Cities Skylines is the premier city-building video game. Carrying on the torch from SimCity But like in SimCity, your main enemy in a prosperous city isn’t the budget. It’s the city skyline traffic.
Traffic early in the game is very easy to manage. You can pinpoint the problem 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
To keep your Cities Skylines’ traffic flowing, spread out junctions as much as possible. Use the hierarchy of roads to reduce traffic. Highways to join large sections of your city. Medium roads to connect neighborhoods and small roads for individual zones.
Types of Road
In the beginning, you have very few roads to use. So what I would recommend is that you extend the roads that allow entry and exit into your city and then link them. These will later be upgraded to one-way streets and 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 maximize 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 and 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, 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 in 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 a 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 junction, 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 skyline Traffic problems. Do you have any other tips? Or have you utilized mass transit options to reduce the amount of traffic clogging your roads?
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