Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
There are alternative routes but they just don't use them.
I don't like one way cities (where most roads are just one way) I prefer two way cities.
The main problem is, that half of them stuck in that one lane do actually make a left hand turn, but majority stay in the left then down at the end of the road they all go into the right hand lane to turn right. It's just weird.
Infrastructure has to adapt with as density increases. Real Cities have a lot of one way roads!
EDIT: I also don't understand the last part of your post. They can't turn from the right lane left, unless you have a mod running. XD
The road goes into my highway connection, I think it's because all my town is down that way at the moment.
No I mean, they stay in the left hand lane, then switch to the right hand lane to turn right at the end of the road. Using left hand drive.
Basically that's not how lanes work in this game. When you have a 6 lane road, in order to get full lane utilization all those 6 lanes have to go to different places. A good example is taking a 6 lane road, which branches into 3 one-way roads, which each connect to 2 lane roads (1 lane in each direction), so all the original 6 lanes can go to different final lanes in different directions.
What you have in the screenshot is a traffic snake (at least that's what I call them). I've actually seen them in real life too, on a ~6 lane freeway in Sydney, Australia. At certain times of day, the freeway will be mostly unused, but the left-most lane (where it turns off to a district) will be backed up with hundreds of cars - all those cars want to leave the freeway to a certain suburb, and the traffic light which regulates the off-ramp only lets a few cars through each time. The cars have to queue up on the freeway because the drivers already in the queue wont let other drivers into the queue. Often in Skylines traffic snakes are of precisely this nature - all those cars ultimately want to travel along the same lane, and they are queuing up for the opportunity to do so, knowing they wont be able to merge into the queue.
Okay, so the next question, is what kind of vehicles form the traffic snake? If it composed primarily of residential cars it is a queue of immigrants moving into newly zoned (or perhaps newly upgraded) residential. This will be a strictly transient traffic snake, once the new zoning has been populated the snake will go away. (you can also minimize these snakes by providing alternative points of entry for immigration - such as rail passenger station, or a harbor).
If the snake is composed mainly of trucks and vans, it is traffic heading to a industrial or commercial zone, this traffic snakes will usually peak in late afternoon/evening, and clear out over night. The best solution to ind/comm snakes, is to create a bypass using a ramp (probably a tunnel) which goes directly where that traffic wants to go - the ramp only has a single lane, it has a high speed limit, it is very cheap - ramps are perfect for moving a stream of traffic from one part of the city to another, and high-speed bypasses are very often THE solution to congestion, as congestion is nearly always caused by traffic which is just passing through. (Note: Bypasses for truck traffic are extremely common in real towns and cities!)
In general I find it best to avoid using wider roads as much as possible. Usually the simple 2-way road works best. Wide roads have a few disadvantages, the primary one is they have a higher speed limit, the path-finder loves roads with high speed limits (even if the cars spend all their time waiting at red lights and stuff), which means cars will be positively attracted to the wide road and they wont want to use alternatives, if you're using wide roads to reduce congestion it can be counter-productive because the wider road draws extra traffic onto itself and connecting roads.
You can of course take advantage of the higher speed limit on wider roads - you do this by having a very long spacing between intersections (I suggest at least 40 tiles - with regular overpasses in place of intersections), this turns the wide road into a true high-speed trunkline for getting between distant parts of the city - the long intersection spacing gives cars time to get up to full speed and allows large numbers of cars to pass through each green light, it also prevents cims taking short journeys on the wide road - optimally cims should make short journeys mainly using small city streets. When using wide roads in this manner you can usually get good utilization of 2 lanes and some utilization of a 3rd lane.
What I find works best at all in managing lane use, is using the Network Extensions Mod and the "small heavy roads", these roads have 3-4 lanes but only require the same amount of space as a normal 2-way road. They sacrifice parking space/green space/bike lanes for the extra car lanes (this kind of road is very, very common in real cities as it's a great solution to congestion). The best thing is these roads have a speed limit of 40 the same as small roads, so they provide extra lanes and extra capacity without the traffic-magnetism of wide roads. And the fact that they are super easy to upgrade to/from makes it easy to experiment with lane usage.
I still use 2-way roads as my primary road, and I use wide roads for high speed trunklines, but when my primary roads get over-congested I can selectively upgrade to the NEM small heavy roads - normally the only place such upgrading is needed is around the entrance/exit of a high-speed bypass or trunkline. A lot of car or truck/van traffic can use these long distance bypasses, and when the traffic emerges it can easily clog the 2-way roads, so using 4-lane roads for a few blocks allows that traffic to disperse onto half a dozen city streets. In this kind of case lane utilization will be excellent.
do not expect that in a game yet to be a state-of-the-art
CtMurphy - Yeah, I changed a few roads around and it simply pushed back the traffic haha oops.
Morwo - Not expecting state of the art, but I'm just wondering why they do that. If it was something to do with speed or because it's a six lane road then that's what I was wanting to know
All drivers do their pathfinding in advance, and far in ahead. So drivers who come from the same source, and go to the same destination, will all take exactly the same route to get there - and this route is calculated at the level of individual lanes, not roads. They do not attempt to accommodate for actual traffic conditions which they encounter - they blindly follow their pre-calculated route down to the minutest detail (this is also why all cars in a snake will change lane at exactly the same point). Even when they pre-calculate their route they do not consider traffic conditions at all - they treat it as a GPS unit would, considering only the stated speed of roads, as such every cim calculates his route as if he is the only user of the road.
It's a good reason to prefer roads which only have one lane in each direction, and, with wider roads, try to take advantage of the added speed moreso than the added lanes (but that is defeated by the fact the highway ramp is much faster and much cheaper than the wide roads, making highway ramps the most wonderful road type for bypasses). As noted, the only place more than 1 lane is really helpful is where a bypass discharges traffic, for example:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=567328179
In the above screenshot, an underground highway ramp is split into a 6 lane road at traffic lights, 4 of those lanes enjoy heavy use because they lead to different places - the 4-lane road going East can take traffic E, NE, SE, and the 4-lane road going West can take traffic W, NW, SW. The 2-lane road going south doesn't go anywhere (it's a dead end) which is why there is no traffic on the respective lane. And finally there is a blank lane which is unconnected.
The underlying highway ramp can carry a huge amount of traffic (high speed greatly increases effective capacity), but the 6 lane road at the discharge point is required to get enough throughput at the intersection. So multi lane roads can work really well to increase the capacity of intersections, essentially they are adding turning lanes. But due to pathfinding reasons they are technically quite challenging to use as trunklines since cims travelling long distance will all gravitate onto the same lane (once again, looks like a job for highway ramp!)
That's where you have to make the traffic breaks. Sometimes, to get the desired effect, you have to sit and wait for changes to take effect. Especially with roads, since roads tend to have a domino effect, even more so in regards to traffic. Often will be the case where you'll change the roads but it'l ltake about 15 minutes to really see the benefits you intended.
And where the traffic is piling up, you could try a traffic breaker like I mentions above. At the point where traffic is backing up the most, create offshoot roads that will get the onroute locations more directly than the main road. It'll act like a filter and take out the over flow, at least too an extent.
CtMurphy - Alright, I'll give it more time.
Thanks everyone :)