Idea: Traffic Light timings and road marking control.

[timfrombriz]

Hi,

So I was watching and thinking, this game is both a transport simulator and a traffic management simulator. Moving people efficiently.

Its interesting to watch road traffic flow, and I've noticed that most of the bottlenecks exist in this game due to intersections being within short distance of each other, with poor traffic signal timing coordination.

My suggestion: Add an option to manually override signal timings to custom settings. For example, you control how long a full cycle period is, and how long a green arrow for forward and left turn for each direction of traffic. This adds a new game play dynamic and I think would be a good problem solver for us style of gamers.

Second suggestion: Add an option to change lane configuration at intersections... A four lane road with a single right turn lane and two forward lanes and single left turn at a cross road intersection, when 95% of traffic needs to turn right causes a bottleneck in a single lane, where 3 lanes are left unutilized. It would be great if we could manage the lane control at approach to intersections, for similar reasons to my first suggestion.

Third suggestion: Waypoints on multilane roads: Act as a point on the road segment rather than specific to the lane on the road segment. Using waypoints this way (to control which lane a bus should position itself in) is mostly due overcome issues caused by the two preceeding points. Please don't take this suggestion as a fix for the previous two issues.

Thoughts?

 

[Gogomaester]

This would be awesome, but it is probably not happening.

 

[pyndec]

I've noticed that most of the bottlenecks exist in this game due to intersections being within short distance of each other, with poor traffic signal timing coordination.Thoughts?

So true! I would be overjoyed if this problem can get fixed.

 

[Lord Vetinari]

While we are talking about traffic lights, another usefull feature would be to be able to set public transport priority. In a lot of countries, traffic lights are set up so that they turn green when a tram or bus reach the crossroad. Also, there are sometimes green lights only for the reserved lane.
That would be helpfull. I'v seen a lot of situations in CIM2 where a vehicle misses multiple green lights in a row because private cars flood into the crossroad stopping midway while busses and trams won't attempt to cross unless the whole path is clear.

 

[Norfolk_Chris]

While we are talking about traffic lights, another usefull feature would be to be able to set public transport priority. In a lot of countries, traffic lights are set up so that they turn green when a tram or bus reach the crossroad. Also, there are sometimes green lights only for the reserved lane.
That would be helpfull. I'v seen a lot of situations in CIM2 where a vehicle misses multiple green lights in a row because private cars flood into the crossroad stopping midway while busses and trams won't attempt to cross unless the whole path is clear.

What a good idea! +1

 

[Borgscan]

While we are talking about traffic lights, another usefull feature would be to be able to set public transport priority.

This could be a way for CO to implement some sort of XP (experience points) system to the game - like any other game as you play you get points to spend on abilities/upgrades, so instead of just throwing money at a problem, you have to earn it. Say to 10 successful lines need to be built in order to pay a fee that can add priority to a set of traffic lights, and a second tier in the upgrade system could allow for all traffic lights city wide to be upgraded to priority.

An XP system would make the game more rewarding (and have even better replay value) than just borrowing money to fix a problem.

 

[unmerged(676128)]

While we are talking about traffic lights, another usefull feature would be to be able to set public transport priority. In a lot of countries, traffic lights are set up so that they turn green when a tram or bus reach the crossroad.

I thought this already happened. Most of the time, when a bus arrives at the lights, it continues straight through and the lights turn green.

This could be a way for CO to implement some sort of XP (experience points) system to the game - like any other game as you play you get points to spend on abilities/upgrades, so instead of just throwing money at a problem, you have to earn it. Say to 10 successful lines need to be built in order to pay a fee that can add priority to a set of traffic lights, and a second tier in the upgrade system could allow for all traffic lights city wide to be upgraded to priority.

An XP system would make the game more rewarding (and have even better replay value) than just borrowing money to fix a problem.

+1 this is a great idea. Say you earn a little XP for each line you build, (with more XP for the type of line eg: a metro line gives more XP than a bus line). This would be great.

 

[XanosEU]

Second suggestion: Add an option to change lane configuration at intersections... A four lane road with a single right turn lane and two forward lanes and single left turn at a cross road intersection, when 95% of traffic needs to turn right causes a bottleneck in a single lane, where 3 lanes are left unutilized. It would be great if we could manage the lane control at approach to intersections, for similar reasons to my first suggestion.

This is a highly useful feature. I already proposed this here. In this thread there are multiple ideas to hone the roadbuilding.

The killer option would be to custom set junctions, like defining which lane can go in which direction (also defined the same way like when building tram tracks). This would give a much better influence on the traffic situation. Junctions with high traffic could be optimized.

Implementing a custom traffic light system would be nice, but this may be to difficult to program.

 

[Borgscan]

Implementing a custom traffic light system would be nice, but this may be to difficult to program.

Not to mention very resource hungry. People already complain about the path finding calculations. Public transport priority shouldn't have much impact on performance though.

 

[Cartographer29]

The intersection customization doesn't have to be complicated. CO gets most intersections right. But there are some times when, say, a single left turn lane isn't enough, and traffic backs up terrible. Simply select the "custom lane tool" and click the arrow painted on the road next to your existing left turn lane, and you can cycle it between "left only" "straight and left" or "straight only". Of course, some you wouldn't be able to do, like a left turn lane onto a wrong way one-way street.

An existing problem I have is a very busy and congested 4 lane one-way street. Because of this, I've designated the right-lane as a bus only lane. Most intersections, that right lane is a "straight and right turn lane" and there's no issues with bus traffic. But, when a one-way street crosses from left to right, that bus lane becomes a right turn only lane and loses it's straight through movement. This forces buses to leave the bus lane, cross the intersection, and then re-enter it, causing route delays due to the heavy traffic. This is a prime location where the ability to change lane arrows would be wonderful.

As a graphical issue, if I have an intersection that is entirely using bus only roads, I'd like the intersection to get the same colour (red). It looks terrible when I build a bus terminal, and the intersections are all black, but the roads are red.

And as for the custom traffic lights, there should be "normal" phasing (all directions roughly the same timing, as currently exists) and "preferential" whereby the chosen direction gets a pre-set increase in "green" time and all remaining directions lose an equal amount so that in the end, a full cycle is still the same amount of time. I don't want to get into "fine tuning", that's what a traffic light simulator program is for.

 

[iomex]

What Rockstar did with GTA San Andreas is create two phases of traffic lights - East/West and North/South. When a traffic light object is placed, it chooses the nearest phase based on it's rotation. Something similar in CiM2 would be a much simpler and less hungry solution. So, rather than when a junction is created the game creates a bespoke phase of traffic lights - the traffic light phase is already calculated based on that road spur's alignment. (Roads at 0-45 degrees, then roads at 46-90 degrees, etc). That way - all north/south roads will be green at once. It will stop that situation where traffic moves but then stops for the next junction 50 feet down the road.