They should make some kind of "sandbox" mode so you can do efficiency tests. Once i tried a traffic light with a really dense intersection and actually worked. But I still only pick them if I have like 3 more bridges/tunnels/roundabouts than i can possibly need.
That would've been super helpful. There was hardly a way to test them all under the same circumstances with hard traffic flow because spawn would be absolutely random.
@@fluxx2875 Nice to know! They're also a little studio that didn't expect to be Mini Motorways such a success. So every update takes quite a while but they're putting their heart into it :)
Also, a map editor, so community can make maps, define scenarios (i.e. paint density map of buildings in each color, order in which they can spawn, change colors, change probabilities of the weekly rewards, etc).
I use them a lot in the late game when you have no room for a roundabout, if you're offered roundabout and traffic light then the roundabout is useless if you can't fit it anywhere. And the traffic light seems better at preventing upstream jams when the roads are super busy as it prevents cars entering one road for a while, which gives that road room to clear.
Only use I have found for traffic lights is that when you have like a single house connected to a road where a lot of cars drive on constantly but from that single house just once in a while. The cars do slow down on intersections but with a traffic light they dont and it's almost always green for them
They should make "smart" traffic lights that can prioritize certain cars and be green for cars when there aren't competing flows of traffic. Actual real world traffic lights have that kind of technology.
They got a lot smarter and faster compared to the og ones, but there's still room to improve. I would appreciate adding color exclusive roads or something like that so you could share roads and split them afterwards. Would be a whole new thing strategy wise i guess.
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS I'd really like to see one way roads. They feel like the main traffic controlling measure that's really missing. I could see them being absolutely insane though.
traffic lights at intersections where the off-directions will only ever turn right make it so that the main road is always green (and thus the cars dont slow down) and the off-directions can still turn without waiting for a green light. It is hard to put into words, but it works.
While that is true, this case rarely (or never?) occurs. Cars will pick the same route back (because otherwise they wouldn't have chosen it to get there), so inevitably they will come back to that same junction and make a left hand turn.
@@MoDlegion It doesn't apply for the same car returning on their b trip from their a trip. You are correct. Where it does occur (quite often so long as you facilitate it) is when you have one residential area supplying two malls. The easiest way to illustrate this is to imagine you have a group of houses on the east side of the map, a mall to the south, and another mall to the west. You lay a straight road directly from the houses to the west mall. Then you lay a perpendicular road branching from that road to reach the south mall. Now, you have a scenario where the cars will go straight from east to west, and west to east on the way back for the west mall, but they will make a left turn to reach the south mall, and a right turn on the way home; in this scenario, cars at this intersection returning from south mall will NEVER make a left turn, because cars do not travel from mall to mall, only house to mall, or mall to house. So now, by placing a traffic light at this intersection, cars traveling to west mall will never slow down at the intersection, and cars at south mall will not be affected, because they can always turn right on red. While this sounds like a niche scenario that would rarely ever occur, it is actually quite easy to force this type of intersection with your road layout in a lot of cases, regardless of where the spawns are with some mindful road placement. That said, it isn't always ideal for your overall layout to use this strategy, but it can be a very helpful way to shore up intersections that are seeing heavier congestion than they need to by implementing an effective traffic light setup. I hope this helps!
Another great things about roundabouts is that when you have them but don’t need them yet you can use them to block spawns without using road tiles. One roundabout blocks 9 tiles!
roundabouts always clog when I use them. If there's low volume and I need an intersection, both options work, but if there's high volume roundabouts do not cut it. You need to test high versus low volume scenarios on roundabouts vs traffic lights.
i gotta say with the experience that ive made so far: intersection < 2x T-crossing < Roundabout < Traffic light < just dont cross the roads lol. But thats taking into the consideration the traffic and demand you get later in the game, where a roundabout connecting 2 backbones will fail faster than the traffic light. I love roundabouts for connecting houses to 1 backbone though and that seems the perfect use for them. Also i think the devs made the traffic lights smart aswell. Because from what ive experienced is that they are green longer for the side with more traffic and they tend to also factor in the cars waiting/incoming.
Yeah, in the og game the traffic lights were not smart and therefore the worst decision ever! Now they're an option to be taken into account, but for myself I don't feel like I'd choose them at some point. Will try some of the comments ideas to hopefully find a personal way to include them.
Kind of mad how useless they are considering how they are integral in the real world, hope they manage to get them working. Also I’d like to see them implement under/overpasses that you can pick that can span max 2 tiles and maybe dual carriageways. Probably asking for 2 much but it’s a great game so I hope it keeps developing.
IRL traffic lights would generally lengthen travel time so I think that fits as to why they don't work well in the game where the shortest time is so important.
It's pretty well known that a system that relies more heavily on 3 way intersections and roundabouts is generally faster to navigate in the real world as well. It's generally just reflecting reality honestly. If your city is using traffic lights at every intersection it has a very inefficient road network. The game is punishing you for doing something inefficient. It just depends on what you want to view it as, as a mechanic it's terribly balanced but as a statement they have a point.
Traffic lights are important in the real world for SAFETY. That's not a consideration in this game, which is why they feel so bad imho. They do just generally slow you down, and that's the whole point.
going on from what @dbrowdy said, traffic lights are there to stop accidents mainly. in mini motorways cars dont crash which means their main purpose doesnt exist.
Traffic light junctions are NOT safe, they encourage cars to speed up to beat lights and drivers miss them failing to stop, which is why trains need automatic halting systems. The time they manage flow is with pedestrian crossings and are in phase Of course often there's no better option due to space considerations and bad drivers can clog roundabouts by not giving way when their exit is blocked
Could you test road connections next? E.g. Should you join 3/4/5 houses to a single road piece or stagger their entry to the road but have more T intersections?
Do you think you could use the traffic lights to have cars arrive at the destination in a group? It seems like there is a maximum number of pins that can be on a building, so you could let it hit that cap then have many cars arrive quickly to remove the timer, whereas a roundabout would allow the cars to trickle in and have more pins overall
Also if you have a suburb that doesn’t have a smooth connection, use a traffic light. In late game it’s less about steady stream and more about unmediated volume. so if you can send 5 cars in and then 5 more, it’s more effective than 1 at a time
The only use I have found for traffic lights is that they enable cars to turn right on reds, so a T-junction with all traffic flowing on the main road and other cars only turning right onto that main road. Then the lights nearly always stay green on the main road, and the road coming in is always able to turn right with no one slowing down. But at that point you could make a slipway road and have nearly the same thing for almost no extra space.
