Good point about the road speed. Actually, I've often found reducing road speed limits very useful for correcting traffic problems. For example, if you've got two similar route options, but one is ever so slightly shorter, you can get huge backups on one while the other is empty. Put in a slower road in place of the one with backups, and you may find the traffic distributes itself more evenly between the two. Putting in bigger, faster roads just encourages more traffic to go that way.
great point. i started using slower speeds to help keep stuff from piling up, especially on roundabouts. if i want cars to take back roads i use slow speeds on back roads and higher speeds on highways to encourage specific routes from certain parts of the city.
With TMPE, you can also achieve the same thing without replacing roads by simply reducing the speed limit from the default on the congested road, or give the other, unused road a higher then normal speed limit, either of those can encourage traffic to use an alternate route but still leave the route available to the traffic where the alternate would make no sense for them to use.
Holy crap, after that 50‘s intro, I wholly expected Ike Eisenhower to pop up and introduce the US Interstate system to us. Good job and another great video.
Managing traffic is one of the things that I really enjoy about C:S. Also vehicular and pedestrian traffic gives the city so much life, and seeing them all go their way with proper road hierarchy and connectivity is bliss :) You explained it well!
The principles of road hierarchy can be applied to transit as well. Bike and walking takes the role of local roads, being greatest access, but low range. Your collectors need moderate access, so frequent stops, but greater range and speed than walking. These are typically busses or light rail, or sometimes metro where extra capacity is needed. The collectors function mostly to link local access to arterial routes and other local access. Arterial routes have limited access, so few stops with greater distance between them, and higher speed and range. Modes like trains, monorail, or metro are well suited to this use, but busses can also work, providing they have limited access and cover greater ranges, like a bus with only a few stops across the city. Instead of highways you get external connections, like intercity rail, intercity busses, planes, and ships. These have very little access and should connect to arterial service. The major difference is that all levels of the hierarchy can intersect at the same point. Where a train stops and exchanges with busses, Cims can walk from the area instead, moving straight from arterial to local access or vice versa. This doesn't negate the roll of collectors though, as trying to link all local access directly to arterial service would increase the stop frequency to hamstring the arterial service.
I agree and actually do very similar things with my mass transit systems in CS, and never have any issues getting Cims to use it heavily. I also follow the rule of thumb that each bus route follows a particular road, with an interchange or turnaround loop at either end of the route to reverse direction and follow the route back in the opposite direction for the 2nd half of the route, providing 2 way bus service along the road it services. I've downloaded some different size buses (the Ryde Series) which gives 15, 30, 60 and 100 passenger busses. My reasoning is each bus acts as a replacement to Cims driving their cars, giving them access to the road system using a shared vehicle. Metro, tram, train, ferry and monorail are also used similarly, but typically higher up on the transit hierarchy. For me Metro is usually the highway equivalent for the public transit system. Also, I rarely ever do circular routes, preferring the 2 directional service the line and dog bone routes produce.
I love the way that for a computer game the top tip is always: make sure you have good walking, cycling and public transport links to avoid the need for cars. It's almost like that would be a good model to follow for real life cities!
I have seen a lot of cities skylines tutorials and follow a bunch of UA-camrs here about managing traffic, but no one is like you. You teach the basics so simply and clearly that I can use them and get good results in my cities. Thank you
Here is a tip I use on freeways. Using traffic manager, I change the speed limits on each lane. The slow lane is on the default speed, and each lane up gains ten kilometers of speed. This helps with freeway traffic, especially traffic that is trying to get from one city to another. Through traffic chooses the fastest option, so they don’t get in the way of local traffic that is using the freeway to get from suburbs to downtown for example.
I think one of the best things that’s helped me out is giving transit the most direct route, and intentionally making the private car’s route allot more circuitous- metro and dedicated, grade separated tram lines can be really good for this imo; you do need good transit nodes/connections tho
I've fount routing busses along your connector and arterials as car replacements works incredibly well for me. For a deep neighborhood, you can also add in a short feeder route to bring commuters to the main roads as well. I've added the Ryde bus assets which gives me 15, 30, 60 and 100 passenger busses so there's options to apply a hierarchy to your bus routes, with a short, low use feeder route using the smaller busses, and an arterial, main line route using the larger busses. My reasoning is to make busses an alternative to cars, by having them use the same routes as cars use. The roads are there because they connect people with the workplaces, shopping, entertainment centers they need to function, so the busses should just use the roads to give the Cims an alternate way to use the roads other then driving their own cars. Works like a charm. And if they need to make a turn at an intersection, they just transfer between bus lines and keep on going. I use things like metro and passenger trains as the equivalent of highways mostly. Trams and monorails would mostly take the role of arterials when the busses just can't cut it any more, even at the largest 100 passenger level.
You can plot and plan that but things change and ruin plans. If I just remove all cars off the highway or road then they will soon learn to develop their own way.
It may sound funny but that's exactly what city planners do in real life to reduce congestion in cities. They give the most direct routes for cycling and walking, a slightly less direct route for public transit, and a circuitous route for cars. City planners used to think (and some still do!) that adding more lanes for car traffic would reduce congestion, but it actually worsens congestion in the long term. Just take a look at the Katy Freeway in Texas. Adding more lanes to it didn't reduce traffic in the end, it just made it worse! Traffic planners also have other tools to reduce congestion and car dependency but this one is pretty important
Yumbltv... I dont leave many comments on UA-cam, but I wanted to leave this one for you. I really appreciate your content on Cities Skylines. I hope you continue. Your information and explainations are great. Your video titles are clear and cover what is in the video. Your voice is calming. Could watch / listen all day. You do a really good job. Please keep it up. ... and hopefully on into Cities Skylines 2 if they make it.
Hey YUMBL, console player here. It’s been my experience that cims will choose the faster road (within reason) over the shortest distance. Example: a large roundabout with a highway speed overpass will make the frustrating u-turn across traffic instead of exiting onto the purpose-built roundabout under the oncoming highway. Being limited to DLC roads and no traffic manager (to stop turns across oncoming traffic) makes for convoluted solutions.
New player here on console and I'm just getting to 40k cims and I gotta say the traffic is absolutely horrible. I have fairly well designed city structure and still have cims going the super long way instead of the direct highway path... They'll go all the way around the city loop when they could just go right and merge for a quick trip. Drives me nuts!
The fun thing about this game is you have to plan ahead. Like, really far ahead. Think about where your traffic will flow to and from and build a road structure to fulfill this demand. But doing so, especially in vanilla, is hard, as you don't get all the road options from the get go. And it is hard to turn local roads into collectors without destroying all that's built alongside it. Planning ahead for 3- or 4-lane intersections make this even harder! Dedicated or combined lanes? Which direction demands doubling up on lanes? Could you achieve higher usage by growing in a certain direction? Man, I love this game.
I love how you are explaining this from the perspective of game mechanics, I've had a hard time getting cims to properly utilize asymmetrical roads and now I see why
You solved the traffic problem, plan route for cims better, and so on and so on, but still you didn't manage to make traffic use all lanes. Sure separating lane exclusively improves the traffic (a little), sure distributing road improves the traffic, but those are not what the problem is. What we really want is that if there is two lane going to the same exact direction, cims will distribute themselves evenly (or at least randomly) in the lanes available. But no they won't they will still use that one lane.
They will get in the correct lane as early as possible. If you want two cars to use different left turn lanes they better have different destinations after they turn ie. turning left and right after turning left together. Its pretty simple.
Another good video, but what else do we expect from the youtuber from the 50s ;) I really like the road decal you have on your arterial roads ( thin it is them ) and we see when you talk about lane usage around 7:40 just looks so nice seeing that "only" on the road :D
I can't thank you enough. The titles of all your videos are perfect but you always drop in some pearls along the way that answer other problems I bump into in my city builds. This one was no exception. Thank you, sir.
I'm so glad you made this video! Too often I see people go straight to suggesting TMPE to solve lane usage issues when road planning is the true fix to the issue.
Same, I don't like relying on mods that can easily be broken in future updates (and then you're hoping the maker or someone else will fix the mod) and treating them as a crutch for failing to understand how the vanilla game works.
Thanks for pointing this out. CS is actually super realistic. There's a reason LA is having constant traffic jams and some European cities can deal with it better. Making a better city makes traffic less of a problem.
Srry, CS is absolutely not realistic. We often know our roads. When there are two lanes going to the highway and only the last 300mtr is one lane and the other 2 miles are two way, the cars take the left lane and the slower traffic the right lane, up to that point it gets one way. CS does not act like that. It draws a line from point a to point b and pick just one lane to draw and follow. Thats why you get that superlong one lane filled roads. IOW; we all are looking to "" cheat" CS to overcome the AI's handicap.
