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HOW TO TRAFFIC 1858 ratings

By Soushi and 1 collaborators
If you're having traffic problems I feel bad for you son. I'm a traffic engineer and I made you a guide.
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About
This is cross-post of a very popular traffic guide, made by Reddit user drushkey, real life traffic engineer and a gentleman :)
It outlines the basic principles of how the traffic works and can really help, if you are struggling with making functional cities.
Original post can be found here.
Here is the map, used in this guide:

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Raerei Cove
A Workshop Item for Cities: Skylines
By: Eva
An island archipelago created in the death throes of an ancient volcano. Cramped spaces, vast view s,
and roaming w ildcats. Road, ship, and air connections; fertile land and ores.
Same map, but with highway directions switched for Right-Hand Drive:
Raerei Cove (RHD)

By: voltis
I love the Raerei Cove map that Eva made, but the highw ay connector is Left-Hand Drive, w hich can
cause some traffic issues w hen you try to make it RHD on the island.
Save file, for those interested:
TrafficVille
By: Drushki
As seen in that guide I w rote, w hich you can find at http://imgur.com/a/z1rM1
Also, here's a few translations of this guide:
[CN]HOW TO TRAFFIC
A Guide for Cities: Skylines
By: SpiritAw aay
这是一位交通工程师的游戏心得，包含了交通规划基础理论、货运引导、公共交通网构建、人行交通、案例、一个堵
车问题及解决过程、各种小建议等等，不仅在游戏中很有用，而且包括了很多现实中的交通规划知识，非常值得一
看。
[RU] HOW TO TRAFFIC

A Guide for Cities: Skylines
By: Soushi
Если есть проблемы с трафиком, то мне жаль тебя, друг. Я инженер транспортных систем и я написал тебе
гайд.
Introduction
So this is my current baby,
Victoria. 75 000 cims and growing. Not the biggest or most beautiful city by any means, but it has a delicious secret:
No traffic problems! Of
course, the traffic overlay has some red spots, but...
No actual congestion, just
the game telling me there's high traffic volume, which I assume it uses to determine it's a pretty noisy place to live. This is the
first exit to the only highway access to the city.
And this is downtown, in

the middle of the action. These two exits together are the main highway access for nearly 30 000 cims, and almost certainly as
many jobs - not to mention Victoria U. TL;DR : no congestion, quick commutes, and (most importantly) excellent access to city
services. Remember that first picture of my city? Not a single garbage dump or incinerator is in view.
"Good for you, but how do I do that?"
The basic, textbook idea is

simply three hierarchical levels of the network: local (2-lane roads), connecting (4- and 6-lanes) and regional (highways)
(there's really a fourth level, national, which in-game would be the outside connection, but we don't build those so forget them).
This organization is how pretty much all cities are built IRL.
Local roads should be where most people live; they're basically an extension to your driveway, letting you get to the real road
network. They don't bring you anywhere themselves, other than maybe the corner store.
Connecting roads get you around the neighborhood. They're wider, faster, and people travelling on them get higher priority at
intersections than those on local roads. That said, you can still live or work on them.
Regional roads are even faster: no intersections, no driveways, high speed limit. Highways obviously fit this, but any kind of
road can fit this description if built the right way, e.g. feeding the outskirts of your city with a 6-lane road with intersections
hundreds of meters apart.
Here's an example: all
high-density with the only escapes the highway to the right and that one slightly orange 6-laner to the "north" and "south". As
you can see, connecting roads don't have to be single straight lines to the regional ones, so long as their intersections are
relatively far apart.
Public transit is the same
idea: long, fast stretches for regional (e.g. trains and subways), buses within the neighborhood, and your cims' own two feet to
get to the door.
"But why not just make ALL the roads 4 or 6 lanes, if they're faster and have higher volume?"
Good question,
hypothetical reader! IRL the answer is style and money, the latter of which applies in-game too. More importantly though, your
cims select their routes based on time-to-destination, assuming no traffic (I don't know this for a fact, but I'm pretty confident it's
mostly true). This means they'll tend to funnel towards the larger roads, if given the choice.
That in turn means that, as planned, the only traffic on local roads is going to be those cims who have to use them. Even with
relatively long stretches of high-density development, that's only a few sims an RL minute at the fastest speed, versus many,
many more on the bigger routes.
(The following is based on 15 minutes of me watching intersections with a stopwatch).
Conveniently, intersection signals in Cities: Skylines seem to be based on detectors: they'll stay green for the last direction to
have traffic, until either ~5 seconds elapse or vehicles arrive in a conflicting lane, whichever comes first. If both roads have
similar loads, that's 50% green time for each, cutting the capacity of both in half. In the case pictured, however, over 5 minutes
the 4 lane avenue got 32 seconds of green for every 5 on the local road.
I think you can improve
that a touch more by having the local roads be alternating one-way streets. IRL, having no traffic coming in the opposite
direction is a serious boost to capacity. Cims being robots, though, can drive between each other without a care in the world,
and my local streets don't have enough traffic on them either way for a serious comparison.
There's also the issue that you need more intersections, since the services may have to travel around the block, slowing them
down. Still, I like them.
Trucks! Trucks everywhere!
Of course, all of the above