One thing you didn’t touch on is gridlock. Gridlock kills games. Unfortunately, all 3 things (intersections, rotaries, and traffic lights) produce gridlock in Mini Motorways. If traffic lights prohibited cars from stopping in the intersection, they’d prevent gridlock. Traffic might be slow, but you’d at least be guaranteed that it would alternate. They don’t, though, cars will stop and block traffic lights. In real life, it’s not legal to block an intersection with a traffic light. In the US, about 75% of the drivers are stupid enough to do it anyway. Just like about 75% of them regularly ignore “no turn on red” signs for dangerous intersections.
I guess that’s one of the down side to make it default to be able to turn at red light (I’m not sure on this one, it might depend on states). In my country turn on red light is forbidden by default instead.
My impression playing the game is that traffic lights are amazing at really high traffic situations. If you have an area that gets really congested, the cars are quite bad at properly giving right of way and moving through the roundabout smoothly. If a normal intersection with nothing would experience severe jams, the roundabout would also. The traffic light however will provide consistent movement to the traffic. It is slow movement, but will keep traffic moving through much higher loads than a roundabout can. I have started to reach the 5000-6000 scores now, and to do that you need to avoid intersections completely so its mostly irrelevant xD. I dont really use roundabout or traffic lights at all.
I want to see custom interchanges, speak of slip lanes, speak of how turning an intersection into a simple diamond makes it almost as efficient as a roundabout. I wanna see someone explore making larger interchanges. Maybe in a daily/weekly that gives lots of motorways, you set up a central interchange and you link all the different regions to it using motorways where needed.
Or maybe uncontrolled intersections could just slow cars a lot more than they do. Either way, I'd be surprised to see it because I think it would require the whole game to be rebalanced
I think it would impair the balance of the game. The existence of overpasses would completely defeat the purpose of roundabouts and traffic lights since there is no reason to intersect two roads other than for mixing up colors. An overpass would be like a super fast roundabout. Besides, a motorway could easily do the same job and is appropriately expensive.
@@franeagle While I do mostly agree, they could always lower spawn chance of the option of an overpass. Also, an overpass would probably need 3x1 tiles so it would add it's own challenges. It would be a bit of a balance difference...
@@realdaybreaker8013 Maybe. Right now I won't because I know they're working very very hard on improving the game. Don't wanna steal any time from them rn (:
I always take a week of traffic lights at some point in my games as they can be very helpful. I have even used them at busy threeways to get the cars out a destination that is going to panic if I don't. Generally, I use them to fix really heavily backed up sections, and surprisingly I have found they work good in complex single color districts if I am running low or can't fit in roundabouts.
First time watching you. Just randomly downloaded this game the other day... Been doing trial and error past few days and landed here. Dude.. I'm glad I discovered you. Quality editing and overall just enjoyable :)! Subbed!
The reason why people think traffic lights are worse is because they use it for light traffic. Traffic lights need to be used for heavy traffic so cars don’t stop every second for another car to go. If you use a roundabout for heavy traffic and not light traffic (which it is suppose to be used for) it will back up a lot And slow don’t cars big time while a traffic light will actually save a lot of time. So basically Roundabouts- light traffic Traffic lights- heavy traffic
Roundabouts, in terms of space, are actually not as bad as you said in the video! They only take up a + shaped space - not a whole 3x3 square. The diagonal exits are still further out, and it takes no space for this extra efficiency boost!
Yeah, not for the corners but it's still a disadvantage while traffic lights can be placed anywhere. In height and width you need the space and this can become a problem later imo.
Homemade roundabouts are good too (basically a diamond shape of roads). Also, small uncontrolled intersections with heavy interference traffic definitely benefit from the order a traffic light introduces (instead of inching around corners)
i'm very new to the game and i am by no means a 'pro' only scoring 5k+ max (vs. 100Ks in the leaderboards). in a 4-way intersection, a roundabout will fare much better as you have demonstrated. But i've noticed that they also have maximum throughput (more about the number of houses than x-ways). In this case, it will be bad either way. And using two 4-ways (if possible) than one 8-way seemed better in my experience (spacing the intersections out vs. a central intersection). Another use i've found for traffic lights is in organizing housing communities (same colors or not). There is a significant slowdown with cars waiting to get home once the cluster is almost like pascal's triangle.
Nice one! 5k isn't as far away from 100k as you think because of the demand thingy of my highscore video! I might try using the last thought tho, because usually I'm not happy with how my communities are organized. But at the same time I'd need a few more lights sometimes to even start that :D
In some dense traffic in the later weeks the traffic light performs better than the roundabout because sometime when it’s overcrowded the roundabout gets chaotic with cars turning and waiting each other while the traffic light when it’s less car isn’t effective but when it’s jampacked just do a better job in directing traffic
It would be a nice update for the game if they put a car accident once in a while in intersections without traffic lights and stop the flow for a moment. Then we would have a reason to use traffic lights
I have not had the chance to play this game yet but from what I have seen so far, what ends up causing game overs is that 1 or more arterial roads become heavily congested as demand increases. Having a stoplight there in key intersections would technically be slower during low demand, in higher demand however time would be saved since it would help prevent gridlocks and extremely slow movement. A lot of that could be alleviated if players do not create intersections from one arterial to another but have a branch road between or have 2 arterial lanes connected by a roundabout with a stoplight at the conjoined intersection.
Found a niche use for them that seemed to consistently speed up traffic. 1) If you attach a small neighbourhood to a “main” road. The lights stay green on the main road until the neighbourhood is called upon. 2) even more niche: Sometimes a house spawns on a road and you can’t disconnect it, despite having no need for that colour. The house creates an intersection that slows down cars using the road. Adding a traffic light to that section creates a permanent green light, alleviating the minor time loss.
Key thing with traffic lights, which you've not mentioned - is to give them leading in road space. Traffic lights close to intersections clog the intersections up whilst on red, so I still only use traffic lights when I have at least a few squares in each direction to play with.
Traffic light seem best for arterial roads with very little crossroad traffic. I use them a lot directly outside of major or jammed destinations, as it lets the cars leave far easier. The other option is using them on motorway connections, to ease heavy motorway traffic past various crossroads, or allow crossroads to cross heavy traffic streams. I’ve lost several games to roundabouts being too slow to pass cars through, as they jam up quickly toward late game. Cars have to yield for those in the circle, which can sometimes double or triple their wait time. They’re still useful, but they can also be the bane of my existence.
The use I have found for traffic lights is when you have two sets of colors and they both need to go straight but they have to over each other perpendicular. It's often faster than roundabouts when there are large amounts of cars on both colors
I found traffic lights to be useful in some situations when there was an intersection where most of the cars wanted to turn directly left. In the roundabout they had to go all the way around while with the traffic lights it's much faster. Although this is a niche use of them I'd say you should still have a few of them available to use in case those situations come up.