@@deejeemadrox1866 well Sascha is correct because they're likely referring far more to agents considering speed limits as part of its path selection, but yes you're correct generally but not quite. You're referring to something different, a dynamic / real time lane selection. C:S actually DOES have a real time lane selection system but it is limited only to emergency agents (and not the civilian agents) to balance performance and realism. Notice emergency vehicles dynamically change lanes to avoid occupied lanes as they're responding to an emergency call. This is on vanilla. As yumbl mentioned, normal civilian agents don't 'see' each other. Tbf from a certain perspective, that's true to life, it's common for travellers to not really care about one another and take a 'me first' selfish / toxic / hostile attitude and refuse to move or takes hostile action towards you. At least very true in cities and / or obnoxiously car dependent sht holes. Anyway C:S has a bit more depth than even the video depicts.
this is a massive fucking cope. LA traffic comes from traffic snakes and HIGH VOLUME. LA traffic exists on ALL lanes when it does. It does not come from a bunch of AI following in one lane just to go to the empty lane at the very time they need to turn off. This is dumb.
Very good advice, all of it is very true and applying road hierarchy has helped my cities get much better traffic flow. One thing I've also found helps, for when you still get that 1/3 lanes used the other 2 ignored scenario is to change the TMPE AI system to have it use improved AI, as that can induce vehicles to change lanes based on traffic at higher settings, and thus get lane condensation back-ups to free themselves up simply by allowing the vehicles to spread out and use all the lanes. Dedicated turning lanes at intersections also helps, as vehicles will tend to bunch up on all purpose lanes even when they don't have to and get in each other's way as they all choose the lane that can go left, or straight as that satisfies the needs of all drivers who will be turning left at some point. Same goes for those multi-purpose straight+right lanes. By making lanes that are left turn only, right turn only and straight only, you force the vehicles to spread out and use more lanes, since the middle lane has to turn left, anyone going straight can't use that lane and has to use another lane until they're ready to turn left. Those turning left, have to use the middle lane as they can't turn left from any other lane, and so on. That's a basic and essential part of lane management and though it was shown visually, it was not explained verbally, how and why those dedicated turning and straight lanes were used and how to include them for those who don't know how and why to set that up yet.
this is useful but very hard when my citizens tend to stay in one lane to later on do a 3 lane switch in one go to get to the right lane instead of just being in the god damn right lane from the beginning so everyone does not have to be in the same lane om hohmofdgsfkkdokfdsopfkddfs
Here's the problem I have, which this video did not address: I have a long arterial. It has a major point of entry. Let's say a highway. And after that point, there are maybe 10 or 12 other arterials and collectors intersecting it. Maybe you can make a left turn at all of them.And since this arterial is toward one side of the city, most of its traffic will EVENTUALLY be making a left. So what happens? EVERY GOD DAMN DRIVER GETS IN THE LEFT LANE. It doesn't matter if they're taking exit 1, exit 10, or exit 999. They want to be in the left lane and they DO NOT CARE about anything else. The fact that your arterial is a 6-lane one-way road, and they have literally four middle lanes to choose from is irrelevant. The only deviation from this is if the roads being turned onto are more than one lane. Then you have multiple left-turn lanes, and thus all but the last cannot go straight. For the sake of argument, let's say you have lights with two-lane-each-way traffic. So the traffic not turning there doesn't get into lane #6...it gets into lane #5, which is also a left-turn lane, but has the potential to go straight. And you would think, okay, well, if the traffic turning there has a lane to exit from, at least *THAT* traffic isn't going to be in the column of death, right? Wrong. Because any cars getting off at this point then ask, "Which lane do I want to be on in the new road?" And if the answer is the right lane, then they say F U to the left-most lane because the second-to-last lane corresponds to the right lane on their new road. It doesn't seem to matter what kind of outflow you have from these roads. Any sort of impedance whatsoever will result in this major, major traffic snarl. If you're lucky, and plan well, it often clears before becoming a 10-mile one-lane traffic jam. But this is a circumstance that, really, either shouldn't happen or that there should be some sort of recourse for beyond downloading mods like TM:PE. Is there?
1. If I'm not mistaken, cars do consider possible jams. To be more specific, they factor average speed on the road rather than maximum, which is determined by traffic jams you have on the road. But there's one problem with that. To factor the traffic jams you actually need to have the jams, and only after a backup is stacked and average speed on the road is recalculated, newly spawn vehicle will consider taking another road. So, building a detour cannot clear your main road off the traffic, only reduce it, because cars will take a detour only if there's a jam on the main road (works IRL as well). And there's a delay in reaction, cars chose their way from the very beginning. 2. About not using other lanes. I used to have that problem before, but somehow I overcome it. At first, use the "dynamic lane selection" option in TMPE. I'm not sure if it helps or if it's a placebo, but I use it anyway. Secondly, you can manipulate with lane connector. How's that? Well, if you have cars stacked in one lane, the chances are they're going the same way. Look that way, as you showed in video, and propose an alternative with lane connector. For example, in your case, you can take your intersection and merge two onward lines into one they are going to. But that won't be enough. Then you go to the previous intersection on their way and split the lane they came from into two lanes you want to use (in your case it’s not the intersection, but the node, where the road switches it's asymmetry). Now that should work, because you literally gave the cars two equal options that they will choose randomly.
Using the traffic policies such as “encourage biking, heavy traffic ban etc” could also work. Great work with the traffic tips, you do deserve more subs
Only started playing CS1, 2 weeks ago.... Don't really like cs2 in its current state but cs1 with all the mods is fantastic.... You make some excellent points and give some food for thought about issues I'm experiencing and they totally make sense... Looking forward to backtracking through your great videos because there is a lot to learn (and have fun in the meantime)
i see a lot of players of cities use so much highway through there cities, i live in holland and here highways are at the edge of towns if not a bit away from them, i use the road system i see around me, which is the road hierarchy as you explained, i have a 1 mil city with only a small highway connection on the edge of my map, and i use medium roads to get them into my city. i almost never run into a problem, On every map i play, i always have 85/90% traffic flow, and no backed up traffic. also i use metro and trains, busses i never use. and am a big fan of pedestrian roads. "agents" as you call them will walk half a 25 tile map if you give them the chance.
Generally, I try to avoid using ridiculously wide roads, as they ruin walkability. I usually don't go much higher than a 4-lane road except at major intersections, where I might put a 6 or 8 lane road depending on how busy it is.
I did know about the road hierarchy, but had no idea about how the traffic system pathing worked, or how road speed affects it. Love your videos, I've learned so much from watching you, and it's really changed my playstyle a lot :)
Delightful video! I can't believe I'm STILL learning things about traffic after three years playing. Not a complaint. Also, this city is absolutely beautiful. If there was an uncanny valley for simulated cities, I'd say you've successfully crossed over.
Actually i was a little anxious to learn some horrific news about major flaws in the traffic system, which made all the city sims in the last 20 years before Skylines practically broken for good and absolutely unplayable. On the other hand i am a bit dissappointed as the information you compiled here is not very surprising. Don't get me wrong, the information is well presented but most of it can be picked up by many people by just playing the game. In the end i am relieved that i will not have to spend hours fiddling with TM:PE lane connector to overhaul everything. So thanks for that ! :)
Great video! I love non-American cities where there is huge amount of streets for pedestrians(half of the streets in my city in the game are like that). Of course if you're doing an American city, this effective way of living it's rare to see xD.
@@YUMBL The fact that C:S has pedestrian and cyclist considerations / implementations whatsoever automatically make it support enough compared to any city builders out there, all of which lack it to my knowledge in favor for games where cars are the 'people'. But ofc, more support, integrations, or content for peds and cyclists in C:S is welcome!
yumbl always bringing great topics to the table.. this idea hit very close to home as the traffic system is my absolute favorite part of these games. it's a giant puzzle always evolving and growing; for some reason i love to watch it simulate.. the tools mods and vanilla systems really creates a unique play style that not many * if any * other game can provide. But i gotta say simple stuff like cars stacking one lane while another is empty really breaks the immersion. the traffic system in this game paired with mods makes for a diverse and complex mechanic alone; ive spent hours tweaking lanes, speed and restrictions trying to make things flow at a decent rate. sometimes i think i spend too much effort on this games traffic rather than something more productive hahah.
I have gotten the explanation of traffic (ALL traffic, pedestrian, bike, cars, public transport etc.) that they calculate the pathing by adding a penalty points to the routes. I don't know the exact number added by each entity but it goes like: Bigger roads has less penalty points than smaller roads. Faster roads adds less penalty points than slow. Each intersection/lanechange adds penalty points. Using a car adds more penalty points than public or walking, transferring between public transports adds a tiny penalty (still lower than cars) etc etc. So f ex if you have an intersection you can use increase the speed in one of the lanes and that lane will add less penalty points to the vehicles and they will prefer that road (I think each segment of road adds penalty points, the faster the road, fewer points, the bigger the road, fewer points). So the thinking of traffic as agents is absolutely correct, and each agent calculates the route (when they start) and chooses the route with the LEAST penalty points. You can further modify this by using TM:PE (to change individual speeds in lanes it's needed anyway, as for my example above) and instruct the vehicles to also get penalty points if an intersection is slow with a lot of waiting times. Special lane rules (I think its called) f ex makes it so they never change more than one lane at a time (you have probably seen traffic come to a complete stop on a highway because vehicles comes to a complete stop while changing 2 lanes over, that setting removes that). Otherwise, as usual, a well thought out video from JUMBLAcorp (as me as a swede pronounces it xD)
@@YUMBL hold ctrl (or alt, can't remember, it's one of them xD) and mouse over lanes while in the speedsettings overlay in TM:PE. Also hold shift to change the whole distance to the next intersection. :)
Solid advice - although i may add that limited access does have one use - i only give neighborhood "branches" one point of access to collecters to prevent through traffic - seems to be working well so far
Yeah and then you realize why most newer subdivisions have only a couple connections to nearby major roads, cuts down greatly on people using your neighborhood as a shortcut especially if the remaining possible shortcut is no longer one because it's so long, slow and winding.
