It was actually really pleasant to sit here and watch traffic go by for a few minutes while I set up that picture. I tried to record video, but my computer wasn't having it.

You may recall that I threatened you with maps earlier, and I was fully serious about that. Here's how you could get around.

For the curious, the photo above was taken from the red circle, facing south. This is the oldest part of the city

It sounds like the way cims insist on walking really extreme distances might be a bug? It does seem like people will walk much too far. I had thought that maybe I had somehow discouraged car ownership? But without providing adequate alternatives? I'm _pretty_ sure that some cims will decide not to own a car if they don't have to.

But maybe it's not my fault? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/116200157349759406

Well, it is now June of 2028 in Glacier Bay. I've spent most of my last several game sessions doing beautification around the city, so the map-visible changes are pretty small. But as part of that, I did fill in zoning in areas where I think the land values can now justify more extensive grading. It turns out that just letting the simulation run while you're planting trees is a great way to build up a budget surplus. Who knew!?

And, more substantially, I built a cargo port in the south east corner of the city! Very exciting stuff. I'll bombard you with pictures later, after work.

I did a lot of that to leave the city in a stable position so I can move south across the bay to a _new_ project!

This as-yet unnamed town is going to be a tourist destination. Now that the harbor is open for business, some enterprising developers are bringing in a passenger port and attracting resorts and cruise lines. The plan is to build out an entertainment district all down the waterfront, with a small urban center at the top of the valley that's mostly housing for the workers and city services.

It's a little hard to see because I just sketched it out with dirt roads. But the basic idea is there, if you zoom in

ALSO, taking that photo is how I discovered that the battery backup built into the solar power plant does *nothing*

So, I take back all the nice things I said upthread, this game is trash /s

BTW, I got GPU Screen Recorder, so you can watch the ferris wheel go around

Mastodon didn't like the video, so here it is elsewhere
https://flic.kr/p/2s28SBJ

Well, by almost every measure, the newly developed city of Aspen (I renamed it, just Aspen, no cove) has been a huge success.The streets are lively, the shops are busy, and the attractions are attracting.

There's just one problem: None of these people got here by boat. Which means they all drove here 😱

What is a girl to do?

Obviously, draw and redraw the lines on the one road coming into town, over and over.

Also obviously, that did not work. Meanwhile, traffic is backing up on the highways halfway around the entire map. So, I imagine some other governments step in.

But, even with all that traffic off the roads, it still barely made a dent in the traffic jams.

So, next, I imagine the state steps in. Probably, the DOT and emergency management sue the government of Aspen, cuz this shit's hazardous.

I think they come to an agreement to do 3 things:

1. Aspen will establish a 2nd road corridor from the highway to the waterfront.
2. The state will build interchange access at another point on the highway, for safety as much as for capacity.
3. Aspen will operate a real local transit system, to reduce demand on the roads as much as possible. None of this starter city nonsense about "taxis are transit, right?"

The result:

I got distracted by an ambulance that was stuck in traffic, so I had to stop and fix some interchanges. That means I mostly didn't get anything built today; just moved some roads around.

I might go through my process for that tomorrow

So yesterday, instead of building much of anything, I fixed a bunch of terrible traffic. I don't have a save from before I started, but I do have one from a couple of days ago. So, these are not exactly as things were, but it's pretty close.

First, was this intersection on the east side of glacier bay, near/connecting to the cargo port. The port wasn't actually functioning at this point, due to a mod that I had to remove. But once it did function, traffic here was *devastatingly* bad.

I had it set up like this because I wanted to give the port direct access to the highway. But, it turns out that almost none of the truck traffic was headed for the highway. It was basically all turning right and heading into the industrial area up the hill. A fact you can ascertain thanks to the road inspector tools. So, one build out of a proper interchange later, and all now all the highway traffic is diffusing into the city, while all the port traffic gets direct access to the industrial area. The only real complicating factor in all of this is that this cliff is fully 30 meters tall. And that is most of the reason I hadn't built a real intersection before. I don't normally like these T interchanges because having the ramps cross over each other means you have to build much higher than is necessary. In this case, that height was happening no matter what. Compared to a trumpet interchange, which is my go-to for 3-way merges, this lets most of the sloping happen parallel to the highway. That minimizes how much it imposes on land I want to use for the port.

The other problem intersection was this one, right in the heart of the city. It has been perennially bad. I've fussed and fussed over the lanes here repeatedly. But, I think I've got it this time.

I had to sit and watch this for a while to figure out what was going on. But, basically, there was a lot of conflict happening in the queue, before anyone could even get to the intersection. It turns out a ton of traffic in the right lanes was turning left and heading to the central industrial district. And a bunch of the traffic in the left lanes was turning right, to head up to the shops and neighborhoods near this intersection.

There's no amount of paint that will solve this problem. The only thing for it was to take away some lanes. (gasp)

Specifically, I took away the ramp that connected the west-bound highway (up, in the pic) to this intersection. I also reversed the direction of the trumpet, which gave a much longer queuing distance, but it was really the lane that did it.

And I replaced that ramp with one a little further along the highway that exits directly into the main road serving the central industrial area.

TBH, I kind of feel silly now, because the local road between these two sections of the city now seems really overbuilt. But what are you gonna do? These things happen. And I'm sure I'll want that capacity for local traffic when I rezone downtown to increase the density

Now, any traffic untangling you attempt should begin with this view. This shows traffic volume. The game also has a traffic flow tool, which is hot garbage. But volume is super important. You want to see the highest volume of traffic gathered onto your highest volume roads. That's highways, and medium or large local roads. If people are bypassing those routes to take small local roads instead, that's going to cause major problems. You can't prioritize any of that traffic, it's just chaos.

If you find yourself in that situation, what you probably have to do is make those other routes less desirable. Or take them away entirely. You can try installing stop signs on every corner that shouldn't be a through route. Or you can turn them into one-way roads. You can even consider removing roads.

Or, if you catch it early, before you've gotten a bunch of development around it, you can pave the desire paths. Add capacity to the roads people already want to use.

Anywayyyy, this has been today's lesson on fixing traffic in cities skylines II

There's actually a big part of me that wants to do lets plays of this stuff. The problem is that listening to my own recorded voice makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. And I would have to do that, because unedited video gaming sessions are incredibly boring

soooo, not sure where to go with that