applies mostly to cars and commuters, who can go from anywhere to anywhere. You have to provide them with very general
solutions, but you can let them do there thing once they're almost home.
Industry is different. If
you're like me, you have it concentrated in a few areas, and while there are less trucks than cars on the roads they almost ALL
take the same few routes. These routes will suffer huge volumes, potentially domino-ing to your city's untimely demise.
Fortunately, the game provides a few very powerful solutions, unique to industry:
1) District policies
Banning heavy traffic is
free, and thanks to your amazing police force 100% effective: no trucks will go through the district. Obviously, this only moves
the problem, but it can push trucks out of quiet little Suburbiton and onto the specially built highway, despite it being a 6 hour
detour.
Just don't forget that cargo has to go SOMEWHERE. If you don't provide any routes, your industries aren't going to be happy.
2) Cargo trains
At first I thought cargo
trains were only for getting goods out of or into the city. Not so! While you don't create routes for them like you do for other
transit networks, the cargo train stations will kindly figure it out themselves and bring cargo wherever it's needed. Moreover,
since cargo is far more predictable than commuters, you can quickly and cheaply build a very simple, out-of-the-way network
that heavily reduces the number of trucks on the roads.
...well, on the roads that
matter anyway. Cargo still has to get to and from the train stations, and no clever tricks can increase the capacity of the cargo
bay itself. You can easily get long truck lines for the train station. I don't know a real solution to this, but there's 2 ways to
reduce the problem.
First, if you're facing the front of the station, know that trucks always enter on the right and exit on the left. Build it on a one-way
road going that direction, and at least you won't have the added problem of them yielding to each other.
Second, you can just build the train station somewhere where lines won't bother anyone, and then hide that section when you're
showing off the low traffic in your city :/
If traffic at cargo stations
gets to be a real problem, you can increase throughput by replacing the standard road connection with a pair of on-ramps, as
pictured. Since they don't have to make the sharp 90 degree turn, trucks maintain their speed, and everyone wins.
(credit to u/gliph for sharing this)
Dem clever industries
One last thing for industry
which isn't immediately obvious: cargo can take some pretty clever and complex routes. This is a train station right next to the
cargo harbor; trains bring the cargo from all around the city to the station, which then spawns trucks to drive it to the ships. The
harbor does the same thing for imports.
Do note that this will create some MEAN traffic between them. I gave them a dedicated set of onramps. It would be nice if the
train could offload directly to the ships, but what can you do.
Anyway, those are the overall strategies I can think of right now. I'll end with a few...
Public Transit
So far, it's been all about
cars and trucks. You can get away with them alone if you want... though who knows why you would want to do that, because
public transit is incredibly efficient:
Every person using mass transit is one less car on the road. That's up to 30 per bus, 240 per train.
Thanks to the former, you end up indirectly increasing the capacity of your roads, since you can fit more people in less
vehicles.
Less cars = less noise, increasing land value (though transit stations also generate noise, so it's not perfect).
Transit stations count as a service, directly producing happy faces in their vicinity. If you want to max office levels, you
pretty much need public transit access.
It's fun to follow trains around. I could do it for hours.
Real traffic engineering is
never this immediately satisfied.
The basics: placing an efficient single line.
A fact true both IRL and in Skylines is that most trips are from A to B, and then back to A. Therefore, just connecting two places
together isn't enough: it should be just as easy to get back to the start. This may seem obvious to you if you've been using
mass transit regularly, but look at this:
I did not make that red line.
The green (good) line is as bog standard as you can get, but it's standard for a reason: all you have to do to get back home is
to take the bus across the street from where you got off. It's also a perfectly straight line which, while not always practical, to do,
means the bus is taking the shortest possible path between any two stops. As a consequence, this line has a moderately OK
"trips saved" stat of 32% (which isn't bad, considering these are the only lines in the city and took all of a minute to make).
The blue "less good" line is the kind of thing you'd do if you were just trying to maximize coverage. The problem is that it's like
travelling on the hands of a clock: getting from 12 to 3 is pretty efficient, but to get back you have to go through all the other
nine hours. The cims seem to realize that, and as a result the "trips saved" are only 26%. That's not to say this kind line is
useless though, as I'll show later.
The red line is an extreme case, but one I know for a fact people do on occasion. I could go into all the problems, but as a rule
of thumb, if it's not immediately obvious where people would use the line to go, it's not going to be very efficient. The result is
that this line saves only 12% of trips, despite having the most buses and covering the most zones.
As I said, loop lines have
their uses. Here, the road was already a circle; a linear line would have been awkward. To avoid the going-around-the-clock
problem, there's an added line going the other way.
The result is amazing effectiveness, both lines giving me 100% car trips saved. That said, they also take 4 buses each, and
transport a whopping 80 people/week total. Not amazingly efficient, but since the road with the green line on it feed a huge area
to the right, I think it's worthwhile in this case.
Here's another loop, also
with 100% trips saved. It's much shorter, so not much time would be saved adding a second line. It's also much more cost
effective, with four times the passengers/bus. I wish you could manually adjust the number of buses on each line... maybe in a
future patch.
Anyway, you'll note that in both the above pictures, these loops connect to several other lines. Without these connections, there
is no way they would reach 100%, since the only viable trips would be within residential zones, e.g. visiting your neighbors.
Which brings us to...
Networking your transit lines
Much like with roads (and