Maybe the fix could be making uncontrolled intersections worse. If there are other cars at the intersection, all cars must come to a complete stop before proceeding. If there are no other cars in the vicinity, they can proceed slowly without stopping. This might also solve the issue of potentially infinite games by making the game marginally more difficult.
I’ve had roundabouts become so overcrowded late game that no cars from certain roads are able to enter the roundabout. Traffic lights have an advantage in this situation because they at least ensure all traffic moves eventually.
They need to add crashes to this game to make traffic lights useful. Make it so the roundabout has a 9% chance of crash, while the traffic lights has a 4% chance of a crash. This game could be really dope if they made more in-depth.
I wonder how the mechanics of Traffic Lights work in game and could they be improved? IRL some lights have sensors in the road and change based on the incoming traffic. It'd be interesting if the in-game ones could detect if a car would just be sitting on the red side without any cross traffic and switch to accommodate that. I think that would give Traffic Lights a much more even playing field, they take up less space but will slow down traffic, but if its clear they don't encumber traffic.
@@jacobsnedaker8993 so are they just imperfect then? I could swear I've seen cars come to a red and just sit. Bit I've also seen traffic jams that just freeze when Im changing roads so maybe its just a bug?
I have found that sometimes placing a traffic lights in to a intersection that has a traffic jam can solve the traffic jam but you don't need to keep the lights there after
I can definitely say that traffic lights have their uses in the late game, especially in maps that don't give you as many motorways. I got up to 4500 using traffic lights at the entrances to "neighborhoods" but yeah if you have the space the roundabout is better. Interestingly, though, if you even have an incomplete 3x3 grid you can do some interesting things with plain roads that reduce traffic.
That makes sense, small groups of houses wouldn't slow the main road and cars travelling in small groups to the same destination can reduce interference with other traffic compared to spread out cars
I feel like it should also have been mentioned that the cars follow US (I think?) traffic laws on traffic lights, ie. they can make a right hand turn on red if the road is clear. I once successfuly used traffic lights on an intersection where the cars went either from the green side, or made a right hand turn. The traffic light was in one orientation the whole game and never switched. That was kinda neat.
understanding that the traffic lights give a certain direction priority at an intersection gives them a very niche purpose I suppose but usually you are better off taking the other offer for sure, but maybe they can alleviate a problem from becoming a game-ender when you have to connect some demand and dont have enough road tiles to create a new route
I use traffic lights at dummy intersections where traffic flows in two directions. Basically if you have a road that spans a long distance or there’s a slow down right out of a suburb draw a one road segment through the road and place a light there. The traffic won’t hesitate and remain at max speed because the light will remain green.
If you have two separate neighborhoods that connect to a main arterial it is good to put traffic lights at their entrances. You can use them strategically as well, removing them and placing them elsewhere in order to control the flow of traffic. They are very easy to delete and replace. There is no structure damage when you delete them. And they automatically reappear in your inventory, with no reload time. You cannot do this with a round-about. When it is deleted, it compromised the structure and needs to be rebuilt. And though it does automatically go back into your inventory, it does take a bit more strategic thought process to figure out where and how to place/replace them.
Sometimes you can have very long lines of cars trying to get into a roundabout (and not doing so because of how it works), so I would assume traffic lights would prevent this problem, giving time to every intersection.
I've found that traffic lights are only good when you have a 3-way junction, but the cars are only utilising one left hand turn, not both. I mostly use them when cars have to return back to 2 "neighbourhoods," providing that the split is on the left side of the road. The lights are always green in this case, and the cars crossing the road don't impede traffic.
Traffic light are for NOT overcrowded intersections, they are made for speeding up the flow in an intersection where is not worth it to spend a roundabout, which would be like using a cathedral window for an apartament. It is useful when cars are too far from a mall and it does not get enough cars in time because they stop at intersections even when they rarely will find another car
I think traffic lights become useful during late game. Sure roundabout are faster when there are only a couple of cars on the road. But during late game even roundabouts get clogged up super easily, having something that tells the cars to stop driving instead of them just trying to get to their destination as soon as possible might actually make it easier for them to get to their destination
Could be true! Although I used two roundabouts in late game (actual latest game possible) and they were doing very well. Probably depends on how many entrances are leading up to them
so I’ve found that traffic lights are actually very useful when you need to cross through a suburb. If you have three blues that need to role through a red suburb, it allows the blues to stream through the red when the reds are out! you were right in in saying that you want to use it at an intersection where high volume meets substantially lower volume. probably like a 1:2 volume ratio!
You make quality content man, and enough of it so that once you really catch that UA-cam algorithm all of your videos will be boosted! I’m not trying to tel you what to do obviously, but if you were to do videos of you playing a game and then tack on tutorials like this one on top of the game play, you’ll definitely see exponential growth! Keep up the work
I would suggest stop and priority signs. That way only cars on the stop sides would stop and that would be a more efficient traffic lights where you can choose which side stops. Still has an disadvantaged which would be cars stopping on the stop sides even when there's no cars on the other sides of the intersection.
I think the easiest way to make traffic lights more competitive is to tweek car speeds. It a little wild that cars can pass through a round about faster than they can a green traffic light. If they slowed down cars in round about a and sped up cars in traffic lights you'd end up with traffic lights that were actually useful and more realistic.
annoying i had a rly good game going. No problem. Suddenly the cars stopped from going out of a Round building, and I lost the game, wtf. No roads or anything deleted, no other color cars interfered; it's gone smoothly until then. How do I avoid that??
I always pick traffic lights over roundabouts. I think they're great when there's high volumes of cars mostly moving in two discrete pathways, getting two means you can cover more intersections with time-saving measures, and that's great because you can also literally place them anywhere and re-assign them to new intersections super quickly and easily.
Obviously this is very hard to test wit defined constants, but one of the theories I’ve had is that traffic lights are probably better at SUPER high density intersections. With a roundabout, you have to wait for every car to clear out of it before you can enter, so in the very very late game they can sometimes be the source of traffic jams. Traffic lights have the benefit of letting small bursts of cars through at a time, and each side gets its turn at designated intervals, so it works better at in jamming things. At least, that’s my theory.
When one way traffic is flowing in the same direction, colours would conflict less as they can turn off onto spur roads. The problem is how could you use one way roads without elevated ramps that allow crossing of other main arteries, except in specific situations with say double sites, served by 2 estates, an inner and outer. Even roundabouts would likely become congested when 2 full lanes effectively narrow to 1 at the junction.
traffic light can be used to regulate traffic in some part of the map (far from the malls) before traffic jam occurs close to the mall centers for example. Traffic will be smoother this way maybe?
Maybe put in traffic lights upstream of main intersections only for colors where the malls aren't in demand, slowing them down and freeing up congestion for the more in demand malls? Not sure if traffic lights trigger if there is no cross traffic though.
