I just started playing Cities: Skylines 2, and it’s pretty cool. Seems like a good mega time-sink game. But oh man is managing traffic flow DIFFICULT. I’m beginning to understand how the AI behaves whenever it comes to types of intersections, like oh man is the computer bad with changing lanes at the last minute or what.

But what I’m working on right now is figuring out how to manage my larger traffic volumes. I’ve gotten a couple cities to get to 10k-20k population, but around that point I have the same issue with traffic flow, in that I don’t know a space efficient way to distribute high volume traffic in my city on my roadways. I think the issue is I’m just getting too high of a population too quickly. I think I’m also making neighborhoods that are WAAAAAAAAAAY too large. How large do you all usually make your large apartment neighborhoods?

Edit: Okay so additional parking makes traffic MUCH worse. I kept thinking “oh man, this is a TON of apartments, so they all need parking for their cars!” If you put 10 underground parking garages next to it, hundreds of cars will spawn and swarm at you in droves, bloodlust in eyes.

  • eldrichhydralisk
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    One important thing to remember is that sometimes more roads and bigger roads will make traffic slower.

    If the only way into a neighborhood is a single high-capacity interchange, everyone uses that and everything is fine. But if there are lots of little side streets that could get into that neighborhood, suddenly you have hundreds of semis clogging up residential areas looking for a shortcut, so the residential traffic backs up behind that, which ends up blocking the big interchange we really wish the trucks would use instead, and now it’s a huge mess.

    Likewise, if you have a huge road with lots of little businesses on it (the dreaded “stroad”) all those lanes make it hard for cars to actually get to where they want to go. So you have people who turn onto the road and suddenly need to cross four lanes to get to their destination, which slows down the cars just trying to get from A to B, so the whole road stops working. In that case, putting the commercial zones on a small side street with the big multi-lane road dedicated to long-distance travel with no zoning on it will work a lot better.

    If you want to see some examples of really smart traffic handling and city design, check out City Planner Plays on YouTube. He builds really pretty cities that are also super functional.