as I've said before) transit lines work most efficiently with a hierarchy. Typically, this has subways/trains serving the region,
buses connecting within districts, and a pleasant walk along the local roads.
The above image gets the idea across, but is *extremely* idealized. The only case I can see applying that directly is if your city
is super dense, a perfect grid, and shaped like an elongated rectangle.
I say dense, because subway stations that close together are not particularly efficient: trains carry a lot of passengers, but are
slow to accelerate and decelerate, so minimizing stops is good (this MAY be less true in the game than IRL, but it seems similar
enough to me).
And there's one more problem: what if you want to go from the end of one of the bus lines to the one next to it? It's a pretty big
detour by mass transit.
TL;DR: If you want to network a non-hypothetical city, you have to adapt this simple idea to whatever you've got. Fortunately,
the map I'm playing (Raerai's Cove, by u/aKiss4Luck or Eva on Steam) - combined with my relatively improvised play-style,
present a good variety of scenarios to deal with.
NOTE: The following is in descending order of the aforementioned hierarchy. While you should probably *plan* things in this
order, early-on starting with bus lines is probably a more cost-effective option.
Regional network
(credit to u/kchoze for

making the image)
Unlike road traffic/highways which are a concern immediately, your city should already be relatively developed before you start
plopping the serious transit lines. As such, you should have at least some idea of which direction you're going to expand the
different zones in, and this is the main (but not only - see below) thing to consider when planning out your regional network.
Essentially, the main non-cargo trips your city will have are residential-industrial/office and back, residential-commercial and
back, and residential-industrial/office-commercial-back. The later is somewhat less common, but is important in making your
commercial buildings happy - thus the "not enough customers" complaint you can get (I may be conflating real life with the game
on this, but it seems to hold up).
An ideal network, therefore, should gather all your users towards the commercial zones (via the horizontal red lines in the
picture, generally buses) before pumping them towards the main places of work (via the vertical lines, usually either trains or
subways).
It is important to keep in mind that excessive transfers will turn cims away from your transit lines, regardless of how straight and
efficient they otherwise are. 2-3 transfers seems ok, but of the cims I've followed none seem willing to do more than that.
After your zoning, the
second consideration is major trip generators: the ploppable buildings that either attract or generate a large number of people
on their own. This is downplayed in-game relative to real life (for example, the entire transit system in my city readjusts
whenever there's a hockey game by adding special bus lines and additional subway trains) but is still worth worrying about, and
trying to keep them on your high-capacity transit lines. The major trip generators are:
Universities. Up to 4500 students at each means people are constantly coming and going.
Airports/passenger harbors. With up to 100/200 passengers at a time, respectively, these don't generate a HUGE number
of trips, but make up for it by releasing them all at the same time. Remember, rush hour IRL isn't caused by people
commuting, but by them commuting in the same direction at the same time.
The Space Elevator. This is the big one. People come out of it constantly, and in big numbers. If it isn't directly adjacent to
a subway or train station, you're in trouble. (Incidentally, are the people coming out tourists from space? What's up with
that?)
Of course, high schools, elementary schools and all the unique buildings generate visitors on their own. None however are
notably more than the equivalent area of high density zoning, so I don't give them more than the same bus service I give
everyone.
Here's the outline of the