Watches as the cars stop entering a round-about because another car is coming... The cars are programmed to round-robin stop at intersections when other cars are in the vicinity before 'crossing' the intersection, and because of this, they will stop before entering a round-about as well. Until this gets fixed, the difference is quite minimal for actual duration throughput of cars. I had a round-about that was backed up past 4 other intersections because the cars were stop-blocking each other instead of smoothly flowing through the round-about like they would have in a real world scenario.
Can you do a challenge where you try to reach the highest score using Traffic Lights INSTEAD OF Roundabouts? As in you can't use Roundabouts and you have to use Traffic Lights where you would use Roundabouts.
Though I think traffic lights are no good, you didn't cover what I always thought the TL was good for... When you have a lot of traffic it seems like it may help even out the traffic and let more cars get through in the same amount of time (as not having a light). Your comparison with a small amount of cars is a captain obvious test. But what about lots of cars? Love your vids by the way. Just found you a few days ago after looking for this game.
Thing is: You can't really test it with hard traffic flow because the spawn gets more random with every day that passes that it wouldn't be comparable at some point. Let's hope for a sandbox mode at some point! :)
without having actual hands on experience, i can only hypothesize the use of traffic lights in closed segregated circuit overlaps. an example is in a 4 way, if going West/East is red and North/South is yellow, all the traffic light does is prevent both red and yellow from being in the intersection simultaneously. The late game instances of such are pretty rare, though. If roundabouts have any real problem, it is exclusively when multiple routes need to go the long way in the same roundabout, or 270 degrees in a 4 way intersection. The game asks for more and more capacity constantly, so there will always reach a point of gridlock. Gridlock is just the best case scenario for score, but usually it comes down to a few over-capacity intersections (or equivalents) long before true system-wide gridlock.
I think traffic lights are used best when there is an intersections and one colour is only going up and down and the other colour is only going left and right. If the colours are going left or right at a roundabout that's when it starts to cause congestion.
Maybe they should always give traffic lights at the end of each week to be able to get people to use them rather than sacrifice better choices, you can then use the second worst choice strategically because it's better than a slow jammed intersection (would be interesting update for sure)
I sometimes picks them if I feel like getting 20 roads instead of 10 roads and highway... I end up using them sometimes if there's no space for a roundabout or I don't have a roundabout.
Traffic lights should be used when you have to have an intersection off a main road, but you don't expect many cars to be using the side road. It preserves the flow of traffic on the main road by staying green and allowing cars to pick up speed. Without the lights, cars would slow down for the intersection even if it was very rarely actually in use. They are designed to be used in a completely different scenario to roundabouts.
I used a traffic light when I had no choice but too have an intersection connected right at the edge of a double factory and it helped for some reason I'm not sure why though lol
It doesn't surprise me. Traffic lights are pretty much worse than a modern roundabout outside of places where you really can't fit in a basic roundabout. This is just the game mirroring real life (not to 100% accuracy but well enough.)
What if you use an intersection with sloped roads going around it. So cars that go straight use the intersection and the cars that need to turn use the sloped ones. It could possibly help end game, because then the roundabout with allot of cars is slow and this can maybe help.
From my experience, If you have 3 roads branching, probably don't need lights or round abouts. if you have 4 roads aka normal intersection, use light. if you have more than 4 like 5 or 6, use round about (round about can have 8 branches.
Hi there! I'm finally back on Instagram. Find me @hydrophilplays if you'd like to!
You forgot about another type of intersection. It’s called a diverging diamond interchange.
Basically the lanes switches side temporarily
They should make some kind of "sandbox" mode so you can do efficiency tests.
Once i tried a traffic light with a really dense intersection and actually worked. But I still only pick them if I have like 3 more bridges/tunnels/roundabouts than i can possibly need.
I also found, that they work best on dense Interactions, where each Side has roughly the Same amount of Traffic.
That would've been super helpful. There was hardly a way to test them all under the same circumstances with hard traffic flow because spawn would be absolutely random.
They wrote on Twitter that they think about implementing these modes, as it is in Mini Metro.
@@fluxx2875 Nice to know! They're also a little studio that didn't expect to be Mini Motorways such a success. So every update takes quite a while but they're putting their heart into it :)
Also, a map editor, so community can make maps, define scenarios (i.e. paint density map of buildings in each color, order in which they can spawn, change colors, change probabilities of the weekly rewards, etc).
I use them a lot in the late game when you have no room for a roundabout, if you're offered roundabout and traffic light then the roundabout is useless if you can't fit it anywhere. And the traffic light seems better at preventing upstream jams when the roads are super busy as it prevents cars entering one road for a while, which gives that road room to clear.
Yeah that's where the space aspect comes into play. Maybe I just think that way because i always try to separate the roads anyways.
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS I try to separate roads taking motorways and roundabouts all the time but I agree with this traffic light use
@eyesiah maximum how much trips have you achieved with this technique?
Only use I have found for traffic lights is that when you have like a single house connected to a road where a lot of cars drive on constantly but from that single house just once in a while. The cars do slow down on intersections but with a traffic light they dont and it's almost always green for them
I figures out the same, they are really good for T-intersections, were a lot of cars go on a main road and wont slow down with a traffic light placed.
@@Vulkandrachi It is better to just separate traffic.
@@bftjoe Not always possible or the most efficient
@@JoshuaJohnsonHou It is almost always possible just need to be willing to make longer routes.
@@bftjoe keyword “almost”
They should make "smart" traffic lights that can prioritize certain cars and be green for cars when there aren't competing flows of traffic. Actual real world traffic lights have that kind of technology.
They got a lot smarter and faster compared to the og ones, but there's still room to improve. I would appreciate adding color exclusive roads or something like that so you could share roads and split them afterwards. Would be a whole new thing strategy wise i guess.
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS imo in order for traffic lights to work they need to make it so you can choose which is green and when
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS I'd really like to see one way roads. They feel like the main traffic controlling measure that's really missing.
I could see them being absolutely insane though.
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS hmm, i think that might break the simplicity of the game a little bit.
I feel like the real answer is an overpass, to let roads cross without making an inconvenient intersection. The map space economy is in shambles.
traffic lights at intersections where the off-directions will only ever turn right make it so that the main road is always green (and thus the cars dont slow down) and the off-directions can still turn without waiting for a green light. It is hard to put into words, but it works.
While that is true, this case rarely (or never?) occurs. Cars will pick the same route back (because otherwise they wouldn't have chosen it to get there), so inevitably they will come back to that same junction and make a left hand turn.
@@MoDlegion It doesn't apply for the same car returning on their b trip from their a trip. You are correct.
