What I really would like

[AlknicTeos]

I really would like to adress traffic in a better way. In the real world I really hate traffic jams, and so I want to always build the perfect city in traffic terms ... but at sometime I end with a mess. Then I start to build bypasses. Just to see the bypass is full soon. Then I start to make priority roads, removing traffic lights and set stops, and build busses. I have there a longer route with 51 busses one lane ( 500% maintain), and 500 passengers waiting at certain stops. There was also once a mod, that allowed to set the lanes to be left, ahead or right turn before crossings, but that didn't work well.
Yes, I have mass transit , and I would really really like to fight traffic jams with some efficiency.
Especially some magic button, that auto suggests a bus route and auto sets the amount of busses on a lane. A Magic Bidirectional Button for bus routes and other route types.
Adding lanes to highways ( I believe in china there is somewhere a 16-lane highway). Something like magic auto suggest Highway Intersection.
I believe I have read somewhere, that traffic is wad . I would like to design a city with about 300k ( like the next bigger city I live) with hardly any traffic jams. Say no to traffic jams!

 

[Mylon]

I'm having a similar problem with my high density grids. They are 50 by 57 grids with a low of 6k and a peak of 11k residents.

First, I really dislike the traffic lights of CS, and even with TMPE its just not doable. I could theoratically setup the perfect traffic light with TMPE but I would have to do this for every traffic light in the city manually. So I just disable them everywhere, which solves most of my traffic problems.

Second, walk-ability, a cim will walk anywhere within 60 tiles, before it actually grabs their car if they have to go somewhere. Which is what I base most of my public transport on.
What helps me in this enormously is pedestrians crossings. (mod) and on 4 lane roads I give those a traffic light. (so pedestrians don't constantly block the road)

As a result I manage to keep traffic flow above 80% (I like to say 85% but sometimes my pedestrians block a intersection and it drops below 85 till I fix things)

Even with all that, I still had to double my metro cars, and triple my trams in capacity to for fill the demand.

But yea to avoid traffic jams, you have to build everything so it can not clog up. Avoid full blown intersections, make them T sections. Make sure most of the traffic uses mostly right-hand turns (or left-hand turns when using left-traffic) You have 1 truck waiting to go left, and soon there are 10 waiting going left on a busy road.

For industries an important one is not to build warehouses on your busy roads, make a small road on the side to put your warehouse there so it doesn't clog up the big road.

The one thing I found that didn't work, is just adding lanes... It's not the lanes, it's the junctions that make your life hell when it comes to keeping traffic flowing.

A magic button for auto-suggest bus/tram routes etc would be nice, but for me it would already help a lot just to find out where everyone waiting at a stop wants to go. (like on the metro you select routes and it shows you where everyone is coming from and going too)

 

[AlknicTeos]

Second, walk-ability, a cim will walk anywhere within 60 tiles, before it actually grabs their car if they have to go somewhere.

oh, 60 tiles. That's new to me, many thanks.
Any Ideas how to avoid traffic jams on the highway? Once I have built 3 parallel highway roads and the result was still worse. The junctions were made so, that they got priority, hardly any stops. I always try to make the big traffic junctions from highways to be one way and roundabouts and no left turning vehicles

 

[28rommel]

AlknicTeos,
Maybe we can help and give you some better advice if you include some pictures of your city.
Take some birds-eye-view images of your city and post them here in your thread.
Your "Prt Scr" (Print Screen) button on your keyboard will work.

 

[AlknicTeos]

sadly, I have deleted the old saves some weeks ago... so I have only one from industries dlc

The main problem is the highway traffic from north into the oldtown ( low density buildings)

I dont know where to inject the traffic from the new town ( high density, west the highway ) proper

Bus lane 1 , connects the newtown inhabitants with the oldtown industry

Maybe it's my ligma, but I also like to build as dense as possible, so maybe I gonna kill oldtown one day. Maybe it's caused of the limited place from simcity I-II. I achieved better traffic with hexagonal streets ( maybe 'cause the place doesn't offer the max building squares, but sadly the save game doesnt exist anymore.