regional network of my city (I couldn't get a good camera angle with the overlays, so MSPaint lines will have to do). The color
code is the same as the default one in-game:
Green = subways
Red = trains
Blue = buses acting as regional lines (I'll explain this one later)
Orange circle are transfer stations; trip generators and the industrial zones are marked (universities are directly on transfer
stations, since both are helped by being right in the middle of things). Unmarked areas are mostly combined
commercial/residential/office.
The goal of this network is twofold: to be within (at most) a few minutes bus ride from every home or place of work in the city,
and to offer the straightest path possible.
Case in point: As you can
see, the subway mostly follows the highway. The logic behind it is simple:
Highways were placed to make vehicular traffic as convenient as possible.

To be competitive, mass transit has to be at least as convenient to get to the same places.
The train line was built to
service the large industrial district (under the arrow) as well as the adjacent residential area. In the real world, this makes
perfect sense, since trains are far cheaper to build and operate than subways, and are therefore a far more cost-effective way
to reach your network out to/through a less densely populated area. Sadly, I've just realized that the same does not hold up in
Cities: Skylines, where their advantages relative to subways are:
Slightly cheaper to place (but more expensive to operate... what. It's literally the same tracks, just sans the tunnels)
Better able to cross terrain, thanks to bridges
Slightly higher capacity
More fun to watch
A subway may have been

better. Regardless, the train connects to 3 of the 4 subway lines in the core of the city (so as to minimize the number of
transfers required) then goes straight to the industrial district. 45% trip reduction, trains usually operating at capacity... seems
to work OK.
TO REITERATE: Subways and trains should make up the backbone of the public transit of a decently large city. Their goal is to
be FAST, and therefore both trace relatively straight lines, and have stops as far apart as reasonable bus routes allow.
Speaking of which...
Buses: picking up the passengers
This was the first area of

the city, and so originally operated on buses only, which sprouted radially from the downtown you see here.
Bus routes were dictated largely by topography. When I wanted to reach far, I stuck to a straight line (light blue). Closer in, the
short distances let me stick to a small loop so as to maximize coverage.
This is also where I started the subway, which I plopped at what was already my "central station".
This black line is

something I ended up doing a lot of, mostly because the mountains on either side kept the city from stretching too far from the
backbone.
Functionally, it acts as two lines (indicated by the red arrows): on either side, if you want to get to the subway you can just pick
the appropriate direction for the shortest route. In addition, since it runs part of the way parallel to the subway, it allows some
interconnectivity that you wouldn't get directly applying the idealized diagram above.
The green line is the same basic idea (granted it's mostly offscreen). South, it acts as the main access to a large, low density
residential neighborhood. To the north, it provides the same "act as two lines" role as the black line, albeit connecting to a
different subway line.
Looking at this now, I

realize that I haven't adapted the bus lines since the last time I expanded this area. The red and black lines (which perform
opposite-direction loops) should probably go around the entire district, with the white line cutting it in the middle. The idea:
The red+black lines connect everyone along the outside to either the white bus line or the train station.
Since they would be a bit far from the middle, the white line covers it. Its main goal is however providing direct access to the
larger area in the background and the subway station there - local coverage is just a side benefit.
The train line, as shown earlier, has its next stop waaaay across the city. Since I can't conceive of a reason why someone
would take the white line out here just to go twice as far in the opposite direction, I don't directly connect
Finally, here's the largest