Thank you. For me the key to the whole thing is knowing that their journeys are pre determined. Therefore they won't adjust to the traffic conditions en route. I hope that the CS2 a.i. is updated. Especially now there will be roadworks and more consequences to your actions. Maybe GPS satellites become a DLC 😁
when i see a car destination "residential" and the fact that car is banned at some point of its gps direction (because i made a pedestrian residential area), makes the car turning around for a while, stopping and despawnning, even when despawning is disabled through traffic manager.
the proof that i broke the ia through traffic manager is that ia targets a destination impossible to reach on car. the the game is design to make every point of the map accesible with car. because you can' only zone on roads. accessible with cars. it's specified that mods alterate the game funcitonnalities. too bad i worked so hard on my pedestrian city.
I know you said that they don't use the shortest route, but I do think it's a factor. I had an issue with everyone taking short cuts through low speed residentials because the distance was actually a lot shorter than the higher speed direct flow main arterial roads, and they were clogging the neighborhoods up. The biggest fix was to simply make the roads that access the hoods directly, a bit longer. From 8u to like 16u. Longer feeder type roads seem to keep the traffic on the arterials because the fixed hood routes are much longer. I think it's a combination of distance AND speed, and there is a value that is being generated using both, where the smallest result determines the path ultimately chosen. Also I like that intro.
Right. It is always the FASTEST route. Thats speed over distance. The shortest route will often be the fastest, but not always with speed limit as the variable.
I am surprised you did not mention lane math here. This can help reduce single lane backups. Since vehicles on a "through" path pick the leftmost lane, having fewer lanes, as well as putting exits before entrances, causes fewer weird merges.
One thing to add, about road hierarchy not always working, is that you can adapt the roads according to how they are used. If a ton of traffic is using a local road because it’s much shorter than the collector/arterial option, then perhaps that local road should be upgraded to a collector. The point is that you can’t always dictate what the traffic should do, sometimes you need to adapt to what the traffic is doing.
One of the overlooked things people don't seem to often mention is enabling dynamic lane selection in TMPE mod, and setting it to the highest level your hardware can support. It's a free world but I wouldn't play this game without it. It doesn't make the cars behave like human drivers in terms of lanes but I found noticeably less or shorter single-file lane queues at intersections, with intersections being generally easier to micro-manage depending on design and location in the network. I could be wrong on this but I think I started using dynamic lane selection in a previous YUMBL video.
Dynamic lane selection works because its job is to recalculate path when vehicle has opportunity to save time. For example when vehicle approach long congested lane like shown on the video it will check if empty lane could be used to get to the same point (e.g. at 4th segment ahead), comparing traffic flow on lanes and also speed of the vehicle in front. If the difference of speed is >25% then it will change that little part of the path to use empty lane. Unfortunately that process can take a lot of time when segments are congested (it has to calculate flow based on vehicles that are on each segments) so vehicles that will use DLS are selected randomly with additional cooldown between uses to prevent overuse. Highest level may cause issues on highways, one of the signs of the problem with this setting are vehicles changing lanes for no reason, forcing other vehicles to slow down.
I like to think of fixing traffic as reducing conflict points. The only reason vehicles back up is because they're trying to be in the same place at the same time. By conflict points, I'm referring to two things here: first, conflict points as typically defined are places where two different routes cross. This could be a left turn in an intersection (which causes conflict points with oncoming traffic, cross traffic, and both left turns starting from the perpendicular directions), right turns at an intersection (can run into cars going straight into the lane they're trying to enter), and especially merges (two lanes of traffic either joining into one or having to cross over each other, like on the bridge of a cloverleaf interchange). There are many other examples of this, but these help highlight my point. The second type of conflict point has more to do with congestion. In the example shown in the video, many vehicles wanted to be in the left lane, thus they have to pile up like that because they can't move closer to the intersection in that lane. Imagine yourself as a car on that road, but limit yourself to using the lanes you'd choose if there were no other cars--are you going to end up in the left lane there to take the ramp? Probably, so a situation like this (assuming it was happening with the highway intact) might mean it's time to either get them on a different route entirely, or it's time to add a second lane to the ramp, further ahead. Another great thing to think about when fixing traffic is to find the bottlenecks. This is something you'd be doing anyway, if you're following my advice above, but still worth mentioning nonetheless. Usually the best way to go about this is to start by finding a place at the head of the traffic (i.e. further in the direction of travel, where the traffic gets stopped up) and work on opening that up. This is something you have to be careful with, as widening roads will induce demand, but if you do this with simple things like using traffic manager to create dedicated turning lanes, different streams of traffic have a chance to separate from each other prior to the point of conflict. For anyone that's driven on a two lane road with no turning lanes, you probably know what I'm talking about here, since vehicles turning left have to sit in the way of traffic.
#1 Strange... I find a solution to many of my problems by taking part of your posts. And, even more strange, in the end my problems isn't any problems at all. The problem is my thinking... :)) #2 One clou to why roundabouts is so popular in ie Europe is that, as far as I've seen, almost nowhere it's allowed to make a right turn against redlight, as it is in many crossings in the US
Living in Southern California, specifically Orange County, has messed me up a bit with trying to figure out road layouts. You can almost take the speed limits you mentioned and bump them up one level so the highway almost a becomes glorified arterial in some ways. 😅 Hell, what Google Maps insists on calling "Highway 39" is more commonly known as "Beach Blvd," and Imperial Highway and Pacific Coast Highway (90 and 1, respectively) are generally regarded as arterials. I was rather surprised when Google Maps told me to take an *on*-ramp to Jamboree *Road*, although that segment of Jamboree Rd. admittedly is more highway-like than road-like. It all comes down to jurisdiction and who is responsible for maintenance. The part of Imperial Highway that the city of Yorba Linda assumed responsibility for lost its highway designation and was subsequently redesignated a Parkway.
My main issue is I usually forget about arterials. My cities usually have just 3 levels of hierarchy, straight from highways to collectors, and while that works just fine for small cities, it becomes a major issue late-game
I find often the issue is sims tend to want to work and buy goods from specific places and if you don't make note of it it can cause major backups because all the Sims are trying to go to that location and regardless of how good you setup your roads and transit it can cause major back ups
One issue I can't seem to figure out is I have cims on a busy collector road that has a connection to a suburban area that cuts through small roads with traffic lights to get home. But I already have that same busy collector connecting to a collector that goes to the home suburban area. It has less turns, higher speed limit, and less junctions but they still use the inefficient route. I don't understand. I don't even think it's logically shorter so I don't get why they just take two big roads to get home rather than 8 small roads.
I have this problem and I found that some of it could be solved by turning off those pretty coloured lane connector thingies. I guess micro managing everything doesn't always make it better. Very interresting to learn about road hirarchy. I will have to look into that as I'm sure it's part of my problem. Probably a big part actually :)
American road systems mainly end in the 5s. Road coming off the interstate is usually 45mph. Interstate range from 55mph to 70mph, and rare to go higher than that. Some through roads can vary from 35mph up to 55mph and depends on the situation of surrounding areas and use of the road. Highways that have more traffic lights than interstates can vary from 25mph (in town) to 70mph (outside in the rural) and all depends on the same factors as through roads. I have driven a lot in real life along the mid Atlantic east coast of the USA.
I need help, I can't find my assets in game. Tried find it. Nothing. I subbed to some commercial stores, the mixed use buildings and they're not appearing in game
@@YUMBL yeah they're in content manager. So they appeared after I first subbed, I "add to local" modified workers/homes on realistic pop. Saved left game, when I tried to play again I can't find them at all 😕
After you build your first couple of cities and want to uninstall the game, (or throw your PC out the window altogether - cause of traffic) this is the video to watch.
@@YUMBL I'm still there :D Well, not cause of traffic but rather ideas not panning out like I expected. I know you know what I'm talking about... Resfeber comes to mind ;)
if you have xbox version, you can make a two lane road or one lane offramp that turns off to the side a short distance to make a "turning lane" only do this on the rigjt lane otherwise it looks weird
Not all of them-- San Francisco and Boston are not terribly flat. Boston's old town is disconcertingly 19th century European, minus the pollution and open sewers.
You really should have talked about lane mathematics. That has a major impact on traffic. A bit trickier is paying attention to node spacing. Putting exit ramps too close to another node can cause problems with wanton lane switching. Pretty much always best to avoid using short segments when possible.
I dont really think in terms of “lane math”. I may add a dedicated turn lane where necessary, but thats all. Same for highway. Adding before an exit is what happens on real highways.