Where it does occur (quite often so long as you facilitate it) is when you have one residential area supplying two malls. The easiest way to illustrate this is to imagine you have a group of houses on the east side of the map, a mall to the south, and another mall to the west. You lay a straight road directly from the houses to the west mall. Then you lay a perpendicular road branching from that road to reach the south mall. Now, you have a scenario where the cars will go straight from east to west, and west to east on the way back for the west mall, but they will make a left turn to reach the south mall, and a right turn on the way home; in this scenario, cars at this intersection returning from south mall will NEVER make a left turn, because cars do not travel from mall to mall, only house to mall, or mall to house. So now, by placing a traffic light at this intersection, cars traveling to west mall will never slow down at the intersection, and cars at south mall will not be affected, because they can always turn right on red.
While this sounds like a niche scenario that would rarely ever occur, it is actually quite easy to force this type of intersection with your road layout in a lot of cases, regardless of where the spawns are with some mindful road placement. That said, it isn't always ideal for your overall layout to use this strategy, but it can be a very helpful way to shore up intersections that are seeing heavier congestion than they need to by implementing an effective traffic light setup.
I hope this helps!
@@JohnGrahamDoe Ah yeah I hadn't though it about it like that, could be useful in those cases!
i can only imagine how much work was going into this video
Editing was grinding my gears at some point but still was fun :D
Another great things about roundabouts is that when you have them but don’t need them yet you can use them to block spawns without using road tiles. One roundabout blocks 9 tiles!
5 tiles but yes! Also it's basically free roads
roundabouts always clog when I use them. If there's low volume and I need an intersection, both options work, but if there's high volume roundabouts do not cut it. You need to test high versus low volume scenarios on roundabouts vs traffic lights.
i gotta say with the experience that ive made so far: intersection < 2x T-crossing < Roundabout < Traffic light < just dont cross the roads lol.
But thats taking into the consideration the traffic and demand you get later in the game, where a roundabout connecting 2 backbones will fail faster than the traffic light. I love roundabouts for connecting houses to 1 backbone though and that seems the perfect use for them.
Also i think the devs made the traffic lights smart aswell. Because from what ive experienced is that they are green longer for the side with more traffic and they tend to also factor in the cars waiting/incoming.
Yeah, in the og game the traffic lights were not smart and therefore the worst decision ever! Now they're an option to be taken into account, but for myself I don't feel like I'd choose them at some point. Will try some of the comments ideas to hopefully find a personal way to include them.
Kind of mad how useless they are considering how they are integral in the real world, hope they manage to get them working. Also I’d like to see them implement under/overpasses that you can pick that can span max 2 tiles and maybe dual carriageways. Probably asking for 2 much but it’s a great game so I hope it keeps developing.
IRL traffic lights would generally lengthen travel time so I think that fits as to why they don't work well in the game where the shortest time is so important.
It's pretty well known that a system that relies more heavily on 3 way intersections and roundabouts is generally faster to navigate in the real world as well.
It's generally just reflecting reality honestly. If your city is using traffic lights at every intersection it has a very inefficient road network. The game is punishing you for doing something inefficient. It just depends on what you want to view it as, as a mechanic it's terribly balanced but as a statement they have a point.
Traffic lights are important in the real world for SAFETY. That's not a consideration in this game, which is why they feel so bad imho. They do just generally slow you down, and that's the whole point.
going on from what @dbrowdy said, traffic lights are there to stop accidents mainly. in mini motorways cars dont crash which means their main purpose doesnt exist.
Traffic light junctions are NOT safe, they encourage cars to speed up to beat lights and drivers miss them failing to stop, which is why trains need automatic halting systems.
The time they manage flow is with pedestrian crossings and are in phase
Of course often there's no better option due to space considerations and bad drivers can clog roundabouts by not giving way when their exit is blocked
Could you test road connections next? E.g. Should you join 3/4/5 houses to a single road piece or stagger their entry to the road but have more T intersections?
This is a good one. The only thing I’ve been doing is avoiding direct intersections and instead have converging roads.
Do you think you could use the traffic lights to have cars arrive at the destination in a group? It seems like there is a maximum number of pins that can be on a building, so you could let it hit that cap then have many cars arrive quickly to remove the timer, whereas a roundabout would allow the cars to trickle in and have more pins overall
Also if you have a suburb that doesn’t have a smooth connection, use a traffic light. In late game it’s less about steady stream and more about unmediated volume. so if you can send 5 cars in and then 5 more, it’s more effective than 1 at a time
The only use I have found for traffic lights is that they enable cars to turn right on reds, so a T-junction with all traffic flowing on the main road and other cars only turning right onto that main road. Then the lights nearly always stay green on the main road, and the road coming in is always able to turn right with no one slowing down.
But at that point you could make a slipway road and have nearly the same thing for almost no extra space.
One thing you didn’t touch on is gridlock. Gridlock kills games.
Unfortunately, all 3 things (intersections, rotaries, and traffic lights) produce gridlock in Mini Motorways.
If traffic lights prohibited cars from stopping in the intersection, they’d prevent gridlock. Traffic might be slow, but you’d at least be guaranteed that it would alternate. They don’t, though, cars will stop and block traffic lights.
In real life, it’s not legal to block an intersection with a traffic light. In the US, about 75% of the drivers are stupid enough to do it anyway. Just like about 75% of them regularly ignore “no turn on red” signs for dangerous intersections.
I guess that’s one of the down side to make it default to be able to turn at red light (I’m not sure on this one, it might depend on states). In my country turn on red light is forbidden by default instead.
super late game roundabouts are ticking time bombs just waiting to get stuck , while traffic lights send massive amounts of cars and keep going
My impression playing the game is that traffic lights are amazing at really high traffic situations. If you have an area that gets really congested, the cars are quite bad at properly giving right of way and moving through the roundabout smoothly. If a normal intersection with nothing would experience severe jams, the roundabout would also. The traffic light however will provide consistent movement to the traffic. It is slow movement, but will keep traffic moving through much higher loads than a roundabout can.
I have started to reach the 5000-6000 scores now, and to do that you need to avoid intersections completely so its mostly irrelevant xD. I dont really use roundabout or traffic lights at all.
I want to see custom interchanges, speak of slip lanes, speak of how turning an intersection into a simple diamond makes it almost as efficient as a roundabout. I wanna see someone explore making larger interchanges. Maybe in a daily/weekly that gives lots of motorways, you set up a central interchange and you link all the different regions to it using motorways where needed.
Just play cities skyline done
I mean, this game is not supposed to be that complicated. It's called *Mini Motorways* for a reason. 🤷🏻♂️
Traffic lights could be made more useful if intersections behaved as all-way stops without them.
Or maybe uncontrolled intersections could just slow cars a lot more than they do. Either way, I'd be surprised to see it because I think it would require the whole game to be rebalanced
I'll happy to see they implement "bridges", not the one on the river, it's the one can cross another road so there is actually no intersection at all.
