This mod is based on the original Traffic Manager Mod by cbethax and Traffic Manager Plus by seiggy. If you have subscribed to another Traffic Manager mod, please first deactivate it in your Content Manager (in-game) before trying this one out. Traffic Manager mod for Cities: Skylines. WORK IN PROGRESS – BACKUP YOUR EXISTING SAVE GAMES BEFORE USING! This mod lets you add priority roads, control traffic lights, change lanes and add/remove crosswalks.
After seeing so many posts about people running into traffic issues because of funky lane picking logic or just general bad design, I decided to make a 'perfect' city with unlimited money and everything unlocked from the start to see what does and doesn't work.
Traffic Manager Cities Skylines Games
First thing's first: You've gotta think about how the game understands traffic and what the logic is. Traffic light timing, turning lane distribution, merging, changing the amount of lanes all makes a huge difference. Yes, the lane path-finding is a bit funky, but think of it this way: Vehicles like to get in a lane early on to make sure they don't have to do some crazy merging later on; make sure your busier roads' lanes all flow somewhere useful.
General road layout:
Don't be afraid of dead ends; I see so many people obsessively join up to the next road, but it creates more intersections and means you have less space for buildings.
Highways aren't always the answer; sometimes just deleting some of the roads joining onto a main road (or make overhead bypasses) will increase flow because there are less intersections.
For any given area, try to keep your incoming traffic far away from your outgoing; distribute the load across different parts of the area.
Large road (two-way) = moderate capacity at moderate speed; Highway = moderate capacity at high speed; Large road (one-way) = high capacity at moderate speed. Know which to use when.
Traffic Lights:
For each direction that can enter a traffic light, you reduce the amount of time others have to go.
Two one-way streets crossing is >4 times as much throughput than two two-way streets; Traffic directions not only have twice as much lane-space, but twice as much green-light time.
T intersections have different lane configurations than Y intersections; and they have different speed limits.
Don't be afraid of traffic lights; They are really superior when there is a higher load of traffic.
Leave plenty of space between intersections; not enough room to filter through is probably the biggest problem I see on this subreddit.
Highways:
Linking two off-ramps to the beginning of a non-highway piece of road causes HUGE merging issues.
Every junction is a bad junction.
The perfect city examples:
Heavy traffic industrial area overview.
Entering/exiting the freeway.
Distributing entering/exiting traffic through the area.
Points of note:
Incoming and outgoing traffic do not touch each other until they're fairly well dispersed.
Incoming traffic only stops when there are 12 lanes available; and those twelve lanes of traffic lights only have one other phase in the cycle so 50% of the time you have 12 lanes of throughput onto 18 lanes. This also matches the initial merge, 12 lanes flowing 50% of the time; at 6 full time lanes, you have no bottleneck.
Space between the initial traffic lights is very long; space is a buffer for flow interruptions.
Having the initial traffic light at the beginning rather than two Highway pieces merging means that vehicles coming from the left, wanting to go right, don't have to merge across 3 lanes of busy traffic. When 50% of the traffic tries to merge like this, the whole thing comes to a grinding halt. Same thing on the way out.
I split the 6 lane into two 3 lanes outbound because each lane had a place to go, and I merged 3 lanes straight onto the highway so cars wouldn't all stack up in two of the six lanes the whole way down.
The inbound, however, I made with 1 lane mergers (to avoid merging across 3 lanes, especially if there was an issue) and dumped it straight into a 6 lane so my traffic light throughput would be as high as possible; it's OK for cars to build up and then flush out.
Cities Skylines Traffic Mod
Tips:
Upgrading only the piece joining the traffic light (for example, from 4 to 6 lane) is a very cheap way of dramatically bumping up traffic throughput at minimal cost.
Don't be so quick to isolate different parts of your city with the only way through being highways; design with the aim of making it so that it's just quicker for most people to opt for the highway.
Don't watch famous Youtubers for ideas; they all seem to be terrible at this.
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