I personally expected a mention of TM:PE's lane connector system. I use it all the time to direct traffic flow on multi-lane roads, e.g. if I know that there's a highly-frequented left turn coming up, I force all traffic wishing to go straight or right to use the right lane by preventing lane switching several nodes ahead of the intersection. It works really well.
I think I used the mod “node controller”. If you’re not playing on PC you can use a different road type. The walk will happen at the transition imgur.com/a/add-crosswalks-middle-of-roads-SiYJl
I have a cronic issue bc one city wants to go to the other city's markets and industry and the trunks deliver and come back with loads so that puts some Traffic and no trains only reduce bc some want to go on highway and i havent got any rail outside connection only road the road they came is a 2 way 4 lane road with 2 way 2 lane road
the big mistake people make is to not understand or underestimate the rail network and failing to create in intracity network to move goods off the city core, this is usually cause by early game experience where player will build 1 or 2 station, see it overwhelm by traffic and then concluding rail is too problematic to expand further. however like metro system, rail only shine when it become a matured system. a properly build city should not see any truck on the city core's artery because they should be offload and onload from a nearby depot. think of tokyo great shopping district, they are all build around the rail network as that could move both people and goods. treat the game like you are building an amazon distribution network and you can easily maintain 95% traffic in a 100k+ city. if you watch alot of urban planner discussion, you will hear the argument that "the more road u build, the more traffic u have", and that is true, the goal is not to try and carry all the traffic in the road, the goal is to get traffic off the road, and providing alternative and logistic centers are the way. the more road hierarchy you have, the longer the time it take to travel, the less people will walk, this is why u don't see american walking in cities as much as european, the concept of road hierarchy is actually flaw. you must always ensure there are bypass to keep the city connected without forcing people to use the artery road, that is generally the reason why artery road are overwhelmed.
If a cim will choose non-vehicular transit given the opportunity, then to what effect does the “free public transit” policy have on their choice? This policy seems to imply it’s not a total given that people will choose their leggos to move around.
Not sure if it exists already, but do you know Total War Warhammer and LegendofTotalwar? He has a series where he saves "disaster campaigns" of people sending him the save file. Mostly a really tough battle that Legend then wins with maximum cheese 😉, although sometimes the economy, two many armies, the wrong units etc. tl;dr This would be a great idea for City Skylines, you getting save files and trying to make the cities work again! Mostly people will have traffic problems, or something else is poorly designed. Could be extremely educational and fun! Alternatively with viewers help you could come up with challenges, like isolated city parts only connected by train, a long city with a maximum width, all industry confined to a very small area, you name it.
Nice video, thanks. Have to ask - where did you get those shared-wall rowhouses/townhouses? The ones in your residential district that are basically a solid block of townhouses. Is that a mod, or where? Thanks! Also great intro style, that was funny :D
The source of the problem is still the game. If every sim is programmed to ignore each other and use the same lane, then what are all of the other lanes for ?
Your knowledge and tips are remarkable but you haven't truly provided a real suggestion on how to make traffic use all lanes, instead you just gave some valuable tips on how to avoid the need. Traffic coming from 1 lane road to, let's say, 6 lanes road won't ever get distributed. They will pick a lane based on the exit (the closest possible) and sticky to that. The only option you have is to force traffic to go straight and keep traffic from different merged sources on separated lanes but at some point you would have to allow it to change lanes so they can exit on wherever they want. I'd like to see some more tips on how to fine tune lane usage as I have never seen a 6 lanes road which wasn't a waste.
@@YUMBL yes, I saw the entire video twice. My point is that the title of the video is a little bit misleading. I haven't learned how to make traffic use all lanes. Instead, I learned a lot of things about how to avoid traffic altogether. Apparently, there is no easy way to force cars to get distributed to multiple lanes that finish at the same point.
Your problem is the “finish at the same point”. Give them multiple endpoints. Multiple routes. That is absolutely discussed in the video. And that is how you do it. I’m sorry you want a trick or something. Its not a trick. Its good design within a predictable system.
I love his videos so much... such great attention to detail and the explanation is on point. And god I love his arterial road asset... i looked through everything in his collection and I failed to locate it. But it really is good road and the info given here is top notch for game and reality. Thank you 🙏🏼
@@YUMBL thank you so much!!! And YES i got it now I watched ur other video that mentioned it! Thank you so much, keep up the great work! Love the content!
I have 2 two-lane highways merging to become a four-lane highway. Traffic from all 4 oncoming lanes is fighting to all go immediately into the left hand lane, causing horrendous backups at the merge point. All the traffic stays in the left-hand lane until the next intersection, which is a turn-off from the right-hand lane of the four-lane highway. So those cars which wish to exit cut across 4 lanes to exit the highway. It's such weird behaviour - cars fight across up to 3 lanes to get into a queue of traffic to then cut back across four empty lanes to exit. I wish the cars would use all the lanes.
Thinking about road hierarchy and speed limits, will you demo how Express Lanes work on the highway for traffic that's just passing through? That ought to remove some traffic from the "local highway." (Also might work with intercity trains, which seem to cause a lot of problems for people.)
@@YUMBL I suspect you've avoided the problems I'm thinking of. But let's double-down in application to trains. For example: we've seen backups with Biffa's New Tealand build where everything gets clogged up as a result of intercity cargo. Creating a speed-unlimited bypass track, in the style of an Express Highway, might help to resolve those issues. Maybe?
Good point about the road speed. Actually, I've often found reducing road speed limits very useful for correcting traffic problems. For example, if you've got two similar route options, but one is ever so slightly shorter, you can get huge backups on one while the other is empty. Put in a slower road in place of the one with backups, and you may find the traffic distributes itself more evenly between the two. Putting in bigger, faster roads just encourages more traffic to go that way.
Great idea! I should have also mentioned the “old town” policy but totally forgot
great point. i started using slower speeds to help keep stuff from piling up, especially on roundabouts. if i want cars to take back roads i use slow speeds on back roads and higher speeds on highways to encourage specific routes from certain parts of the city.
With TMPE, you can also achieve the same thing without replacing roads by simply reducing the speed limit from the default on the congested road, or give the other, unused road a higher then normal speed limit, either of those can encourage traffic to use an alternate route but still leave the route available to the traffic where the alternate would make no sense for them to use.
Holy crap, after that 50‘s intro, I wholly expected Ike Eisenhower to pop up and introduce the US Interstate system to us. Good job and another great video.
Thanks a lot! Real fun to make for me ;)
Actually, it just reminded me of the intro scene of LA Confidential in which Danny DeVito is praising all the beauties of LA,
I havent seen it, but I can imagine the aesthetic
@@YUMBL Are you freaking kidding me? How old are you anyway? 😊 ua-cam.com/video/_hAtZLZ7rWQ/v-deo.html
I was 8 😂
Managing traffic is one of the things that I really enjoy about C:S. Also vehicular and pedestrian traffic gives the city so much life, and seeing them all go their way with proper road hierarchy and connectivity is bliss :)
You explained it well!
Thank you very much! I wanted to explain what I would have liked to know as a beginner.
The principles of road hierarchy can be applied to transit as well. Bike and walking takes the role of local roads, being greatest access, but low range. Your collectors need moderate access, so frequent stops, but greater range and speed than walking. These are typically busses or light rail, or sometimes metro where extra capacity is needed. The collectors function mostly to link local access to arterial routes and other local access. Arterial routes have limited access, so few stops with greater distance between them, and higher speed and range. Modes like trains, monorail, or metro are well suited to this use, but busses can also work, providing they have limited access and cover greater ranges, like a bus with only a few stops across the city. Instead of highways you get external connections, like intercity rail, intercity busses, planes, and ships. These have very little access and should connect to arterial service.
The major difference is that all levels of the hierarchy can intersect at the same point. Where a train stops and exchanges with busses, Cims can walk from the area instead, moving straight from arterial to local access or vice versa. This doesn't negate the roll of collectors though, as trying to link all local access directly to arterial service would increase the stop frequency to hamstring the arterial service.
Great ideas!
I agree and actually do very similar things with my mass transit systems in CS, and never have any issues getting Cims to use it heavily. I also follow the rule of thumb that each bus route follows a particular road, with an interchange or turnaround loop at either end of the route to reverse direction and follow the route back in the opposite direction for the 2nd half of the route, providing 2 way bus service along the road it services. I've downloaded some different size buses (the Ryde Series) which gives 15, 30, 60 and 100 passenger busses.
My reasoning is each bus acts as a replacement to Cims driving their cars, giving them access to the road system using a shared vehicle. Metro, tram, train, ferry and monorail are also used similarly, but typically higher up on the transit hierarchy. For me Metro is usually the highway equivalent for the public transit system.
Also, I rarely ever do circular routes, preferring the 2 directional service the line and dog bone routes produce.
"Bike takes the place of local roads"
*laughs in bike lane highways*
@Ole Nickel highways are not local roads.
@@YUMBL whooosh
I love the way that for a computer game the top tip is always: make sure you have good walking, cycling and public transport links to avoid the need for cars. It's almost like that would be a good model to follow for real life cities!
