Connect highway to your city best practice

[gandalf]

Whats the best way (!!) to connect highway to your city to avoid traffic jams?

A 2-way, a 4-way or a 6-way ?

[fayceless]

Use one-way roads (2-lane) to create a roundabout and connect your highway to it.

It doesn't have to be this complicated but here's one I made:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=448856036

[gandalf]

Would not there be heavy jam at those two 4-lane roads with traffic light?

[fayceless]

There are no traffic lights, it's all one-way roads, so there's no lights. Even at the 4-lane intersections.

[MouttonNoir]

This is a standard practice in the UK in addition to simple on/off slip roads leading to smaller adjacent mini roundabouts- these are the most efficient and elegant solutions

[Saber Kitsune]

Originally posted by gandalf:

Would not there be heavy jam at those two 4-lane roads with traffic light?

Nah, because of the one ways, traffic lights won't spawn.

Originally posted by fayceless:

There are no traffic lights, it's all one-way roads, so there's no lights. Even at the 4-lane intersections.

You do know that the round part of the roundabout was made with a two way right? :P

[fayceless]

Originally posted by Saber Kitsune:

Originally posted by fayceless:

There are no traffic lights, it's all one-way roads, so there's no lights. Even at the 4-lane intersections.

You do know that the round part of the roundabout was made with a two way right? :P

Hahah, yeah, I realized that after I took the picture.

[Mildr]

I think that the problem is not with the highway connection but with the main road of your city.

[Phoenix C64]

try this or something similar

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=449943518

[grapplehoeker]

Best practice of connecting a highway from the outside to your city?
Don't rely on just one interchange, Depending on the size of the city, use many interchanges. Create a highway outer ring and or a highway running directly through the city. The more interchanges you have, the more options your traffic have to reach all parts of it.
As for connecting a an interchange to your road system, the methods suggested above in this thread are fine. The one point to try to remember is to make sure you use on ramps/exit ramps on both sides of the road and provide adequate space between each ramp entry/exit point to avoid clumping in one lane.
We now also have the ability to create all of this underground. This is a great space saving method but I can warn you from experience that it may give you a headache trying to maintain a sense of what you're doing while working with several levels of tunnel excavation and one way systems ;)
Here's an example of one I did recently,
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=447345957

[Phoenix C64]

some constructive critizism to the image grapplehoeker posted:

1) make sure you leave room to make changes later on. ex: in the image, the cloverleaf on left and trumpet on right might not be enough once everything is zoned and traffic starts to be heavy. so leave space enough to change them later.

2) all those "head twisting" tunnel accesses you have there: get the butterfly asset i linked in my post above yours and it will be prettier and also more efficient :)



the biggest problem of all times ALWAYS is if your city is not directly on the main highway.
let me try explain what i mean:

in one of the new EU maps, the highway entrance/exit sucks. only ONE highway and goes from up to left. so naturally what players would do, is make a 4way intersection (cloverleav, stack exchange, turbine, whatever) so they can make a new highway from there to their city

WRONG! what will happen is that one intersection will be super jammed because traffic wants to come and go from all sides into your city

basically what i am trying to say here is that never ever draw your whole city on a side of the main highway that requires you to make all traffic go through one single big intersection

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Phoenix C64:

some constructive critizism to the image grapplehoeker posted:

1) make sure you leave room to make changes later on. ex: in the image, the cloverleaf on left and trumpet on right might not be enough once everything is zoned and traffic starts to be heavy. so leave space enough to change them later.

Thank you but that won't be necessary since I'm using cargo rail to the central reservation on top of that hill to distribute deliveries to the commercial zones that will cover the top of the hill. The cargo traffic therefore will bypass the cloverleaf and the trumpet you mention, and regular residential traffic will not be a problem.

2) all those "head twisting" tunnel accesses you have there: get the butterfly asset i linked in my post above yours and it will be prettier and also more efficient :)

Thanks again, but no. I like custom building my own and this was my first exercise with underground layouts and I have since learnt to do it without headaches. It also helps not to try it at 3am inthe morning lol! As for your custom asset, it does look pretty and I might make use of it in the future if you could remove the trees ;)
[/quote]

[Phoenix C64]

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

As for your custom asset, it does look pretty and I might make use of it in the future if you could remove the trees ;)

maybe :) but you can remove the trees yourself.
actually what i do, as the space is 2x infinite, i put another asset where now the trees are, a 2x4 park with trees, parking, n stuff. looks cool

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Phoenix C64:

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

As for your custom asset, it does look pretty and I might make use of it in the future if you could remove the trees ;)

maybe :) but you can remove the trees yourself.
actually what i do, as the space is 2x infinite, i put another asset where now the trees are, a 2x4 park with trees, parking, n stuff. looks cool

maybe ;) But I dislike plopping assets that have trees pre-planted which I then have to delete. I far prefer a bare interchange which I can then populate with assets or trees or props as I determine.

[gandalf]

But the two 4-way roads will at some point down the road, where it connects with my industry, commercial etc, have traffic jam because of traffic lights there?

[SteelRodent]

I basically do it the OP way, but I recommend anyone to not rely on just one junction to the regional highways. With all my new cities I run the highway all the way through and make multiple off-/on-ramps to the same areas to spread out the traffic.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=450801770

This is also what I find to be the minimum distance between ramps that you can get away with. Any closer and the traffic will get in the way of itself.

Also, don't zone industrial close to the edge of the map or your first highway access. If you do the trucks will go on your highway to drive through your city to wherever your commercial areas are, instead of going down roads further into the city.

And yes, I may have to move the intersections on the crossroads further down later on, but right now it's only 13,000 people so it's not a big deal where they are.