They should change the traffic lights to an overpass, so you can cross roads without traffic running into each other
That’s a very good Idea, and would make segregation of colours so much easier. Wish they could add that together with a South African map
I think it would impair the balance of the game. The existence of overpasses would completely defeat the purpose of roundabouts and traffic lights since there is no reason to intersect two roads other than for mixing up colors. An overpass would be like a super fast roundabout. Besides, a motorway could easily do the same job and is appropriately expensive.
@@franeagle While I do mostly agree, they could always lower spawn chance of the option of an overpass. Also, an overpass would probably need 3x1 tiles so it would add it's own challenges. It would be a bit of a balance difference...
How about road angles? Does 90 degree turn has the same efficiency as a 45 one?
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS could you try reaching out to the game creators to get an insight
@@realdaybreaker8013 Maybe. Right now I won't because I know they're working very very hard on improving the game. Don't wanna steal any time from them rn (:
Actually no, steeper angles make cars turn much more slowly, 135° turns are more efficient than 90°, and 90° turns are more efficient than 45° turns
@@ImStevan are these turns the actual angle of the roads or the angle turned by the car?
@@jerecakes1 angle turned by the car
One crucial thing you forgot is, cars can turn right on a red light.
Would it make them better than I roundabout that gives me the opportunity to turn in every direction tho? :)
@Lucas DIEP I've seen it done just a few days ago, it seems like a feature.
I recommend not using them next to a mall because traffic will get stuck
I always take a week of traffic lights at some point in my games as they can be very helpful. I have even used them at busy threeways to get the cars out a destination that is going to panic if I don't. Generally, I use them to fix really heavily backed up sections, and surprisingly I have found they work good in complex single color districts if I am running low or can't fit in roundabouts.
First time watching you. Just randomly downloaded this game the other day... Been doing trial and error past few days and landed here. Dude.. I'm glad I discovered you. Quality editing and overall just enjoyable :)! Subbed!
The reason why people think traffic lights are worse is because they use it for light traffic.
Traffic lights need to be used for heavy traffic so cars don’t stop every second for another car to go.
If you use a roundabout for heavy traffic and not light traffic (which it is suppose to be used for) it will back up a lot
And slow don’t cars big time while a traffic light will actually save a lot of time.
So basically
Roundabouts- light traffic
Traffic lights- heavy traffic
Roundabouts, in terms of space, are actually not as bad as you said in the video! They only take up a + shaped space - not a whole 3x3 square. The diagonal exits are still further out, and it takes no space for this extra efficiency boost!
Yeah, not for the corners but it's still a disadvantage while traffic lights can be placed anywhere. In height and width you need the space and this can become a problem later imo.
If you are a rgb gamer you wanna place some traffic lights in the city so you have at least few more light there ;D
The RAM of my PC doesn't have RGB lighting so I guess I have permission to hate on traffic lights right? ;D
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS I dont have too so we can be in traffic light haters club :D
maybe use traffic lights on exits from houses, so cars passing by when the house is empty don't slow down.
I think the only good use for traffic lights would probably be in late game when there's no room to put round-a-bouts and traffic control is needed.
They don't let you control traffic though. They can work for cars making rights onto a main road, but that's about it
"never use them" Suprisingly realistic.
The best use I found is the progress for the achievements using 25/50/100 traffic lights.
Homemade roundabouts are good too (basically a diamond shape of roads). Also, small uncontrolled intersections with heavy interference traffic definitely benefit from the order a traffic light introduces (instead of inching around corners)
i'm very new to the game and i am by no means a 'pro' only scoring 5k+ max (vs. 100Ks in the leaderboards). in a 4-way intersection, a roundabout will fare much better as you have demonstrated. But i've noticed that they also have maximum throughput (more about the number of houses than x-ways). In this case, it will be bad either way. And using two 4-ways (if possible) than one 8-way seemed better in my experience (spacing the intersections out vs. a central intersection).
Another use i've found for traffic lights is in organizing housing communities (same colors or not). There is a significant slowdown with cars waiting to get home once the cluster is almost like pascal's triangle.
Nice one! 5k isn't as far away from 100k as you think because of the demand thingy of my highscore video!
I might try using the last thought tho, because usually I'm not happy with how my communities are organized. But at the same time I'd need a few more lights sometimes to even start that :D
In some dense traffic in the later weeks the traffic light performs better than the roundabout because sometime when it’s overcrowded the roundabout gets chaotic with cars turning and waiting each other while the traffic light when it’s less car isn’t effective but when it’s jampacked just do a better job in directing traffic
It would be a nice update for the game if they put a car accident once in a while in intersections without traffic lights and stop the flow for a moment. Then we would have a reason to use traffic lights
First time I heard about this idea. Could be an interesting or annoying feature :D
Only one way to find out tho!
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS i have entire list of "improvements", especially for "hard mode" with all the bs that slows down traffic flow
So the first daily challenge I played allowed for infinite traffic lights.. Great! xD
I have not had the chance to play this game yet but from what I have seen so far, what ends up causing game overs is that 1 or more arterial roads become heavily congested as demand increases. Having a stoplight there in key intersections would technically be slower during low demand, in higher demand however time would be saved since it would help prevent gridlocks and extremely slow movement. A lot of that could be alleviated if players do not create intersections from one arterial to another but have a branch road between or have 2 arterial lanes connected by a roundabout with a stoplight at the conjoined intersection.
Thanku man u made video on my requested topic🤙
I love how you can see the answer from the thumbnail. Props to you
True I guess. I probably should be more into clickbait (:
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS uh oh lol
Found a niche use for them that seemed to consistently speed up traffic.
1) If you attach a small neighbourhood to a “main” road.
The lights stay green on the main road until the neighbourhood is called upon.
2) even more niche:
Sometimes a house spawns on a road and you can’t disconnect it, despite having no need for that colour.
The house creates an intersection that slows down cars using the road.
Adding a traffic light to that section creates a permanent green light, alleviating the minor time loss.
Intrestingly enough the cars seem to only slow down if the one house at the side has a mall to go somewhere...
Key thing with traffic lights, which you've not mentioned - is to give them leading in road space. Traffic lights close to intersections clog the intersections up whilst on red, so I still only use traffic lights when I have at least a few squares in each direction to play with.
Yeah, traffic lights can help with heavy flow but it won't solve gridlock.
Traffic light seem best for arterial roads with very little crossroad traffic. I use them a lot directly outside of major or jammed destinations, as it lets the cars leave far easier. The other option is using them on motorway connections, to ease heavy motorway traffic past various crossroads, or allow crossroads to cross heavy traffic streams.