The world may never know ;)
I have seen a lot of cities skylines tutorials and follow a bunch of UA-camrs here about managing traffic, but no one is like you. You teach the basics so simply and clearly that I can use them and get good results in my cities. Thank you
There actually is traffic based lane ai in the game, but it is exclusively being used by the emergency vehicles. They react to traffic on their lane
theres also an extremely low chance the AI recalculates current route for each agent.
@@F14thunderhawk which has been upgraded in cities: skylines 2
Here is a tip I use on freeways. Using traffic manager, I change the speed limits on each lane. The slow lane is on the default speed, and each lane up gains ten kilometers of speed. This helps with freeway traffic, especially traffic that is trying to get from one city to another. Through traffic chooses the fastest option, so they don’t get in the way of local traffic that is using the freeway to get from suburbs to downtown for example.
that is so useful, thank you!
I think one of the best things that’s helped me out is giving transit the most direct route, and intentionally making the private car’s route allot more circuitous- metro and dedicated, grade separated tram lines can be really good for this imo; you do need good transit nodes/connections tho
Great points!
I've fount routing busses along your connector and arterials as car replacements works incredibly well for me. For a deep neighborhood, you can also add in a short feeder route to bring commuters to the main roads as well. I've added the Ryde bus assets which gives me 15, 30, 60 and 100 passenger busses so there's options to apply a hierarchy to your bus routes, with a short, low use feeder route using the smaller busses, and an arterial, main line route using the larger busses.
My reasoning is to make busses an alternative to cars, by having them use the same routes as cars use. The roads are there because they connect people with the workplaces, shopping, entertainment centers they need to function, so the busses should just use the roads to give the Cims an alternate way to use the roads other then driving their own cars. Works like a charm. And if they need to make a turn at an intersection, they just transfer between bus lines and keep on going.
I use things like metro and passenger trains as the equivalent of highways mostly. Trams and monorails would mostly take the role of arterials when the busses just can't cut it any more, even at the largest 100 passenger level.
You can plot and plan that but things change and ruin plans. If I just remove all cars off the highway or road then they will soon learn to develop their own way.
It may sound funny but that's exactly what city planners do in real life to reduce congestion in cities. They give the most direct routes for cycling and walking, a slightly less direct route for public transit, and a circuitous route for cars. City planners used to think (and some still do!) that adding more lanes for car traffic would reduce congestion, but it actually worsens congestion in the long term. Just take a look at the Katy Freeway in Texas. Adding more lanes to it didn't reduce traffic in the end, it just made it worse!
Traffic planners also have other tools to reduce congestion and car dependency but this one is pretty important
Yumbltv... I dont leave many comments on UA-cam, but I wanted to leave this one for you. I really appreciate your content on Cities Skylines. I hope you continue. Your information and explainations are great. Your video titles are clear and cover what is in the video. Your voice is calming. Could watch / listen all day. You do a really good job. Please keep it up. ... and hopefully on into Cities Skylines 2 if they make it.
Thank you! I appreciate that a lot. CS2 is gonna he a blast :)
Hey YUMBL, console player here. It’s been my experience that cims will choose the faster road (within reason) over the shortest distance. Example: a large roundabout with a highway speed overpass will make the frustrating u-turn across traffic instead of exiting onto the purpose-built roundabout under the oncoming highway. Being limited to DLC roads and no traffic manager (to stop turns across oncoming traffic) makes for convoluted solutions.
Correct!
New player here on console and I'm just getting to 40k cims and I gotta say the traffic is absolutely horrible. I have fairly well designed city structure and still have cims going the super long way instead of the direct highway path... They'll go all the way around the city loop when they could just go right and merge for a quick trip. Drives me nuts!
The fun thing about this game is you have to plan ahead. Like, really far ahead. Think about where your traffic will flow to and from and build a road structure to fulfill this demand.
But doing so, especially in vanilla, is hard, as you don't get all the road options from the get go. And it is hard to turn local roads into collectors without destroying all that's built alongside it.
Planning ahead for 3- or 4-lane intersections make this even harder! Dedicated or combined lanes? Which direction demands doubling up on lanes? Could you achieve higher usage by growing in a certain direction?
Man, I love this game.
Its one of the deepest games for how simple it is
I love how you are explaining this from the perspective of game mechanics, I've had a hard time getting cims to properly utilize asymmetrical roads and now I see why
Glad to help! :)
You solved the traffic problem, plan route for cims better, and so on and so on, but still you didn't manage to make traffic use all lanes. Sure separating lane exclusively improves the traffic (a little), sure distributing road improves the traffic, but those are not what the problem is. What we really want is that if there is two lane going to the same exact direction, cims will distribute themselves evenly (or at least randomly) in the lanes available. But no they won't they will still use that one lane.
They will get in the correct lane as early as possible. If you want two cars to use different left turn lanes they better have different destinations after they turn ie. turning left and right after turning left together. Its pretty simple.
Another good video, but what else do we expect from the youtuber from the 50s ;)
I really like the road decal you have on your arterial roads ( thin it is them ) and we see when you talk about lane usage around 7:40 just looks so nice seeing that "only" on the road :D
Thank you very much! :)
I can't thank you enough. The titles of all your videos are perfect but you always drop in some pearls along the way that answer other problems I bump into in my city builds. This one was no exception. Thank you, sir.
Glad to help! :)
I'm so glad you made this video! Too often I see people go straight to suggesting TMPE to solve lane usage issues when road planning is the true fix to the issue.
Fundamentals are key :)
Same, I don't like relying on mods that can easily be broken in future updates (and then you're hoping the maker or someone else will fix the mod) and treating them as a crutch for failing to understand how the vanilla game works.
Thanks for pointing this out. CS is actually super realistic. There's a reason LA is having constant traffic jams and some European cities can deal with it better. Making a better city makes traffic less of a problem.
Srry, CS is absolutely not realistic. We often know our roads. When there are two lanes going to the highway and only the last 300mtr is one lane and the other 2 miles are two way, the cars take the left lane and the slower traffic the right lane, up to that point it gets one way. CS does not act like that. It draws a line from point a to point b and pick just one lane to draw and follow. Thats why you get that superlong one lane filled roads. IOW; we all are looking to "" cheat" CS to overcome the AI's handicap.
@@deejeemadrox1866 well Sascha is correct because they're likely referring far more to agents considering speed limits as part of its path selection, but yes you're correct generally but not quite.
You're referring to something different, a dynamic / real time lane selection. C:S actually DOES have a real time lane selection system but it is limited only to emergency agents (and not the civilian agents) to balance performance and realism. Notice emergency vehicles dynamically change lanes to avoid occupied lanes as they're responding to an emergency call. This is on vanilla.
As yumbl mentioned, normal civilian agents don't 'see' each other. Tbf from a certain perspective, that's true to life, it's common for travellers to not really care about one another and take a 'me first' selfish / toxic / hostile attitude and refuse to move or takes hostile action towards you. At least very true in cities and / or obnoxiously car dependent sht holes. Anyway C:S has a bit more depth than even the video depicts.
this is a massive fucking cope. LA traffic comes from traffic snakes and HIGH VOLUME. LA traffic exists on ALL lanes when it does.
It does not come from a bunch of AI following in one lane just to go to the empty lane at the very time they need to turn off. This is dumb.
Very good advice, all of it is very true and applying road hierarchy has helped my cities get much better traffic flow.
One thing I've also found helps, for when you still get that 1/3 lanes used the other 2 ignored scenario is to change the TMPE AI system to have it use improved AI, as that can induce vehicles to change lanes based on traffic at higher settings, and thus get lane condensation back-ups to free themselves up simply by allowing the vehicles to spread out and use all the lanes. Dedicated turning lanes at intersections also helps, as vehicles will tend to bunch up on all purpose lanes even when they don't have to and get in each other's way as they all choose the lane that can go left, or straight as that satisfies the needs of all drivers who will be turning left at some point. Same goes for those multi-purpose straight+right lanes. By making lanes that are left turn only, right turn only and straight only, you force the vehicles to spread out and use more lanes, since the middle lane has to turn left, anyone going straight can't use that lane and has to use another lane until they're ready to turn left. Those turning left, have to use the middle lane as they can't turn left from any other lane, and so on. That's a basic and essential part of lane management and though it was shown visually, it was not explained verbally, how and why those dedicated turning and straight lanes were used and how to include them for those who don't know how and why to set that up yet.
this is useful but very hard when my citizens tend to stay in one lane to later on do a 3 lane switch in one go to get to the right lane instead of just being in the god damn right lane from the beginning so everyone does not have to be in the same lane om hohmofdgsfkkdokfdsopfkddfs
I've just logged of my Cities after malding with traffic not using all lanes and then this uploaded. What a timing
Glad to help! :)
@@YUMBL absolutely, you're my lifesaver man!
Here's the problem I have, which this video did not address:
I have a long arterial. It has a major point of entry. Let's say a highway. And after that point, there are maybe 10 or 12 other arterials and collectors intersecting it. Maybe you can make a left turn at all of them.And since this arterial is toward one side of the city, most of its traffic will EVENTUALLY be making a left.
So what happens?
EVERY GOD DAMN DRIVER GETS IN THE LEFT LANE.