and densest area of my city. All the lines here follow the same basic logic as those presented above, with variations depending
on the local road geometry and how I was feeling at that moment.
There are two things worth special note however:
The red subway line is the one subway not to follow a highway. I placed it largely by feel to be honest, based on the long
stretch of high density to either side with all in/egress limited to relatively narrow bottlenecks to the picture's North/South.
While I could possibly have replaced it with a bus line, the added capacity of a subway afforded me convenient places to
anchor other buses, again cutting their effective max distance from a subway in 2 or more.
The blue line (pointed to by the arrow) does some weird stuff and looks like it doesn't follow any previous pattern, but it
does: the large number of subway stations let me twist about to gain some coverage. It acts as "multiple lines", except some
of them are loops. (If this strikes you as confusing, that's because it is. It took me a few minutes to confirm that the line
wasn't completely ridiculous. Point is, you don't have to rigidly adhere to too many rules to have effective buses).
One question you may be asking yourself is whether it wouldn't be better to just have multiple lines, instead of lines pretending
to be 5. The answer is: I'm asking myself the same question. Both have upsides:
Multiple lines allow shorter routes, decreasing the chance of a 1 hour wait followed by 6 simultaneous buses.
Single lines minimize transfers, facilitating semi-local (read: not requiring the subway) trips.
I lean towards the former because it worked in Cities in Motion 2, but I need to do more testing to be sure.
Special cases
Special case #1: Long, linear path between subway stations
I can't imagine this
happening on most maps, but it did on mine. I had a long stretch of offices going between the airport/space elevator and the
main area of my city. Not enough demand for a subway station, but that wouldn't stop me from forcing some mass transit down
their throats.
Doesn't get much simpler than this: linear bus route between the two subsequent subway station. Bam: super (borderline
unrealistically) effective.
Special case #2: Bus terminals
When posted the first
version of this guide, u/velcrox posted this impressive bus terminal. My first thought was "Wow, why didn't I think of that that's
amazing." The second was "I can't imagine a situation where this isn't complete overkill".
Second view to highlight
how it works.
The idea is simple: you have one or more primary line (typically long-distance and high capacity, i.e. trains or subways) bringing
users to the terminal. They get off the train, take pedestrian paths (or crosswalks) to the bus stop leading where they want, and
voilà. Where my typical bus lines just stop in front of subway station - which would cause serious traffic if more than 3 or 4 lines
converged in the same area - this design allows for a whopping 20 buses (assuming 2 lines per stop, which in my experience is
the limit).
If you want to have a more realistic bus network, or if you prefer shorter, more direct lines to my long ones, this is an excellent
idea.
Of course, you can always
use a scaled-down version.
This is the result of my expanding over a river, only to realize it was too deep to also extend the subway. Since this was the end
of the map (and thus also the last planned stretch of subway tunnel) I replaced said last leg with an express bus directly from
the station to here, arriving over the bridge just barely visible to the north. Effectively, I'm using a bus as a regional route,
instead of a connecting one.
From there, cims can either take one of the 5 other buses covering the local area, or walk over the pedestrian paths if their
destination is nearby.
Note that placing a bus terminal inside a roundabout is a profoundly stupid idea. IRL, this would cause accidents pretty much
every day. In game, it made managing traffic a pain. But I think it's pretty, and now you've looked at it. So there.
Pedestrian paths: The oft-forgotten public transit option
If you remember when I
described the hierarchy of public transit options, I said that their equivalent of local roads was cims' own two legs. Colossal
Order included pedestrian paths for two reasons: they look good, and they're extremely useful. (And not just in bus terminals).
This is the same area as
above with a larger, birds-eye view. As you can see, the area above downtown is connected only by the road of the far left. The
slope is too steep for the road to come back down (at least, not without some serious zig-zagging) and walking all the way
around is too far for cims to seriously consider. A bus line could connect the hill to the train and subway stations on the bottom,
but that's a waste given that they *are* technically in walking distance.
Fortunately, pedestrian paths are smaller, can make sharper turns and can be steeper (think stairs, though you don't see them)
than even the smallest roads. Added benefit: cims have no qualms with making 100m vertical climbs in their daily commute.
Effectively, these paths extend the range of the stations below at almost no cost.
Of course, their use isn't
limited to steep hills. In this low-density district, blocks are long, which would normally be inconvenient for reaching the one
street with a bus line. While I could have cut the blocks with roads just to let pedestrians through, it was again cheaper and
prettier to give them their own paths.
Their small width also allow you to minimize damage while you trace them through neighborhoods. You can often squeeze them
between existing buildings (unless you on a grid, where those gaps don't exist).
Unfortunately, path or no, that old man seems to have missed his bus :(
Of course, pedestrian
paths don't have to be limited to the outskirts. Here, while messing with road geometry to solve some traffic coming off the
highway (in case your curious, the stretch of road between the roundabout and the 4-lane avenue was too short, causing
backup and leading me to raise the whole thing into the air) I inadvertently ended up cutting off the main access from the
subway station on the left to the university in the lower right.
You'd think they could use that crosswalk right there and then WALK ACROSS THE OPEN ASPHALT, but no.
Fortunately, a path over the avenue and curving behind that building gets them right to class.
Problem solving
The above having taken

me something like 12 hours, I don't have much energy left for the problem-solving portion of this guide. But I also don't feel like
hanging you guys out to dry, so I'll skip all the relatively simple ones and get straight to a problem that took me over 2 hours to
solve.
I warn you in advance: the solution is a little anti-climactic. The steps in between, however, consist of most of my bag of tricks,
so hopefully you'll get something useful out of it.
So there I was, expanding my city to some new land. Take a short break to admire what I've done so far, and...
Uh oh. Something like 6km