I’ve lost several games to roundabouts being too slow to pass cars through, as they jam up quickly toward late game. Cars have to yield for those in the circle, which can sometimes double or triple their wait time. They’re still useful, but they can also be the bane of my existence.
The use I have found for traffic lights is when you have two sets of colors and they both need to go straight but they have to over each other perpendicular. It's often faster than roundabouts when there are large amounts of cars on both colors
The intro was hilarious lol
Good content, nothing I didn't know but lots of people will find this useful to confirm the lights are a waste of time
I found traffic lights to be useful in some situations when there was an intersection where most of the cars wanted to turn directly left. In the roundabout they had to go all the way around while with the traffic lights it's much faster. Although this is a niche use of them I'd say you should still have a few of them available to use in case those situations come up.
Maybe the fix could be making uncontrolled intersections worse. If there are other cars at the intersection, all cars must come to a complete stop before proceeding. If there are no other cars in the vicinity, they can proceed slowly without stopping. This might also solve the issue of potentially infinite games by making the game marginally more difficult.
I’ve had roundabouts become so overcrowded late game that no cars from certain roads are able to enter the roundabout. Traffic lights have an advantage in this situation because they at least ensure all traffic moves eventually.
oh my goodness i wanted osmeone to do this but didnt think anywone would go through teh effort. tqtq ur the best
They need to add crashes to this game to make traffic lights useful. Make it so the roundabout has a 9% chance of crash, while the traffic lights has a 4% chance of a crash. This game could be really dope if they made more in-depth.
I wonder how the mechanics of Traffic Lights work in game and could they be improved? IRL some lights have sensors in the road and change based on the incoming traffic. It'd be interesting if the in-game ones could detect if a car would just be sitting on the red side without any cross traffic and switch to accommodate that.
I think that would give Traffic Lights a much more even playing field, they take up less space but will slow down traffic, but if its clear they don't encumber traffic.
That's already how these traffic lights work. as soon as the cross traffic is clear they switch immediately
but don't cars just... ignore lights when there is no traffic at all? I can swear some cars go through red lights
@@jacobsnedaker8993 so are they just imperfect then? I could swear I've seen cars come to a red and just sit. Bit I've also seen traffic jams that just freeze when Im changing roads so maybe its just a bug?
I have found that sometimes placing a traffic lights in to a intersection that has a traffic jam can solve the traffic jam but you don't need to keep the lights there after
I can definitely say that traffic lights have their uses in the late game, especially in maps that don't give you as many motorways. I got up to 4500 using traffic lights at the entrances to "neighborhoods" but yeah if you have the space the roundabout is better. Interestingly, though, if you even have an incomplete 3x3 grid you can do some interesting things with plain roads that reduce traffic.
Can you mention some things with 3x3 field? I’m curious
That makes sense, small groups of houses wouldn't slow the main road and cars travelling in small groups to the same destination can reduce interference with other traffic compared to spread out cars
I feel like it should also have been mentioned that the cars follow US (I think?) traffic laws on traffic lights, ie. they can make a right hand turn on red if the road is clear. I once successfuly used traffic lights on an intersection where the cars went either from the green side, or made a right hand turn. The traffic light was in one orientation the whole game and never switched. That was kinda neat.
understanding that the traffic lights give a certain direction priority at an intersection gives them a very niche purpose I suppose but usually you are better off taking the other offer for sure, but maybe they can alleviate a problem from becoming a game-ender when you have to connect some demand and dont have enough road tiles to create a new route
I use traffic lights at dummy intersections where traffic flows in two directions. Basically if you have a road that spans a long distance or there’s a slow down right out of a suburb draw a one road segment through the road and place a light there. The traffic won’t hesitate and remain at max speed because the light will remain green.
If you have two separate neighborhoods that connect to a main arterial it is good to put traffic lights at their entrances.
You can use them strategically as well, removing them and placing them elsewhere in order to control the flow of traffic. They are very easy to delete and replace. There is no structure damage when you delete them. And they automatically reappear in your inventory, with no reload time.
You cannot do this with a round-about. When it is deleted, it compromised the structure and needs to be rebuilt. And though it does automatically go back into your inventory, it does take a bit more strategic thought process to figure out where and how to place/replace them.
True, that's actually a good point. Usually it all gets messed up after deleting stuff.
Sometimes you can have very long lines of cars trying to get into a roundabout (and not doing so because of how it works), so I would assume traffic lights would prevent this problem, giving time to every intersection.
The intro feels like: PLAY JAJA DING DONG!
I think there should be a hot key for "backward steps" for building / demolishing, too many times I accidentally destroyed a motorway...
I've found that traffic lights are only good when you have a 3-way junction, but the cars are only utilising one left hand turn, not both. I mostly use them when cars have to return back to 2 "neighbourhoods," providing that the split is on the left side of the road. The lights are always green in this case, and the cars crossing the road don't impede traffic.
Traffic light are for NOT overcrowded intersections, they are made for speeding up the flow in an intersection where is not worth it to spend a roundabout, which would be like using a cathedral window for an apartament. It is useful when cars are too far from a mall and it does not get enough cars in time because they stop at intersections even when they rarely will find another car
I think traffic lights become useful during late game. Sure roundabout are faster when there are only a couple of cars on the road. But during late game even roundabouts get clogged up super easily, having something that tells the cars to stop driving instead of them just trying to get to their destination as soon as possible might actually make it easier for them to get to their destination
Could be true! Although I used two roundabouts in late game (actual latest game possible) and they were doing very well. Probably depends on how many entrances are leading up to them
so I’ve found that traffic lights are actually very useful when you need to cross through a suburb.
If you have three blues that need to role through a red suburb, it allows the blues to stream through the red when the reds are out!
you were right in in saying that you want to use it at an intersection where high volume meets substantially lower volume. probably like a 1:2 volume ratio!
Sounds reasonable. Probably gotta give them a try again! 😊
You make quality content man, and enough of it so that once you really catch that UA-cam algorithm all of your videos will be boosted!
I’m not trying to tel you what to do obviously, but if you were to do videos of you playing a game and then tack on tutorials like this one on top of the game play, you’ll definitely see exponential growth!
Keep up the work
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS ^
I would suggest stop and priority signs. That way only cars on the stop sides would stop and that would be a more efficient traffic lights where you can choose which side stops.
Still has an disadvantaged which would be cars stopping on the stop sides even when there's no cars on the other sides of the intersection.
I think the easiest way to make traffic lights more competitive is to tweek car speeds. It a little wild that cars can pass through a round about faster than they can a green traffic light.
If they slowed down cars in round about a and sped up cars in traffic lights you'd end up with traffic lights that were actually useful and more realistic.