It doesn't matter if they're taking exit 1, exit 10, or exit 999. They want to be in the left lane and they DO NOT CARE about anything else. The fact that your arterial is a 6-lane one-way road, and they have literally four middle lanes to choose from is irrelevant.
The only deviation from this is if the roads being turned onto are more than one lane. Then you have multiple left-turn lanes, and thus all but the last cannot go straight. For the sake of argument, let's say you have lights with two-lane-each-way traffic. So the traffic not turning there doesn't get into lane #6...it gets into lane #5, which is also a left-turn lane, but has the potential to go straight.
And you would think, okay, well, if the traffic turning there has a lane to exit from, at least *THAT* traffic isn't going to be in the column of death, right? Wrong. Because any cars getting off at this point then ask, "Which lane do I want to be on in the new road?" And if the answer is the right lane, then they say F U to the left-most lane because the second-to-last lane corresponds to the right lane on their new road.
It doesn't seem to matter what kind of outflow you have from these roads. Any sort of impedance whatsoever will result in this major, major traffic snarl. If you're lucky, and plan well, it often clears before becoming a 10-mile one-lane traffic jam. But this is a circumstance that, really, either shouldn't happen or that there should be some sort of recourse for beyond downloading mods like TM:PE. Is there?
1. If I'm not mistaken, cars do consider possible jams. To be more specific, they factor average speed on the road rather than maximum, which is determined by traffic jams you have on the road. But there's one problem with that. To factor the traffic jams you actually need to have the jams, and only after a backup is stacked and average speed on the road is recalculated, newly spawn vehicle will consider taking another road. So, building a detour cannot clear your main road off the traffic, only reduce it, because cars will take a detour only if there's a jam on the main road (works IRL as well). And there's a delay in reaction, cars chose their way from the very beginning.
2. About not using other lanes. I used to have that problem before, but somehow I overcome it. At first, use the "dynamic lane selection" option in TMPE. I'm not sure if it helps or if it's a placebo, but I use it anyway. Secondly, you can manipulate with lane connector. How's that? Well, if you have cars stacked in one lane, the chances are they're going the same way. Look that way, as you showed in video, and propose an alternative with lane connector. For example, in your case, you can take your intersection and merge two onward lines into one they are going to. But that won't be enough. Then you go to the previous intersection on their way and split the lane they came from into two lanes you want to use (in your case it’s not the intersection, but the node, where the road switches it's asymmetry). Now that should work, because you literally gave the cars two equal options that they will choose randomly.
The cars only know the speed limits of a given path. Not the current speed of traffic. They dont path based on one another at all.
Using the traffic policies such as “encourage biking, heavy traffic ban etc” could also work. Great work with the traffic tips, you do deserve more subs
Thanks a lot! Policies can be important too. I wanted to keep things general and non dlc specific
Only started playing CS1, 2 weeks ago.... Don't really like cs2 in its current state but cs1 with all the mods is fantastic.... You make some excellent points and give some food for thought about issues I'm experiencing and they totally make sense... Looking forward to backtracking through your great videos because there is a lot to learn (and have fun in the meantime)
i see a lot of players of cities use so much highway through there cities, i live in holland and here highways are at the edge of towns if not a bit away from them, i use the road system i see around me, which is the road hierarchy as you explained, i have a 1 mil city with only a small highway connection on the edge of my map, and i use medium roads to get them into my city. i almost never run into a problem, On every map i play, i always have 85/90% traffic flow, and no backed up traffic. also i use metro and trains, busses i never use. and am a big fan of pedestrian roads.
"agents" as you call them will walk half a 25 tile map if you give them the chance.
You are missing the point. Many people actually like designing car-centric cities. That is a solution for them.
Generally, I try to avoid using ridiculously wide roads, as they ruin walkability. I usually don't go much higher than a 4-lane road except at major intersections, where I might put a 6 or 8 lane road depending on how busy it is.
I think the moment a light or roundabout is added the width of the road no longer matters to walkability in the game.
i couldent tell you how many Biffa videos ive watched where the whole time im yelling "slow down the speed limit" on roundabouts
Thanks for not resorting to Traffic Manager in this explaination. :) Us console players can't use it, so understanding the default ai is very handy
I did know about the road hierarchy, but had no idea about how the traffic system pathing worked, or how road speed affects it. Love your videos, I've learned so much from watching you, and it's really changed my playstyle a lot :)
I’m glad to hear it! Thanks for watching :)
This game is a full fledged Traffic Simulator in disguise. Still love it. 👍
Delightful video! I can't believe I'm STILL learning things about traffic after three years playing. Not a complaint. Also, this city is absolutely beautiful. If there was an uncanny valley for simulated cities, I'd say you've successfully crossed over.
Actually i was a little anxious to learn some horrific news about major flaws in the traffic system, which made all the city sims in the last 20 years before Skylines practically broken for good and absolutely unplayable. On the other hand i am a bit dissappointed as the information you compiled here is not very surprising. Don't get me wrong, the information is well presented but most of it can be picked up by many people by just playing the game.
In the end i am relieved that i will not have to spend hours fiddling with TM:PE lane connector to overhaul everything. So thanks for that ! :)
You’re welcome! Theres no trick to it. Just good planning, and understanding how pathing works.
LMAO the intro! I haven't even watched the rest of the video yet but I'm sure it will be great as always
Thanks a bunch :)
Great video! I love non-American cities where there is huge amount of streets for pedestrians(half of the streets in my city in the game are like that). Of course if you're doing an American city, this effective way of living it's rare to see xD.
I love a good pedestrian centric area as well! I wish cities skylines supported it better.
Yes, zoneable pedestrian streets should be a thing.
@@Kibbelingg there are those in the network extensions mod
@@YUMBL The fact that C:S has pedestrian and cyclist considerations / implementations whatsoever automatically make it support enough compared to any city builders out there, all of which lack it to my knowledge in favor for games where cars are the 'people'. But ofc, more support, integrations, or content for peds and cyclists in C:S is welcome!
yumbl always bringing great topics to the table.. this idea hit very close to home as the traffic system is my absolute favorite part of these games. it's a giant puzzle always evolving and growing; for some reason i love to watch it simulate.. the tools mods and vanilla systems really creates a unique play style that not many * if any * other game can provide. But i gotta say simple stuff like cars stacking one lane while another is empty really breaks the immersion.
the traffic system in this game paired with mods makes for a diverse and complex mechanic alone; ive spent hours tweaking lanes, speed and restrictions trying to make things flow at a decent rate. sometimes i think i spend too much effort on this games traffic rather than something more productive hahah.
The traffic makes the game! I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I first got Cities Skylines
I missed how awesome the vehicles are in this video the last 4 times I watched. They really make the city.
I have gotten the explanation of traffic (ALL traffic, pedestrian, bike, cars, public transport etc.) that they calculate the pathing by adding a penalty points to the routes.
I don't know the exact number added by each entity but it goes like: Bigger roads has less penalty points than smaller roads. Faster roads adds less penalty points than slow. Each intersection/lanechange adds penalty points. Using a car adds more penalty points than public or walking, transferring between public transports adds a tiny penalty (still lower than cars) etc etc.
So f ex if you have an intersection you can use increase the speed in one of the lanes and that lane will add less penalty points to the vehicles and they will prefer that road (I think each segment of road adds penalty points, the faster the road, fewer points, the bigger the road, fewer points).
So the thinking of traffic as agents is absolutely correct, and each agent calculates the route (when they start) and chooses the route with the LEAST penalty points.
You can further modify this by using TM:PE (to change individual speeds in lanes it's needed anyway, as for my example above) and instruct the vehicles to also get penalty points if an intersection is slow with a lot of waiting times. Special lane rules (I think its called) f ex makes it so they never change more than one lane at a time (you have probably seen traffic come to a complete stop on a highway because vehicles comes to a complete stop while changing 2 lanes over, that setting removes that).
Otherwise, as usual, a well thought out video from JUMBLAcorp (as me as a swede pronounces it xD)
Can you actually change the speed of lanes individually!? How?
@@YUMBL hold ctrl (or alt, can't remember, it's one of them xD) and mouse over lanes while in the speedsettings overlay in TM:PE. Also hold shift to change the whole distance to the next intersection. :)
Thank you! Thats great info. Idk if i’ll use it too much as i dont think that happens irl, but its good to know!
Solid advice - although i may add that limited access does have one use - i only give neighborhood "branches" one point of access to collecters to prevent through traffic - seems to be working well so far
Yeah and then you realize why most newer subdivisions have only a couple connections to nearby major roads, cuts down greatly on people using your neighborhood as a shortcut especially if the remaining possible shortcut is no longer one because it's so long, slow and winding.
When Billy grew up he became a roundabout. Don't be like Billy.
america moment
Roundabouts may be “one way”, but they are not the only way ;)
Sounds painful. Way too much throughput
Thank you. For me the key to the whole thing is knowing that their journeys are pre determined. Therefore they won't adjust to the traffic conditions en route.