of traffic. That's definitely not good.
STEP 1: Localise the problem
Easy enough: it's the
place where the traffic starts (or ends, I guess, from the perspective of the drivers). It also happen to be on my favorite
interchange. :(
STEP 2: Identify the problem behavior
That doesn't look like a
legal merge to me, Mr. Truck.
Essentially, trucks are slowing to a standstill, turning almost 90 degrees, and then inching their way into a forced 2-lane change.
Appalled by this reckless behavior, drivers upstream are stopping.
-> traffic
STEP 3: Troll the forums
Don't do this.
Don't do this.
STEP 3: Has something changed that might cause this?
Fortunately, that's obvious

in this case. It's probably that area I was building attracting extra traffic.
STEP 4: Confirm suspicions.
SimCity 4 veterans might
bemoan the absence of the road-query tool, which allowed you to know the origins and destinations of all the users of a given
road with a single click. Instead, we have the more laborious task of polling people individually.
Aside: I once had the task of stopping road traffic and asking them this exact information IRL. For 16 hours. In Nowheresville,
northern Canada. It sucked.
Suspicions confirmed
While traffic already on
the highway is pretty much business as usual, the line of merging trucks is all coming from the industrial district pictured and
heading to the newly-constructed commercial area. Ok.
STEP 5 (Optional): It wasn't like this before, right?
Fortunately - thanks to kindly redditors asking for my save - I had a prior version of the city on the workshop. Looking at the
same area, things were ok... but barely. This kind of merger was happening, just not regularly enough to cause more than a few
second of slowdown on occasion.
STEP 6: Can I just fix the interchange?
Short answer: no. There is

no way a larger onramp would fit - and even if it did, it wouldn't avoid them merging. Same deal with placing it on the other side.
Besides: I love this interchange, it's so symmetrical.
STEP 7: Add capacity somewhere else?
There WAS another route
that leads from industry to new commerce... or is there? I built the circled interchange a long time ago - before my city reached
anywhere near here - in order to connect to the harbor. There was no point then of allowing a left turn from industryville, and I
never thought to add one since.
STEP 8: Manually reticulate some splines
Road construction is so
fiddly sometimes.
STEP 8.5: WAIT
Don't forget that your city needs some time to readjust, as vehicles either chose a new path or simply new vehicles spawn with
knowledge of the new road layout. Then they have to actually get to the affected area. Meanwhile, the problem areas need
some time to clear out, even if everything is technically A-OK.
STEP 9: Did it work?

Well, most of the vehicles
using the new ramps are definitely moving to and from the right places, but...
No.
It's slightly better. More
vehicles are going through... but not enough to fix the problem permanently. Ugh.
Same deal, those
ridiculous merges.
STEP 4, again
Polling the trucks tells a
simple story. The new route is the new route of choice for SOME of the trucks, on the far end of the industrial district. The
others still prefer the original route, lacking access to Google Traffic.
STEPS 10+: What else can I do?
Lots of other ideas to
increase capacity. Make the connection a direct highway (blue)? Won't fit.
Add a speedy onramp (orange) or alternate highway (purple)? Fits, but then the weird-merger problem just happens in the new
interchange. Right.
Direct, coast highway? Would work, but impossible to make not hideously ugly.
Train over the other islands, bringing goods to the commerces' doorstep? Nowhere to fit it at the destination, islands would look
like a jumbled mess
like a jumbled mess
But wait... what about some econ 101? Instead of increasing capacity, decrease demand?
This new area could

probably survive with, say, 8 less stores.
They'd probably prefer
being somewhere more central, anyway. The offices they're replacing can go back there near Colossal Order, for inspiration.
Again, we wait for the situation to reach the new equilibrium...
Bingo.
Well, that was easy.
Moral: sometimes all the traffic engineering in the world can't beat a slight adjustment to your urban planning.
(told you it was anti-climactic)
Time to end with some...
Starting out - Building to 10 000 Cims
Probably the question
most people have asked me is what to do in the early game. I'll remind you right away that I'm a traffic engineer; while I'd like to
think I'm very good at management games overall, I'm by no means a certified expert on things that aren't immediately traffic
related, so take everything that isn't road design with a grain of salt.
Anyway, you hit New Game and you're staring at this. You have three immediate problems:
You have very little space with which to spread things out.
You have relatively little money with which to build infrastructure.
Most of said infrastructure isn't unlocked in the first place.
Essentially, most of this guide doesn't really apply to you yet... But if you completely forget about it, you can easily paint yourself
into a corner. Step one is to figure out the most basic part of your plan: which way are you going to expand?
Option 1: You want to extend away from the existing highway
You might want to do this