But lets see if I get myself above 80 traffic flow

edit : this was a game more to explore the new featurs

 

[Glitcher]

Coming from someone with a population of 100'000 and an average traffic flow of 87%, I can easily tell what the problem is with your traffic: POOR HIGHWAY ACCESS!

What you've essentially built is a narrow bottleneck (two bottlenecks actually) where vehicles are filtering down to a particular spot to reach the highway or cross from one side of town to the other. It's inevitable that you're going to have traffic jams with such a poor setup. You need to be more ambitious with your highway development, since it has the highest speed limit and is therefore more attractive to vehicles. You CAN'T simply rely on one long highway running down the middle of your city and just build two-lane and four-lane roads everywhere else for people to get around. That's a novice mistake that leads to long congestion lines.

So I've drawn you up a solution. It involves creating a second highway crossing the first one and supplying it with many more highway ramps. If you make it easier for vehicles to get highway access, the traffic will be more evenly dispersed and you won't have any congestion. Just follow blue lines in my diagram and you should be golden!

 

[AlknicTeos]

I will give it a try, many thanks

 

[28rommel]

AlknicTeos,
From your first image, your city doesn't look too bad (some examples from other players are sometimes "shocking").
I can see the initial Three-Way (Freeway) Intersection in the center of your image, that was given to you when you first started this map.
What I would have recommended, is that you should have planned for this freeway intersection to continue to be highway, and not dead-end it to be a custom roundabout (as you did). Actually, you could have planned to later replace this Three-Way Intersection with a Cloverleaf Intersection (Four-Way), so that you could also extend your overall freeway system in a northern (or north-west) direction.

One thing I see a lot in people's example images, is they don't plan their overall future freeway network, to be extended through-out your map.
Do not try to work from just the freeway system that is given to you; you must plan to extend it, in various directions. Don't get me wrong ... you should not go too crazy with the freeways. But the more on and off ramps through-out your city (with your extended freeway system), the more that your overall traffic is spread-out (But don't place your on/off ramps too close to one another. They also need to be spread-out along the freeway). This massively avoids a problem that players experience (as you are) where all traffic is trying to use the one or two freeway on/off ramps that exist (bottle-neck).

Here is example of my city with 81% traffic flow and about 120K citizens. I have zero traffic backup through-out my entire city (no lies). At most, at some of my major road intersections, all traffic cannot clear before the light turns red. But in most cases, by the next green light, all traffic that previously could not make it (and new traffic that also approaches) clears the intersection completely.
Do you see in the images how I have extended my freeway network? One down-side to this is cost. It is not only expensive to build, but the ongoing upkeep costs can add-up (so be careful if you are not playing with the free unlimited-money mod that comes with the game).
You just need to slowly add more and more new freeway (and on/off ramps), as you continue to grow; don't extend it too fast.
My second image is the public transportation view. By the way I only own the base-game and the SnowFall DLC.

Good luck.
PS: I don't expect you to make massive destruction of your city in your current game, to incorporate my recommendations. But in the next new city/game you start, take into consideration.
If you want to see more images or closer images of an area, just tell me and will be glad to help.

 

[28rommel]

LOL.
Someone beat me to it.
But it's very refreshing to see that the advice is almost identical. I swear I did not read Glitcher's post before posting mine.

 

[AlknicTeos]

.. instead I gave my hexagon play a new start

it's only 21k big, but still 92% flow, and yet I'm looking for embadding highways in a hexagon way to it, so trying to look somewhat ahead. And maybay I also try to use dead end roads.
The thing about hexagon is, if you disable the traffic lights is, that it looks they would collide, but they will drive through.
Maybe I'm able to get the 87% flow at 100k, as target. The idea behind hexagon was once, if you want to only use oneways and still want to arrive everywhere you would have to use a input triangle and a output triangle, and then I have seen, there is also no issue when disabling the oneway
Oh, and yet I don't use Busses.

But what I really wonder is, how you are able to have no jams at the highway ramps, that's always my first issue. Or maybe it's im thinking to much of my local next bigger city and there is usually about every 1-2 km some ramps or tunnels, some kind of splitting or fusions and not every 100 m or so. One map area is only 2km*2km big

but more tomorrow, 87% at 100k seems really to be a beautiful goal

edit: huh, since when do we have a 4 lane highway?