I hope that the CS2 a.i. is updated. Especially now there will be roadworks and more consequences to your actions. Maybe GPS satellites become a DLC 😁
when i see a car destination "residential" and the fact that car is banned at some point of its gps direction (because i made a pedestrian residential area), makes the car turning around for a while, stopping and despawnning, even when despawning is disabled through traffic manager.
the proof that i broke the ia through traffic manager is that ia targets a destination impossible to reach on car. the the game is design to make every point of the map accesible with car. because you can' only zone on roads. accessible with cars. it's specified that mods alterate the game funcitonnalities. too bad i worked so hard on my pedestrian city.
I know you said that they don't use the shortest route, but I do think it's a factor. I had an issue with everyone taking short cuts through low speed residentials because the distance was actually a lot shorter than the higher speed direct flow main arterial roads, and they were clogging the neighborhoods up. The biggest fix was to simply make the roads that access the hoods directly, a bit longer. From 8u to like 16u. Longer feeder type roads seem to keep the traffic on the arterials because the fixed hood routes are much longer. I think it's a combination of distance AND speed, and there is a value that is being generated using both, where the smallest result determines the path ultimately chosen. Also I like that intro.
Right. It is always the FASTEST route. Thats speed over distance. The shortest route will often be the fastest, but not always with speed limit as the variable.
enjoyed the beginning, made me laugh this morning. took me back to the good ol' days.
Glad you liked it! :)
The Intro ^^ --- absolutley love it
And as always very good video. Your explanation changed my way to play these game.
I’m glad you liked it!
Traffic Manager Presedent Edition is probably the greatest mod ever made for Cities: Skylines.
That and Precision Engineering
I am surprised you did not mention lane math here. This can help reduce single lane backups. Since vehicles on a "through" path pick the leftmost lane, having fewer lanes, as well as putting exits before entrances, causes fewer weird merges.
Excellent explanation of the traffic system in Cities Skyline. Thank you!
Thanks for watching! :)
One thing to add, about road hierarchy not always working, is that you can adapt the roads according to how they are used. If a ton of traffic is using a local road because it’s much shorter than the collector/arterial option, then perhaps that local road should be upgraded to a collector. The point is that you can’t always dictate what the traffic should do, sometimes you need to adapt to what the traffic is doing.
do more of the skits, truly an outstanding performance
One of the overlooked things people don't seem to often mention is enabling dynamic lane selection in TMPE mod, and setting it to the highest level your hardware can support. It's a free world but I wouldn't play this game without it.
It doesn't make the cars behave like human drivers in terms of lanes but I found noticeably less or shorter single-file lane queues at intersections, with intersections being generally easier to micro-manage depending on design and location in the network.
I could be wrong on this but I think I started using dynamic lane selection in a previous YUMBL video.
I actually didnt mention any mods. It was on purpose. The ideas here apply to every version of the game, and every player.
Dynamic lane selection works because its job is to recalculate path when vehicle has opportunity to save time. For example when vehicle approach long congested lane like shown on the video it will check if empty lane could be used to get to the same point (e.g. at 4th segment ahead), comparing traffic flow on lanes and also speed of the vehicle in front. If the difference of speed is >25% then it will change that little part of the path to use empty lane. Unfortunately that process can take a lot of time when segments are congested (it has to calculate flow based on vehicles that are on each segments) so vehicles that will use DLS are selected randomly with additional cooldown between uses to prevent overuse. Highest level may cause issues on highways, one of the signs of the problem with this setting are vehicles changing lanes for no reason, forcing other vehicles to slow down.
@@krzysztofg7677 thanks for explaining the technical details of how it functions, always good to know more about what's going on under the hood
I like to think of fixing traffic as reducing conflict points. The only reason vehicles back up is because they're trying to be in the same place at the same time. By conflict points, I'm referring to two things here: first, conflict points as typically defined are places where two different routes cross. This could be a left turn in an intersection (which causes conflict points with oncoming traffic, cross traffic, and both left turns starting from the perpendicular directions), right turns at an intersection (can run into cars going straight into the lane they're trying to enter), and especially merges (two lanes of traffic either joining into one or having to cross over each other, like on the bridge of a cloverleaf interchange). There are many other examples of this, but these help highlight my point.
The second type of conflict point has more to do with congestion. In the example shown in the video, many vehicles wanted to be in the left lane, thus they have to pile up like that because they can't move closer to the intersection in that lane. Imagine yourself as a car on that road, but limit yourself to using the lanes you'd choose if there were no other cars--are you going to end up in the left lane there to take the ramp? Probably, so a situation like this (assuming it was happening with the highway intact) might mean it's time to either get them on a different route entirely, or it's time to add a second lane to the ramp, further ahead.
Another great thing to think about when fixing traffic is to find the bottlenecks. This is something you'd be doing anyway, if you're following my advice above, but still worth mentioning nonetheless. Usually the best way to go about this is to start by finding a place at the head of the traffic (i.e. further in the direction of travel, where the traffic gets stopped up) and work on opening that up. This is something you have to be careful with, as widening roads will induce demand, but if you do this with simple things like using traffic manager to create dedicated turning lanes, different streams of traffic have a chance to separate from each other prior to the point of conflict. For anyone that's driven on a two lane road with no turning lanes, you probably know what I'm talking about here, since vehicles turning left have to sit in the way of traffic.
#1 Strange... I find a solution to many of my problems by taking part of your posts. And, even more strange, in the end my problems isn't any problems at all. The problem is my thinking... :))
#2 One clou to why roundabouts is so popular in ie Europe is that, as far as I've seen, almost nowhere it's allowed to make a right turn against redlight, as it is in many crossings in the US
Thats a great point! Right in red is normal here, though I’ve never turned it on in cities. Thank you for watching :)
It’s just a yield ;)
@@idromano Go to US and test. It's very smooth
Living in Southern California, specifically Orange County, has messed me up a bit with trying to figure out road layouts. You can almost take the speed limits you mentioned and bump them up one level so the highway almost a becomes glorified arterial in some ways. 😅 Hell, what Google Maps insists on calling "Highway 39" is more commonly known as "Beach Blvd," and Imperial Highway and Pacific Coast Highway (90 and 1, respectively) are generally regarded as arterials. I was rather surprised when Google Maps told me to take an *on*-ramp to Jamboree *Road*, although that segment of Jamboree Rd. admittedly is more highway-like than road-like. It all comes down to jurisdiction and who is responsible for maintenance. The part of Imperial Highway that the city of Yorba Linda assumed responsibility for lost its highway designation and was subsequently redesignated a Parkway.
this was very helpful, thank you
Thanks for watching :)
Very clever intro😉…. excellent video 👍🏻
Thanks a lot! Much appreciated :)
I'm wayyyy too high for this 1940s intro
Nice video! Keep up the good work!
Thank a lot!
1. How do you have left turns only?
2. How do you have fall trees?
3. How are the people and cars moving at normal speed?
Awesome video BTW.
1. Traffic manager (mod)
2. They came with the map from the steam workshop
3. I run the game at 70% speed (mod)
Thank you! :)
At 3:56 what road texture pack is that?
I use “USRP” highways
My main issue is I usually forget about arterials. My cities usually have just 3 levels of hierarchy, straight from highways to collectors, and while that works just fine for small cities, it becomes a major issue late-game
The best way to fix traffic I've found is mixed use zoning for most things, and then I turn the industries into conveyor belts.
I find often the issue is sims tend to want to work and buy goods from specific places and if you don't make note of it it can cause major backups because all the Sims are trying to go to that location and regardless of how good you setup your roads and transit it can cause major back ups
You can actually use the speed of a road to control lane usage. Just slow down the overused lane 10-20mph to balance the lanes
One issue I can't seem to figure out is I have cims on a busy collector road that has a connection to a suburban area that cuts through small roads with traffic lights to get home. But I already have that same busy collector connecting to a collector that goes to the home suburban area. It has less turns, higher speed limit, and less junctions but they still use the inefficient route. I don't understand. I don't even think it's logically shorter so I don't get why they just take two big roads to get home rather than 8 small roads.
Remove some of the small road connections to force them to use your intended route
Great video. Worth being a Patreon.
This is an amazing intro 👏
Thanks a lot :)
I have this problem and I found that some of it could be solved by turning off those pretty coloured lane connector thingies. I guess micro managing everything doesn't always make it better. Very interresting to learn about road hirarchy. I will have to look into that as I'm sure it's part of my problem. Probably a big part actually :)
useful as always YUMBL, and with a proper expalin in this messy game XD
I’m glad to help! :)
American road systems mainly end in the 5s. Road coming off the interstate is usually 45mph. Interstate range from 55mph to 70mph, and rare to go higher than that. Some through roads can vary from 35mph up to 55mph and depends on the situation of surrounding areas and use of the road. Highways that have more traffic lights than interstates can vary from 25mph (in town) to 70mph (outside in the rural) and all depends on the same factors as through roads. I have driven a lot in real life along the mid Atlantic east coast of the USA.
I need help, I can't find my assets in game. Tried find it. Nothing. I subbed to some commercial stores, the mixed use buildings and they're not appearing in game
Make sure they appear in the “content manager” to make sure theyre really subbed, then look in find it under “growable/rico”
@@YUMBL yeah they're in content manager. So they appeared after I first subbed, I "add to local" modified workers/homes on realistic pop. Saved left game, when I tried to play again I can't find them at all 😕
Look under the ploppable rico buildings maybe. Icon in the UI
@@YUMBL the freaking loading screen mod that assets off for some reason. I never toggled that option. Thank you so much for your time you're awesome!