for a number of reasons. You may want to have your city extend towards the coast. Alternatively, you may be playing on Raerei
Cove like me, and not have any other choice.
Above is the (recreated) before-after of my city. Here's the thought process:
I'm going to want a highway up the middle, even though I can't build one now. I'd better leave some room for it.
I'm going to want a highway up the middle, even though I can't build one now. I'd better leave some room for it.
For now I'll use an avenue, connected to the highway with 2 1-way-2-lanes.
Off this road, I'll need connector roads for sure. May as well build them now.
An important thing to note with any start is that it's very unlikely you'll get it perfectly right right at the start. You can see the
highway junction I ended up with is an absolute (but functional) mess, and that what used to be a grid of pure industrial on the
left has become an elongated roundabout serving a bunch of incinerators and a cargo train station. Real cities change, and
yours probably should too.
Option 2: You want to extend alongside the starting highway.
In some ways, this case is

simpler. The city above is my second one, a more typical grid with the starting zone shown by the red box. It has a population of
62 000, just about to hit peak-traffic.
The initial connection was the same, but industry was concentrated near the highway for easier access (they're the ones who
will use it most, and the least likely to mind the noise). This kind of city is arguably easier to plan out, since you can just repeat
the same pattern again and again. There's also the advantage that only on a few stretches of road do cargo and personal
vehicles intersect (particularly after I build a massive commercial district across the highway).
However, you need a higher density of connecting roads parallel to the highway (as you can see going through the
office/commercial) since very few internal trips will path on the highway itself.
Said connecting roads are more concentrated around the high density zones on the right, since those generate more trips.
Looking at these for the first time in a while, I realize they seem to contradict what I've been saying thus far. I'll go over them in a
tip later.
Note that where the line of offices is now used to be empty space, left to isolate people from the industries. I filled it in later as
the industry leveled up.
Sorry if this section is short - to be honest I never put any thought into how I do this. It's mostly trained reflex from decades of
city builders, but hopefully you can gleam something from the basic layout and idea.
Miscellaneous tips
MISCELLANEOUS TIP #1
Ironically, buses can be a
major source of congestion. Despite apparently emptying and filling up almost instantly, they wait a set amount of time at the
stops, making buses behind them block up a lane while they wait. If you have a lot of lines converging in one place (say, at a
subway station) try having a few adjacent bus stops for the different lines. One stop for every two lines seems to work for me.
The game warns you
about this in extreme cases, but don't have intersections too close together! This avenue acts as a service road for the
highway, but bends away from at the exists so as to avoid backing up traffic into the roundabout. Speaking of which...
Traffic lights only matter
when they're red!
This section of my second city is probably the densest grid possible, and is full high-density development. In many cities, this
would be a serious problem, but here it works perfectly fine. Why?
Simple: all the roads leading to the places people might actually want to go are huge. They could conceivable get somewhere
by going north long enough, but they would end up going through blocks and block of suburbs, and no one wants that when
they're a big fat avenue just sitting nearby. The only people who would want to use them would be those pulling up to their
homes - at most 2 per block.
The end result is that there is almost no demand for a green light in the vertical axis, and therefore the 6-lanes are free to give
green lights almost all the time.
Of course, the zoning in your city has to be just-so for this to work... but it can.
"roundabouts are so great why aren't you building them everywhere omg"
Roundabouts are indeed

pretty sweet. To be honest, you can ignore almost everything you just read and plop roundabouts everywhere. As an added
pretty sweet. To be honest, you can ignore almost everything you just read and plop roundabouts everywhere. As an added
bonus, they look nice and are a central tool for ton of the amazing cities I see on [the Cities: Skylines] subreddit. The only
downsides are that they take a little longer to build, and they take a lot more space.
Personally, I feel like relying too much on roundabouts is a lot like sticking to grid-based cities: it can definitely work, but it gets a
bit repetitive to build. That said, I do use them where I need to (mostly to connect to highways) and occasionally make random
ones since they're undeniably pretty. Like everything else in this game, what you do is up to you.
Stay flexible and have fun.
Remember that this guide has been more about building solid cities than perfect ones. I would rather play around faults in the AI
than abuse them, and I prefer having cities work despite their flaws than building ones that are flawless.
Consequently, I suggest seeing everything here as helpful suggestions, not strict guidelines. After all, if being a traffic engineer
made me infallible, traffic wouldn't exist.
:D
Thanks for reading!
This took a lot longer to write than I'd planned, so I hope it helps someone out.
Feel free to ask me any questions in comments, or PM [on Reddit] or whatever.
Have fun building!
145 Comments < 1 >
wcdog987 (NotASellOut) Mar 21 @ 8:42am

