Cities Skylines is the premier of City building video games. Carrying on the torch from SimCity. But like SimCity, your main enemy of a prosperous city isn’t the budget. It’s the Cities Skylines traffic.
Traffic early game is very easy to manage. You can pinpoint the problem road and then put in a solution. But once you get to a reasonable size, your city comes to a halt. So here are some useful tips to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Types of Road
In the beginning, you have very few roads to use. So what I would recommend is with the roads that allow entry and exit into your city extend them and then link them. These will later be upgraded to one-way streets then eventually highways.
Simple Beginnings
We will only be using simple roads, to begin with. With your main highway(currently two simple roads) in place. Branch another Simple road off from either one. Like the below:
Use the guidelines as they appear to maximise space usage. From these branches, branch more roads. Off of these roads, we will be zoning residential on one side. Then on the other side of the highway, we will zone industrial plus power stations. Think of the roads as arteries and veins. Each main artery has many veins branching off of it.
Think of the roads as arteries and veins. Each main artery has many veins branching off of it.
Place the power plant in the industrial section away from the residential area. Make sure to link it up with powerlines. As well as adding the water utilities. Press play and watch your city begin to grow. It won’t be long until you need to extend the residential area. Just continue the pattern and you should have something like the below image:
Phase Two
As you continue to extend your city there will come a point where if you check the traffic overlay that there are red congested areas. Particularly towards the entry point of our city. Creating roundabouts seems like the next logical step. But, I did try this, and trying to implement that into our current city leads to issues. Roundabouts benefit from having spaced-out entry points. But our current layout won’t allow it.
Highways
It’s time to bring in the big guns. The highway. Go to your road options and select the highway (We want the traditional highway, three lanes one way.) If you are on PC, press Page Up or on consoles press up on the D-Pad to raise the highway one level. Replace the two one-way roads with your highways. At any junctions connect the two roads that are perpendicular to the main road. These should flow under the highways.
Then use the highway bypasses to connect to these roads, you should end up with the below layout:
By doing this your spacing out the connections which reduce the number of pressure points in your road network. Continue this throughout your city and you shouldn’t experience as much traffic as you would with roundabouts or highways.
If you notice any traffic on any other junctions that are not part of the highway. Then you can use roundabouts since there shouldn’t be too many entry points and they will be a suitable distance apart.
So that is how to solve Cities Skylines Traffic problems. Do you have any other tips? Or have you utilized the mass transit options to reduce the amount of traffic clogging your roads.
If you need other tips click here.
