Traffic Load Balancing --- my solution, but are there others?

[MarkShot9]

So, I am around 40K and using the P&P DLC for the first time. My goal is pretty much a carless city; at least for now, since I am not sure where I will go with all this later.

I am playing mods, unlimited money, but everything locked. Thus, there had once been cars to get where I wanted with transit, wall to wall, etc ... As such the concept of one way loop roads was used in the early build for traffic.

Even once I went P&P, the loop roads were kept, but cars banned. You have to do this with real roads as people with house which abut these are under the impression that the car ban does not apply to them. The loops are essential for better services and cargo.

Originally, growth did stagnate without cars, but this was solved by inter-city bus and rail. New residents simply need to flood in; not necessarily via the highway.

However, I began to run into some loop road congestion on the loop road 95% -> 80% due to cargo going to service points. Now, the first fix I did which lifted me 5% was to make sure service points came up on the right and bus stops on the left.

Still cargo traffic is coming from one place and going to one place. Of course, in real life you might do something to distribute cargo service points. This would work in real life to achieve network load balancing, but in the game I believe the point-to-point path calculation is based on raw travel time. Thus, all cargo trucks want to go to the same place as they have the same origin.

The only solution I see is partitioning the P&P commerce/residential area from one huge one to smaller slices. Each slice will require its own cargo service point, and this should force the traffic flow to be distributed.

Anyway, this is what I came up with. Does anyone have either another solution or a mod which forces load balancing of routes?

Thanks.

[LordOmar2]

Sounds good so far.. please share your further experiance with this tactic.
I'm for my part are eager to hear more about it since I thought about multible (sliced) Plaza Areas too

[MarkShot9]

Here is what I found out from an evening playing with it.

You don't need to load balance. It will do that on its own. It just creates more noticeable traffic delays when they turn in and out of the first service point.

For US RHD, you can only place bus stops on the left hand side of the one way road if there is parking along the road. Otherwise, bus stops must be on the right. So for a four way one way without parking forces buses to stop on the right. You would have to put your service building on the left in this case avoid bus conflicts.

The top of cargo vehicle to service buildings are not the big industry DLC trucks, but instead those stupid looking vans. My guess is that they don't carry much of anything, and so you are going to see a lot of them.

Another problem is that regular roads can be crossed in a P&P area which will slow traffic. It does not matter if you get rid of crosswalks and use PED bridges, because hardly will use it.

What I found out is even with extreme use of P&P DLC --- TRAFFIC CAN STILL BECOME A REAL NIGHTMARE WITH NO CARS WITH HIGH SPEED ONE WAY ROADS.

---

I see two solutions:

(1)

Separate P&P areas coming off different very wide ramps of a very wide highway; 12 lanes. Or separate areas restricted to highways that don't merge. Either way you will be working with mods to map edge.

(2)

To reduce traffic congestion going to the same P&P area with multiple service areas (as they will load balance automatically), then use a broad high speed round about.

---

How can P&P areas actually be worse than car traffic? Car traffic if well designed can be diverse sources and destinations. P&P areas are almost one flow from source to destination. Also, car traffic can be reduce by mass transit, but you have no such tools for these stupid little vans.

Further cars simply spawn in and out of existence, tending not to slow traffic. Where as P&P service areas cause repeated lane blockages.