I've noticed something that I think you could include in your miscellaneous tips section.
On highways, just like in real life, there are signs that direct traffic on what route takes them where. Naturally, the AI of the game
already know the route to take to get to their destination, however I've seen cars switch lanes on highways at the most random
locations, sometimes even switching from the far left lane to the far right lane. I looked closer at the highways and noticed that
the cars are switching when they come into view of the signs that span the intersections of highways. (1/2)
wcdog987 (NotASellOut) Mar 21 @ 8:42am

In one spot, I had used the pre-made asset where the highways connect at 90 degree angles, but one highway set bridges over
the other. Cars don't see the sign until the peak of the bridge, where they are alll switching lanes immediately. In another spot,
the road curves 180 degrees, however when testing the angle at which the cars change lanes in relation to the signs, they appear
to change lanes when the sign is 40 degrees to the left or right from the direction they are facing, so long as there are no
obstructions in the path.
I can post some screenshots so that my examples are made more clear, but I think this could be a useful tip for highways.
Planning straight paths to intersections on highways where signs will appear will help traffic merge/change lanes more
appropriately than suddenly.
Timmy ♥☮☯ Mar 6 @ 12:36am

This is just super awesome! So thorough and deep. Thank you very much!
FlammerMe | kickback.com Mar 4 @ 6:02am

grab popcorn and start reading
very helpful guide, long but everything is covered that you need to know in short this guide teaches you to build solid cities rather
than perfect ones
AvengedNinja Feb 20 @ 3:11pm
Great Guide thanks!
Strejda Wallas Feb 19 @ 4:27am

I have bleen playing Raerei Cove for some time now, but even after reaching the last milestone, I don't get to unlock as much new
land to expand as I see in this tutorial. Did the OP use some kind of mod?
ezequielandrush Feb 15 @ 8:57am

Nice! very clear and helpful
Anyo Feb 15 @ 3:46am
liked it
Maultasche Feb 13 @ 10:45am

Thank you a lot, I enjoyed reading it!
Dragon's Rage Feb 7 @ 8:09pm

like
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Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines > Guides > Soushi's Guides

HOW TO TRAFFIC 1858 ratings

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Here is the map, used in this guide:

Raerei Cove (RHD)

Save file, for those interested:

Also, here's a few translations of this guide:

[RU] HOW TO TRAFFIC

And this is downtown, in

"Good for you, but how do I do that?"

The basic, textbook idea is

(The following is based on 15 minutes of me watching intersections with a stopwatch).

Of course, all of the above

(credit to u/gliph for sharing this)

Dem clever industries

The basics: placing an efficient single line.

Networking your transit lines

Much like with roads (and

(credit to u/kchoze for

Here's the outline of the

Highways were placed to make vehicular traffic as convenient as possible.

A subway may have been

Buses: picking up the passengers

This was the first area of

This black line is

Looking at this now, I

Finally, here's the largest

There are two things worth special note however:

Special case #2: Bus terminals

Pedestrian paths: The oft-forgotten public transit option

The above having taken

Uh oh. Something like 6km

STEP 1: Localise the problem

STEP 2: Identify the problem behavior

STEP 3: Troll the forums

STEP 3: Has something changed that might cause this?

Fortunately, that's obvious

STEP 4: Confirm suspicions.

STEP 5 (Optional): It wasn't like this before, right?

Short answer: no. There is

STEP 7: Add capacity somewhere else?

STEP 8: Manually reticulate some splines

STEP 8.5: WAIT

STEP 9: Did it work?

STEPS 10+: What else can I do?

This new area could

Again, we wait for the situation to reach the new equilibrium...

(told you it was anti-climactic)

Time to end with some...

Starting out - Building to 10 000 Cims

Option 1: You want to extend away from the existing highway

You might want to do this

Above is the (recreated) before-after of my city. Here's the thought process:

Option 2: You want to extend alongside the starting highway.

In some ways, this case is

Roundabouts are indeed

Stay flexible and have fun.

Thanks for reading!

Feel free to ask me any questions in comments, or PM [on Reddit] or whatever.

145 Comments < 1 >

wcdog987 (NotASellOut) Mar 21 @ 8:42am

wcdog987 (NotASellOut) Mar 21 @ 8:42am

Timmy ♥☮☯ Mar 6 @ 12:36am