as i as i sort of touched on the last episode we can we can make this a lot more efficient all right so this time if we if we draw a roundabout in first we're going to do what i touched on in the last episode which was a hamburger so what one do you want to go over that a little bit back down straight through the same for the other direction and this is like a very popular solution in the uk we sort of call them a grade separated roundabout or grade separated junction at this point i could go down and up but i may as well just stay up all the way over all right so down the north to south and the east to west and now we just need to round about the other the other options in so we can just do that and then that there you go network complete so we've got the straight through separated they pretty much just do their own thing but then all the other routes they need to go around the roundabout if they want to go somewhere so people coming from the north if they want to go east they literally have to go round the entire roundabout unfortunately that doesn't seem to be normal roundabout rules it's just a bit of a free-for-all if you look at this junction there's not a lot of giving way but let's simulate this is it better than the normal roundabout 80 is the score to beat 263 way better but obviously nowhere near as good as the original options and that's because this this takes up a lot less space so you can really really squeeze this in now if i'd drawn this a lot more efficiently you'd probably actually see that with the concrete used but i didn't i went nice and big and if we stay on the old roundabout thing we've also got i don't know if you've ever heard of in england in particular swindon have you ever heard of the magic roundabout it looks terrifying but it does actually make sense sort of so essentially it's lots of roundabouts joined together to make like an uber roundabout okay so essentially you have like four round butts you have like one for every junction so we'll put one there we'll do slightly bigger ones for over here just to make it a bit clearer they should all really be the same shape already right and then we'll connect all of these up and then we want to connect these roundabouts up so we'll go from this one over to that one and this one is that one but now to take advantage of the actual roundabouts now we want to add like a few more arms in so if we want to get these people from east down to south at the moment they're going all the way around this giant roundabout they're just using it as a big roundabout you want them to come down this arm and then do that now if you see this purple car he's decided to come down here he goes straight across there and then round this roundabout and then he's at its destination so if we just pretty much continue this through essentially we're just making another roundabout in the middle that says network complete but ignore that we're going to make it more efficient just by connecting all of these together like that so now it looks like a mess but i'm pretty sure if we give it a little bit of time things will clear up pretty quickly and this could actually be a really efficient design now yes there is a lot of give way but take a look there's literally no bridges this is cheap cheap as chips let's press simulate and see how it looks oh not bad not bad at all so traffic flow obviously that's a lot lower we were expecting that but with the concrete used really low our overall efficiency score is 402 so that's not bad i think to be honest with a bit of tweaking as well i look at that corner there i really did not draw that very well i think that could be a lot better in fact i'm gonna draw it again right did i draw it neater i'm not entirely sure actually the network completed thing happened a lot sooner oh there you go there we go so just by having a little bit more of a steady hand we upped the traffic flow to 62 and our overall efficiency 443 which actually makes this the best design super i'm not sure the complexity factor is quite accurate on this but uh we'll take it we will take it all right so now we're gonna do a proper major one this is like one of the best looking ones it's one of these in london on the m25 yeah but essentially we want to do our straight three roads so you got a straight through roads with our bridges over the top yeah we want to put the diamonds back in because this one's sort of a mix of everything we've seen so far or maybe not the magic roundabout right and now is where it gets really really freaking cool so this is called a turbine interchange because it sort of just looks like a cool turbine so let's say we're coming from the south and we want to go west at the moment you can't you can't do that you can you can go north you can go east but you can't go west we're gonna come with our diamond diverging we're gonna go over in a bridge but sort of keep curving over and this is where you can choose do you you can stay as a bridge but i thought i want to keep it realistic i want to save money so we're going to go back down come over to there over the top back down and merge in there and then we sort of just repeat this so now you can see this blue car you can come around there over that bridge over that bridge oh he stopped there i don't know why he stopped there why did he stop there i don't know that one didn't and now we just sort of rotate this round so we've done it from this arm so you can see on this on this diamond road we start at the end of it so you can see the diverge is quite far away from this bridge and the merge is quite close to it and that just allows us to like rotate this around so if we want to come from this arm come around there back down over there and we want to connect in as close to the bridge as possible because we started further away like that nice now we do this one over there back down up over there and cut as close in as we can back down merging and the final one is just from this diamond road and then we just try emerging under that bridge network complete and look how cool that looks that does look decent i'm a bit annoyed i messed up that one it's a little bit wobbly uh but interesting how this one works it it's gonna be expensive there's a lot of bridges going on but let's simulate it looks pretty cool actually it doesn't look too bad or is is quite bad traffic flow the highest by far 87. this one super efficient on the traffic because the amount of concrete used 9 000 tons the overall efficiency not the best 342 so surprisingly the top the top one i don't really understand how that works the top one was the magic roundabout but i'm going to leave that one in because that looks absolutely wicked let's go back to the map yeah look how cool that looks it almost looks like my top left one but like proper but anyway guys thanks for joining if you want to see me carry on with all these other levels that we've got to do i'm gonna try and do them a bit more like sensibly from now on rather than this absolute carnage we got there i'll try and keep it like sensible and neat looking like this turbine one we just did but yeah loving this game hating the sound effects of it that's why i turn them off but apart from that cool game just please add an undo button i need to undo but anyway guys peace love and bridges i'll catch you guys next time bye [Music]

Channel: Real Civil Engineer

Views: 1,511,941

Keywords: freeways game, real civil engineer mini motorways, real civil engineer freeways, freeways real civil engineer, freeways highway engineer, highway engineer freeways, free ways, free ways game, freeways realistic, realistic freeways game, highway interchange game, traffic fixing game, rce, traffic games, drawing highway junctions, drawing highways interchanges, engineering, road engineer game, efficient freeways solutions, is freeways realistic

Id: GOG0DssWRB4

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021