In my latest town, I wanted to try a traffic solution where I fed all four freeways into a 4-lane highway around the city center. All outbound freeways also emerge from that ring road.
The results are very satisfying. Knowing full well that the Cims from other towns will use my freeways to travel to and from each other, I usually don't like connecting freeways inside my cities. This time, however, the ring road handled things quite well. Whereas I had a few offramps to some commercial sectors that needed a little more traffic, the only real way to do inter-city traffic, including Cims that want to use my traffic grid to do a U-turn and go back to where they came from, was to use the downtown ring road.
What helps very much with traffic management is the mixing of left- and right-hand exits. One hand is for getting into town, the other hand is for leaving it via a freeway. I put the outbound exits just before an inbound entrance uses the same lanes. The exiting traffic then doubles back about 90 degrees for the outbound lanes that match up with the previous inbound ones.
My only traffic hot spots are where I got cute and used 6-lane intersections for decorative purposes in a park/unique building complex. All my freeways are smooth driving.
I plan to stick with one-way ring roads for my future cities. They work great!
The results are very satisfying. Knowing full well that the Cims from other towns will use my freeways to travel to and from each other, I usually don't like connecting freeways inside my cities. This time, however, the ring road handled things quite well. Whereas I had a few offramps to some commercial sectors that needed a little more traffic, the only real way to do inter-city traffic, including Cims that want to use my traffic grid to do a U-turn and go back to where they came from, was to use the downtown ring road.
What helps very much with traffic management is the mixing of left- and right-hand exits. One hand is for getting into town, the other hand is for leaving it via a freeway. I put the outbound exits just before an inbound entrance uses the same lanes. The exiting traffic then doubles back about 90 degrees for the outbound lanes that match up with the previous inbound ones.
My only traffic hot spots are where I got cute and used 6-lane intersections for decorative purposes in a park/unique building complex. All my freeways are smooth driving.
I plan to stick with one-way ring roads for my future cities. They work great!
