Largely you lose out on very realistic solutions that would be available with the mods. Whereas with vanilla you have to settle for very poor options
#Which Problems u see, in (mostly) Vanilla Play
spring cairn
For example, with mods and extensions, you can change the number of lanes at an intersection to help determine needs for traffic flow. You can also control which lanes go where and prevent cars from jumping in each other’s way
Without public transit, you’re stuck with limited options and mostly involves cars which can be a pain to deal with when there’s a lot.
Suggestion is to make sure road hierarchy is followed. This will help to provide paths for the vehicles that are on larger roads with higher speeds
Also, land planning is important. Give people a place to live, shop, and work within a short distance to rely on walking rather than car use.
Also, make sure that industry has easy access to highway, train, or port to reduce their traffic load through neighborhoods
green nebula
Is this about the game, or real life?
If it’s for the game, it should be in #cs1-general, this channel is aimed at real life planning for anyone with questions to RL planners
rotund citrus
Either I just still don't understand Road Hierarchy and that it actually makes a difference when it comes to the game and the control of Traffic Jams, or its all just some Pseudo theory or model created to fool us all! LOL! I watched CPP Youtube Video on Road Hierarchy a while back, I am going to watch it again to see if something clicks this time for me
spring cairn
The idea of road hierarchy is that where the most traffic will be, you don’t have conflicting movements, you try to keep it as simple as possible. Think of the highway, higher speeds, one direction, maybe two and the on/off ramps allow for transition in a controlled way. Imagine traveling 60-70 mph down the road and then having a car pull out in front of you. Not safe. In the game, rather than safety, it’s about traffic management. You allow the cars to get where they need to go quickly and get out of the way of other cars.
Local roads are slower, the allow for a ton of conflict points/intersections (every driveway connection is a mini intersection basically.
By managing these two ends of the spectrum with gradients in between, you’re signaling to the game where to load and unload cars on the roads, and control the flow of movement to where they want to go.
If you know where a lot of traffic is going to be (industrial areas or residential to industry) that traffic should have the right capacity to flow into it to reduce traffic jams
Maybe thing of it like this… assume every road as a certain capacity before it backs up. Like a storm drain pipe clearing water from a road. If the pipe isn’t big enough or there isn’t enough alternative pipes to handle the load, the system can’t handle it and back up (floods). Same idea for roads. The more connectivity you have, the more options you provide to your sims to get where they want to go or provide a bigger capacity road to meet that need.
When you zone on a road or add conflicting connections (intersections) it means it slows down traffic, bottlenecks it, and otherwise causes issues. This is the equivalent of having a plug in the pipe example, reducing flow capacity through the pipe
Hope that helps @rotund citrus
Transit hierarchy is a thing yes! Low capacity like bus, up to high capacity like trains. The more traffic flow on any given route should warrant higher capacity transit to deal with that. Or you can try to spread on the load and use multiple smaller capacity lines that make similar movements but spreads it out over a larger area. So like having a bus line traveling east/west every other or third block for example.
The way I plan my cities with the understanding of my planning background is like this. I figure out where my neighborhoods will be, where industry will be, and predict the amount of traffic moving between them. You know industry will have a lot of traffic because imports/exports and people going to/from work. So plan accordingly to account for that. Neighborhoods nearby will try to walk to work. Further. Neighborhoods will jump in their car, so provide transit instead (in game mechanic that allows you to see routes on a road is SUPER useful here). Road wise, provide multiple connections that give people plenty of options (don’t funnel your traffic unless you have a high capacity road to manage that). The rest is trial and error