 

[Glitcher]

Dear God, that's just as bad as before! Did you not listen to a word I said? Instead of expanding your highway network, you created this ridiculous hexagonal road network that has some of the worst highway access I've ever seen. Seriously, I checked your save file and found it's practically impossible to enter or leave the city through the highway from any part of town. You're still playing like an amateur who refuses to upgrade his starting highway T-intersection, instead relying on two-lane and four-lane roads everywhere.

Listen, creating highway access is not that difficult. All you need is a bridge over the highway and four ramps: two for each highway direction - one to enter, one to exit. That's it! Instead of building that very simple setup, you made a virtual maze of tunnels where I can't even tell how the hell I'm supposed to get around. If I'm on the high density side of town, I found it's impossible to go both directions on your main highway. You're missing ramps!

IMO, this city is another failure. You can be content with a 92% traffic flow for now, but this city is going to crash and burn as it expands when you realize you didn't build the proper highway access for your vehicles. You need to completely rethink your traffic strategy. You need to get a bus system in place. You need to leave space to add transit lines like trains. You need to stop relying on wide roads everywhere as the end-all solution to traffic. And most importantly:

EXPAND!

YOUR!!

HIGHWAYS!!!

 

[Glitcher]

Here, these are some screenshots from my city of a mature highway network on very difficult terrain. Even with steep cliffs, you can still run a line of interlocking highways to facilitate vehicles getting around. This is what you should be aiming for:

 

[talisman56]

My neatness gene is having a meltdown, but if it works...

 

[Glitcher]

My neatness gene is having a meltdown, but if it works...

You can't be neat on terrain this steep. You simply have to build highways and interchanges that are functional and fluid. And they work too. As I said, 87% traffic flow with 100'000 citizens speaks for itself.

 

[AlknicTeos]

still you won't win a neatness award.
build up and reorganinzed my highway a litte. The latest sector is the one in the upper left, yet the right buttom could still grow a little. And as you can see I'm trying different highway-hexagon intersections. Yet 91% flow at 50k.

Also I will need later or sooner a real hexagon highway intersection, guess will have to make it with big roundabouts ( the bigger roundabout are the the single triangles within)... this all eats so much space, even when I lose more 'cause of the hexagon structure.
And at 40k I thought busses would be good, with all this bus streets. It was horrible, metro ftw

edit : 70k 89 flow, next big step is a roundabout highway intersection at north

 

[Glitcher]

That's.... better at least. Maybe get more highway on the right side of the city, but it's within the ballpark. I don't know what your obsession with hexagons is, but if you need a six-way highway interchange, you can always try this one.

 

[28rommel]

... And as you can see I'm trying different highway-hexagon intersections. Yet 91% flow at 50k.
View attachment 414011

LOL.
Your hexagon city looks kind of neat. Its design is like a city of an advanced, futuristic race of people (think Star Trek).
When I first saw your birds-eye image, it reminded me of the 1997 movie titled Contact, starring Jodie Foster.
In it, when she is travelling through space in a wormhole, she suddenly comes to a stop where she looks down on an alien planet in a far-away galaxy, and she sees the outline of a huge city, similar to your picture.

 

[Glitcher]

BTW, I noticed in your screenshot that you have the power usage, water usage and smoke detector distribution policies enabled. All three are bad ideas. I suggest you read this guide on game policies.

 

[AlknicTeos]

I don't know what your obsession with hexagons is,

it should be some kind of proof by contradiction for traffic to be not wad.

Something that is that kind of stupid ... srsly the traffic flow shall be in this about 11% not 89%.
A game is always only an abstraction of the real world, but this game is probably one of the more accurate city builders, as it allows among other things a high grade of free roadbuilding. And as long I don't know the meta, I try to picture the real world. If it's wad to have 3 drive ups and exits at an distance you would have one acceleration lane, well that breaks with the real world.

... oh and have I told you, that the city has no single traffic light , .... maybe it's right of way enforced by horn

... imagine a real world crossing with 6 roads, you would stand very long at the lights

edit : the 3 harmfull policies made an income difference from 130k ,

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

edit: huh, since when do we have a 4 lane highway?

Since the "Mass Transit" DLC, 2017-05-18.