Truck Traffic Snarl

[Crenickator]

Any advice for managing my industrial zone traffic? Seems like no matter how many bypasses, frontage roads, traffic circles, and rail connections I put in, there is always a line of 20 trucks waiting to get through every intersection and backing up the highways, and in some cases I can't even figure out where these trucks are trying to get to all at once.

I am using the Traffic ++ mod, but I doubt this is a bug. I just assume I don't know how to traffic for industrial, though my residential and commercial sections are quiet. It's a forestry focused zone, served by one major highway. It shouldn't really need a ton of trucks coming into town to bring resources, should it? It's built on high forest terrain. But that's what it seems, an excess of trucks coming into town bringing logs. And if I understand right, some trucks will go from one factory to another before departing?

Just what do I need to do?

 

[metacritical]

i use cargo stations to help keep industrial traffic off roads. i tend to have long motorway off-roads which helps avoid backing up the motorways too much. if things get really bad i also create large isolated industrial zones that are not connected to the motorways so no traffic from those zones can enter the motorway system, other than going from the delivery cargo station to wherever the cargo needs to be delivered and back again. these are connected to the other zones by footpaths, trains or metro stations, occasionally tram only roads but never roads that other vehicles can travel along

 

[Crenickator]

i use cargo stations to help keep industrial traffic off roads. i tend to have long motorway off-roads which helps avoid backing up the motorways too much. if things get really bad i also create large isolated industrial zones that are not connected to the motorways so no traffic from those zones can enter the motorway system, other than going from the delivery cargo station to wherever the cargo needs to be delivered and back again. these are connected to the other zones by footpaths, trains or metro stations, occasionally tram only roads but never roads that other vehicles can travel along

My industrial zone is isolated, and currently served by trams to keep car traffic down. I have two cargo train stations on either side of the area, with a highway in the center leading into a traffic circle. I also have a backroad into the area for garbage trucks, but it's not creating a problem. There are just so many log trucks that everything gets backed up, and like I said, I wasn't exactly sure where all of them are trying to get to, so I don't know a good way to try to use one-way streets to ease the flow. When I've tried, too many trucks seemed like they wanted to backtrack to other industrial zones they'd already passed and needed to loop around again, destroying the whole point of trying to get it all to flow one way. All I'm doing is moving around the intersection that gets totally swamped with trucks. Do I just need to spread out my zones more?

 

[28rommel]

Do I just need to spread out my zones more?

You might need to.
How large is this forestry area ? About how many different lots/businesses make up this area ?
It might help us ascertain the problem, if you can post a bird's-eye image (view) of this area, and the roads around it.

 

[ristosal]

Could you share a screenshot where we can see the whole industrial area and nearby highway connections? It's the best way to help troubleshoot a problem like this, really, because everyone builds a little different.

 

[Crenickator]

Okay, let's see here.

First Screenshot is the general area.

Originally it only encompassed the area between the 4-lanes with tramlines and I've had to expand. It seems like all my problems started when I began to expand. The highway traffic circle is just my latest attempt to try to get some decent traffic flow in there. I've tried several different things. There is a highway off-ramp at the very top of the area there, and it seems like everything wants to exit there. If I delete it, they all just snarl the traffic circle instead.

This is early morning, and more trucks just keep coming in the day until the highway is back up past my residential and commercial districts. Moving the intersection there on the right just seems to move where the traffic jam begins, and adding the other routes away from the traffic circle doesn't seem to appreciably affect where the trucks are trying to get to. They hit an intersection and it all backs up, and I can't seem to avoid the backup. Got plenty of money, though, so I should be able to do just about anything to fix it. Thanks.

 

[metacritical]

by isolated i mean there are no roads connecting to it all. workers get there by train, metro or tram (using tram only roads so cars cannot drive down them). goods leave by cargo train only.

 

[ristosal]

I know where that is located, the outside connections highway is quite a ways up north. That said I would dezone half of that and relocate if possible, because dealing with the amount of industrial traffic at that location isn't really worth it right now. There would be problems in any case because that is pretty much a highway dead end.

 

[28rommel]

From your first image (the one in the dark), it seems that I can see that this entire area has many, many trees. Are those just natural background trees spread throughout, or are they there because of forestry specialization ?
If they are due to the area being all forestry industry, then this area has ALOT, and I mean ALOT, of individual (forestry) businesses, in where each and every one of them, has one truck going in and out for import and export reasons. I try to keep my specialization industries to form growables the size of 4x4, and sometimes 3x4, only. This way each business "eats-up" (occupies) more land, but yet you only have to deal with one truck for each business. If I have small parcels of land left-over, then I place office zoning in there as filler (which with some public transportation and ped paths brings almost no traffic, and offices can withstand a higher degree of noise and ground pollution). From your second image (where it's raining), I can see you have quite abit of small/tiny business lots of forestry. Those tiny lots produce one truck each.

But even doing this, may not help, because this forestry area is very large.
Only thing I can think of, is to add an additional roundabout as an exit/entrance point for your trucks underneath your freeway (in addition to trying to alleviate so many small parcels of forestry businesses).

 

[Crenickator]

Thank you all. I was not aware I could overload it like that. It didn't seem to be a problem until suddenly there were so many trucks I couldn't do anything. Yes, almost all of it is forestry industry plots. I knew they got trucks, but a lot of the time I couldn't tell where the trucks were coming from or where they were going. They'd just sit at one frickin' intersection until everything was a giant traffic jam.

 

[Promethian]

One way roads are a good trick for heavy load. Something I like to do for industry is to have a long one way stretch that passes right through my industry area very deeply (I often use the highway type road for this) with one way roads leading off that stretch. This means incoming traffic can get deep into your industry area without hitting a stoplight or getting hindered by the traffic that has a shorter trip. Really big industry areas I run parallel one way roads going the opposite direction for the exits. This results in the traffic splitting off the one way roads to get where it needs to go then joining a one way road for a no stop path out. I'll provide some screenshots of one I did recently.

This is an overview of the entire zone:

This is the entrance:

This is the bottom with a cargo hub:

In these pictures the central road is a highway type, it runs all the way down. The parallel roads on either side are one way going back up to the highway with direct onramps to get back to the highway. All connections between the entry way and exit ways are one way some going to and some going from. The cargo hub gets a lot of traffic but because its effectively tied to these one ways everything just passes right through without a problem. I can fill in industrial zone to both the left and right for a couple blocks and there won't be a problem.