Solutions for highways, again

[douglasrac]

Hi,

I know that are other topics about highway designs etc, but here I want to focus in a new approach, considering the city and traffic, not only the highway it self.

I have a problem with my current city that is traffic jams near highways. It doesn't seems to be an optimal approach when dealing with highways, because if it carries a lot of cars, it's quite obvious that at the end of it will be a huge concentration of cars, since the exit will end up in a smaller and slower road. But maybe you have an idea that I dont.

First situation is below:

Here there is a common exit of a highway. The problem is that cars are jamming on the orange and yellow circles. On the yellow circle I think is due to the amount of connection too near to each other. In the orange circle is too many intersections. The question is how to reduce them?
Thus I created exits indicated by the red arrow. Those exits/entrances are special for workers in the industry. But that didn't help much. One way road would probably solve the problem but that is not possible in CiM.
Actually I don't see this type of connections in real life. Like 4 entrances/exits in one road.

The other situation is:

Access to neighborhoods. It seems to me that was the best approach. Also the most used in real life, but also with traffic jams all over. Seems simple, you go right or straight, but the cars doesn't flow.

And those situations are happening now, while the city is small. If I do nothing, when it's done will be a huge mess.

Here is the approach of real life I'm talking about:

Then I had the idea of making the connection to an avenue instead of a large road. But when I connect an external road to an avenue it automatically makes a connection between the 2 avenue roads, so it defeats the whole purpose of isolating the lanes.
I think I have to make exits and entrances with less connections as possible and make the large road or avenue to connect the rest of the neighborhood far way from the highway.

Any ideas?

 

[giladteller]

I didn't understand the problems. In what direction is the traffic jam in problem 1?
Where are the cars in the traffic jam going? Are they getting on the highway or off it?

 

[unmerged(272945)]

Well done, douglasrac and giladteller, for keeping this forum alive!

Maybe it's get busier again when there's more content released.

 

[douglasrac]

I didn't understand the problems. In what direction is the traffic jam in problem 1?
Where are the cars in the traffic jam going? Are they getting on the highway or off it?

I know, the screenshots doesn't show any real traffic jams but they are there.
The traffic jams are in all entrances/exits. Mainly in the white one. The red one in the other side is not being very used.

I manage to solve problem 1 by lowering the amount of connections. Same for problem 2. When going out of a highway, it seems that you need to make few connections, making the cars dissipate to other roads one at a time. Meaning the connections should be far from each other.

Number 1 now looks like this:

As you can see the road that was connection on the orange circle, south to north was diverted to connect directly to where there is already a connection. Making straight lanes, flowing more cars.

For problem 2:

Just less connections at the highway connection. Same principle.

And below something I just figure out. A solution for small spaces.

Instead of connecting the highway in both sides, I just connect one side and make a U turn in the highway. This way, with only two external connection from the highway, is possible to drive to any direction. The left U turn is actually quite unnecessary.

And the last one, another traffic jam I was having (didn't post).

Solved also by lowering the number of connections. The avenue ends in a large road that connects to the highway. The other large road was also connecting and now it's just going straight. This is good because now there are no cars deciding to go right or straight. There is only one way, flowing more cars and concentrating traffic in the road that have better capacity: the avenue.


Conclusion: highways exits/entrances are always a bottleneck. It needs to be planned in a way that the traffic will build up / drift away gradually and without compromising the flow. Which, by the way, is not the principle used in real life.
In my map that is pretty hard to do. It's an XL map but the space is somehow very limited.

 

[The_Skyo]

Nice read. I like working through the traffic problems. One thing I don't like with many people's user maps is this:
They place one small road going north/south. They place a perpendicular road intersecting the first road. They place another perpendicular road one, two, or three tiles away (East/West) also intersecting the first road. These two intersections so close together make for terrible traffic jams.