Yeah I feel that. I mean the speed in the roundabouts is still ridiculous.
i like the idea of using traffic lights a t-sections. it really helps
Probably because of the right turn. Gotta get more into this!
annoying i had a rly good game going. No problem. Suddenly the cars stopped from going out of a Round building, and I lost the game, wtf. No roads or anything deleted, no other color cars interfered; it's gone smoothly until then. How do I avoid that??
Back then this bug happened pretty often. Haven't seen in lately so it's probably extremely unlikely!
I always pick traffic lights over roundabouts. I think they're great when there's high volumes of cars mostly moving in two discrete pathways, getting two means you can cover more intersections with time-saving measures, and that's great because you can also literally place them anywhere and re-assign them to new intersections super quickly and easily.
Yep exactly what I thought he should experiment with traffic lights in the middle of a game not when there is not much going on
Obviously this is very hard to test wit defined constants, but one of the theories I’ve had is that traffic lights are probably better at SUPER high density intersections. With a roundabout, you have to wait for every car to clear out of it before you can enter, so in the very very late game they can sometimes be the source of traffic jams. Traffic lights have the benefit of letting small bursts of cars through at a time, and each side gets its turn at designated intervals, so it works better at in jamming things. At least, that’s my theory.
Might be true. I usually do well with the roundabouts also at max traffic, but I usually only use three exits so it's fine with that :)
I wonder if one way roads could be added to The game
as an upgrade possibly, like 20 road tiles + 2 one way road signs
Definitely. I wonder what I'd use them for tho. Would probably prefer color exclusive roads so you could split roads again.
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS rerouting traffic to make it take the longer way when driving to a certain shop perhaps, od making custom interchanges
When one way traffic is flowing in the same direction, colours would conflict less as they can turn off onto spur roads.
The problem is how could you use one way roads without elevated ramps that allow crossing of other main arteries, except in specific situations with say double sites, served by 2 estates, an inner and outer.
Even roundabouts would likely become congested when 2 full lanes effectively narrow to 1 at the junction.
Traffic lights help late game when you have a pile up of cars in a parking lot.
2:27 the area needed to put down a roundabout is actually a 3x3 cross, the corners don't count.
Yes, but how to name it? 😅
It's definitely a disadvantage tho :)
traffic light can be used to regulate traffic in some part of the map (far from the malls) before traffic jam occurs close to the mall centers for example. Traffic will be smoother this way maybe?
Maybe put in traffic lights upstream of main intersections only for colors where the malls aren't in demand, slowing them down and freeing up congestion for the more in demand malls? Not sure if traffic lights trigger if there is no cross traffic though.
Watches as the cars stop entering a round-about because another car is coming... The cars are programmed to round-robin stop at intersections when other cars are in the vicinity before 'crossing' the intersection, and because of this, they will stop before entering a round-about as well. Until this gets fixed, the difference is quite minimal for actual duration throughput of cars.
I had a round-about that was backed up past 4 other intersections because the cars were stop-blocking each other instead of smoothly flowing through the round-about like they would have in a real world scenario.
Can you do a challenge where you try to reach the highest score using Traffic Lights INSTEAD OF Roundabouts?
As in you can't use Roundabouts and you have to use Traffic Lights where you would use Roundabouts.
I might get into this! Although it wouldn't be a comparable score since the game has a lot of random elements to it.
In this game cars pass over other cars without collision. Traffic lights would be so much more useful if cars had to actually brake to avoid crashes.
Roundabouts are obviously better... they could be placed standalone and block spawn somewhere 🤣
Though I think traffic lights are no good, you didn't cover what I always thought the TL was good for... When you have a lot of traffic it seems like it may help even out the traffic and let more cars get through in the same amount of time (as not having a light). Your comparison with a small amount of cars is a captain obvious test. But what about lots of cars?
Love your vids by the way. Just found you a few days ago after looking for this game.
Thing is: You can't really test it with hard traffic flow because the spawn gets more random with every day that passes that it wouldn't be comparable at some point. Let's hope for a sandbox mode at some point! :)
without having actual hands on experience, i can only hypothesize the use of traffic lights in closed segregated circuit overlaps. an example is in a 4 way, if going West/East is red and North/South is yellow, all the traffic light does is prevent both red and yellow from being in the intersection simultaneously. The late game instances of such are pretty rare, though.
If roundabouts have any real problem, it is exclusively when multiple routes need to go the long way in the same roundabout, or 270 degrees in a 4 way intersection. The game asks for more and more capacity constantly, so there will always reach a point of gridlock. Gridlock is just the best case scenario for score, but usually it comes down to a few over-capacity intersections (or equivalents) long before true system-wide gridlock.
I think traffic lights are used best when there is an intersections and one colour is only going up and down and the other colour is only going left and right. If the colours are going left or right at a roundabout that's when it starts to cause congestion.
Maybe they should always give traffic lights at the end of each week to be able to get people to use them rather than sacrifice better choices, you can then use the second worst choice strategically because it's better than a slow jammed intersection (would be interesting update for sure)
THe thumbnail is exactly how they still are today in my experience
I've had traffic lights clear up congestion on 3 point intersections that were a little overloaded.
You place traffic lights at the end of the game when you don't have space for a round about. Because it still stops traffic jams.
I really hope they add a one way street to the game
I sometimes picks them if I feel like getting 20 roads instead of 10 roads and highway...
I end up using them sometimes if there's no space for a roundabout or I don't have a roundabout.
What about if you have a side road joining a main road? The only time I use roundabouts.
Traffic lights should be used when you have to have an intersection off a main road, but you don't expect many cars to be using the side road. It preserves the flow of traffic on the main road by staying green and allowing cars to pick up speed. Without the lights, cars would slow down for the intersection even if it was very rarely actually in use. They are designed to be used in a completely different scenario to roundabouts.
I used a traffic light when I had no choice but too have an intersection connected right at the edge of a double factory and it helped for some reason I'm not sure why though lol
Traffic lights are much less useful when the drivers share a mind and cannot crash into each other
It doesn't surprise me. Traffic lights are pretty much worse than a modern roundabout outside of places where you really can't fit in a basic roundabout. This is just the game mirroring real life (not to 100% accuracy but well enough.)
What if you use an intersection with sloped roads going around it. So cars that go straight use the intersection and the cars that need to turn use the sloped ones. It could possibly help end game, because then the roundabout with allot of cars is slow and this can maybe help.
From my experience, If you have 3 roads branching, probably don't need lights or round abouts. if you have 4 roads aka normal intersection, use light. if you have more than 4 like 5 or 6, use round about (round about can have 8 branches.
I die a little inside now ever time I'm sitting at a traffic light in real life...
Therefore roundabouts are extra fun now :D
Is putting two (separate, but close-by) T-junctions instead of one intersection better?
I think so. Wanted to test that fairly soon for a follow up on the tips and tricks vid tho.