You are one of my top ten favorite UA-camrs with a name that starts with Yum
I’ll take it as a win!
After you build your first couple of cities and want to uninstall the game, (or throw your PC out the window altogether - cause of traffic) this is the video to watch.
We’ve all been there. Wanted to give up when I realized my first city was non functional 😅
@@YUMBL I'm still there :D
Well, not cause of traffic but rather ideas not panning out like I expected.
I know you know what I'm talking about... Resfeber comes to mind ;)
I love your crosswalk markings.
Thanks! Intersection marking tool is wonderful
if you have xbox version, you can make a two lane road or one lane offramp that turns off to the side a short distance to make a "turning lane" only do this on the rigjt lane otherwise it looks weird
Love the series! I know US cities are quite flat in gerneral, but I always wondered if u plan to do some terrain adjustments?
Thank you! Probably not on this map, but perhaps next build. A more dynamic map is in order
Not all of them-- San Francisco and Boston are not terribly flat. Boston's old town is disconcertingly 19th century European, minus the pollution and open sewers.
You really should have talked about lane mathematics. That has a major impact on traffic. A bit trickier is paying attention to node spacing. Putting exit ramps too close to another node can cause problems with wanton lane switching. Pretty much always best to avoid using short segments when possible.
I dont really think in terms of “lane math”. I may add a dedicated turn lane where necessary, but thats all. Same for highway. Adding before an exit is what happens on real highways.
I personally expected a mention of TM:PE's lane connector system. I use it all the time to direct traffic flow on multi-lane roads, e.g. if I know that there's a highly-frequented left turn coming up, I force all traffic wishing to go straight or right to use the right lane by preventing lane switching several nodes ahead of the intersection. It works really well.
I love lane arrows generally, and connectors on highways. Arrows keep it flexible and apply quickly.
@@YUMBL I use both. But neither helps the folks who don't use mods.
Hi beginner here. At 2:07 there’s a pedestrian crossing in the middle of a road nowhere near an intersection. How is that done?
I think I used the mod “node controller”. If you’re not playing on PC you can use a different road type. The walk will happen at the transition imgur.com/a/add-crosswalks-middle-of-roads-SiYJl
That intro was gold
Thanks a lot! 😂
I have a cronic issue bc one city wants to go to the other city's markets and industry and the trunks deliver and come back with loads so that puts some Traffic and no trains only reduce bc some want to go on highway and i havent got any rail outside connection only road the road they came is a 2 way 4 lane road with 2 way 2 lane road
the big mistake people make is to not understand or underestimate the rail network and failing to create in intracity network to move goods off the city core, this is usually cause by early game experience where player will build 1 or 2 station, see it overwhelm by traffic and then concluding rail is too problematic to expand further. however like metro system, rail only shine when it become a matured system. a properly build city should not see any truck on the city core's artery because they should be offload and onload from a nearby depot. think of tokyo great shopping district, they are all build around the rail network as that could move both people and goods. treat the game like you are building an amazon distribution network and you can easily maintain 95% traffic in a 100k+ city.
if you watch alot of urban planner discussion, you will hear the argument that "the more road u build, the more traffic u have", and that is true, the goal is not to try and carry all the traffic in the road, the goal is to get traffic off the road, and providing alternative and logistic centers are the way. the more road hierarchy you have, the longer the time it take to travel, the less people will walk, this is why u don't see american walking in cities as much as european, the concept of road hierarchy is actually flaw. you must always ensure there are bypass to keep the city connected without forcing people to use the artery road, that is generally the reason why artery road are overwhelmed.
Very Well made video
Thanks a lot! :)
If a cim will choose non-vehicular transit given the opportunity, then to what effect does the “free public transit” policy have on their choice? This policy seems to imply it’s not a total given that people will choose their leggos to move around.
Not sure if it exists already, but do you know Total War Warhammer and LegendofTotalwar? He has a series where he saves "disaster campaigns" of people sending him the save file. Mostly a really tough battle that Legend then wins with maximum cheese 😉, although sometimes the economy, two many armies, the wrong units etc.
tl;dr
This would be a great idea for City Skylines, you getting save files and trying to make the cities work again! Mostly people will have traffic problems, or something else is poorly designed. Could be extremely educational and fun!
Alternatively with viewers help you could come up with challenges, like isolated city parts only connected by train, a long city with a maximum width, all industry confined to a very small area, you name it.
Nice video, thanks. Have to ask - where did you get those shared-wall rowhouses/townhouses? The ones in your residential district that are basically a solid block of townhouses. Is that a mod, or where? Thanks!
Also great intro style, that was funny :D
Thanks a lot! The buildings are by smilies in the steam workshop I think.
Actually, traffic system in CS is really broken. Honestly, it's totally unrealistic shit. But it's a price to low CPU consuption.
Its definitely not broken. Just know that its a system that can be understood.
The source of the problem is still the game. If every sim is programmed to ignore each other and use the same lane, then what are all of the other lanes for ?
I like a 2+4 road. It gives you a dedicated left, dedicated right, and two through lanes. Every one will be used. Thats what theyre for.
How did you get turn lanes?
How do you have all this custom stuff? You pulled up speed limits and adjusted them! That option is not in my game.
The mod is “traffic manager president edition”.
Your knowledge and tips are remarkable but you haven't truly provided a real suggestion on how to make traffic use all lanes, instead you just gave some valuable tips on how to avoid the need.
Traffic coming from 1 lane road to, let's say, 6 lanes road won't ever get distributed. They will pick a lane based on the exit (the closest possible) and sticky to that.
The only option you have is to force traffic to go straight and keep traffic from different merged sources on separated lanes but at some point you would have to allow it to change lanes so they can exit on wherever they want.
I'd like to see some more tips on how to fine tune lane usage as I have never seen a 6 lanes road which wasn't a waste.
Did you miss the part about how traffic chooses a lane based on where its going? You have to make sure the vehicles all have different destinations.
@@YUMBL yes, I saw the entire video twice.
My point is that the title of the video is a little bit misleading. I haven't learned how to make traffic use all lanes. Instead, I learned a lot of things about how to avoid traffic altogether.
Apparently, there is no easy way to force cars to get distributed to multiple lanes that finish at the same point.
Your problem is the “finish at the same point”. Give them multiple endpoints. Multiple routes. That is absolutely discussed in the video. And that is how you do it. I’m sorry you want a trick or something. Its not a trick. Its good design within a predictable system.
Me with my highways at 55mph and my main road at 70mph *makes sense*
Ty i needed this
I love his videos so much... such great attention to detail and the explanation is on point. And god I love his arterial road asset... i looked through everything in his collection and I failed to locate it. But it really is good road and the info given here is top notch for game and reality. Thank you 🙏🏼
Thanks a lot! The arterial is in the “big urban roads” pack
@@YUMBL thank you so much!!! And YES i got it now I watched ur other video that mentioned it! Thank you so much, keep up the great work! Love the content!
Can you put that in 3 way service interchange at 4:12 on the steam workshop?
I may have to!
@@YUMBL You did, thanks
Glad it worked out :)
I have 2 two-lane highways merging to become a four-lane highway. Traffic from all 4 oncoming lanes is fighting to all go immediately into the left hand lane, causing horrendous backups at the merge point. All the traffic stays in the left-hand lane until the next intersection, which is a turn-off from the right-hand lane of the four-lane highway. So those cars which wish to exit cut across 4 lanes to exit the highway. It's such weird behaviour - cars fight across up to 3 lanes to get into a queue of traffic to then cut back across four empty lanes to exit. I wish the cars would use all the lanes.
Do you have “dynamic lane selection” up too high in traffic manager?
@@YUMBL Hey thanks for the reply! I didn't even know about Dynamic Lane Selection until now 😊 I will play around with the options.
What are these black roads you use? I tried searching through your collections but I can't seem to find it. Thanks!
I have a video called “dark roads” that explains it
Add to point. If you have more connectivity to your highways, you can alleviate bottlenecking.
Can certainly be true!
which mod did you use to get the realistic cars?
This traffic is totally crazy about what drivers do.
Whats the mod you use to make your lanes in ways that are impostible in vanilla? Apart from node controller.
Either traffic manager or intersection marking tool
Thxs
Thinking about road hierarchy and speed limits, will you demo how Express Lanes work on the highway for traffic that's just passing through? That ought to remove some traffic from the "local highway." (Also might work with intercity trains, which seem to cause a lot of problems for people.)
I dont actually have a local highway. Just the highway seen in this video. It’s not really necessary imo, but could certainly be done
@@YUMBL I suspect you've avoided the problems I'm thinking of. But let's double-down in application to trains. For example: we've seen backups with Biffa's New Tealand build where everything gets clogged up as a result of intercity cargo. Creating a speed-unlimited bypass track, in the style of an Express Highway, might help to resolve those issues. Maybe?
For sure! Always add a bypass to all train stations, and use of “optimized outside connections” is important.