How to Start a City! Cities Skylines Road Layout and Traffic Fix Inspiration 

I would like a more varied map style for cities. How many cities just get randomly built on a highway that went to nowhere XD

I realise this was aimed at beginners but my preference is to load the map into the editor and downgrade all the highways to national roads all the way to the edge of the map with a tiny tail of highway at the edge to make the connections. Then I reduce all the intersections to something more suitable to national roads. Maybe a basic parclo. Finally I tend to boost the railroad to double the capacity and tidy up the unrealistically tight intersections. Then I start the game normally.

My husband and I are from Virginia Beach and we just FREAKED OUT that you highlight our city!! Big fans, keep up the good work!!

No matter how professional you are in the City Skyline game, you still learn new information from time to time

It’s awesome to see my hometown featured in a video!!!! Virginia Beach for the win!!!

Great advice! The Virginia Beach method is pretty similar to what happens with I-40 heading to Carolina Beach here in NC except that it ends up going parallel to the coast rather than perpendicular

There are plenty of guides out there, but yours are short and concise. In my opinion, they are the clearest to understand.

As someone who grew up in Va Beach, I was excited to see someone call it out! I had never really thought about how it filters the traffic down between local and oceanfront destinations as it goes, but thinking now about how i had interacted with the roads there you are absolutely on point and recent changes have underscored that usage. The first connector the highways hit is a north-south collector that provides a shortcut between the main highway and the major east-west arterial just to the north, Laskin, which runs pretty much parallel to 64. Then further towards the oceanfront, The closest road to the beach (Atlantic) is effectively a local road, while Pacific is the north-south arterial that runs from the far north end of the beach all the way down past Rudee inlet and south.

Checking in here from Virginia Beach. If you'd like to continue with the Virginia Beach approach, remember to not implement public transit at all and then to have multiple highways that circle back on each other. Love the shout out!

begin building a city... dang thats some great advice I never thought of that.... I dont definitely do that once a week, because I learn something new I want to base a city off....

I have two theories for avoiding traffic stop later when the city is large and I have tested only one theory so far and it works. What I always did was try to get industry in one large area for the entire city (because of pollution). I never realized, because traffic AI is greatly flawed, you can't do that. What happens is, you get a "chit" load of industry trucks all taking the same routes, exits and rampons and this will cause traffic to come to a standstill as cars stop traffic to change lanes, which is unrealistic but that's what you're facing in City Skylines. My guess was, if industry is spread out in smaller sections throughout the city, in different spots, you end up with a smaller amount of trucks taking a similar path and thus not bring traffic to a standstill because of endless flow taking same route. So what I did was build smaller sections that split into residential, commerce, industry and business...about four per city land-block. You still get some areas of traffic in the red because traffic is just high there and the city is huge so there's a lot of vehicle. That's fine, as long as the traffic is moving and not stopping completely, that's all you can ask for in City Skylines. About 90+ percent of my traffic map is NOT in any red at all. My second theory is to build industry along the main highway the comes into and out of the city. I have not tested a city like this yet. You can have as many roads as you can afford and that won't fix the traffic problem because it's an AI issue. Trucks will still take the same path to and fro, even though you have a "chit" load of paths they can take to get to the same spot. Industry is the biggest traffic buster and you must spread it out and keep it small, in order to force all those trucks to NOT take the same "d'ham" paths and clogging "chit" up.

There is no other RU-vidr I’ll watch absolute start to absolute finish. Even on a starter video. Entrancing.

11:08 I prefer to have the industrial area on the right side just so I can connect it with a quick ramp to the highway (exiting the city) to reduce traffic on the roundabout and for smooth exporting in the near future.

Santa Cruz, California also just dumps the highway into town. It's really jarring after 40 minutes in the mountains.

I recently started cities skylines on my console and i realized that this was the game i have been searching for many years. I started a little more than a month ago and i already have 110+ hours on game. My only regret is to discovering this game a little late. There isnt many new content about it nowadays and i am forced to work with relatively old content. I like your channel very much though, thanks for the effort!

The Virginia Beach method is also used here in Florida frequently...Melbourne comes to mind. Really nice overview to help begin a city. It's such an awesome game, but that starting point decision still intimidates me a little when starting a new city!

Always good to get back to basics. I can't shake bad habits from playing SimCity 2000 where you just gridded the whole map. I'd really like an "undoing the grid" kind of fix your city. We're all pretty good at traffic by this point, it's time to branch out. 😀

This is the best out of many videos I've watched about how to start, and I've watched a lot! Thanks

Always inspiring, always entertaining, always relaxed... and always a great way to spend the time. Thanks for every video you're doing!

So very true: Respect road hierarchy, however I manage it, and I just don't have horrid traffic problems. Busy at times, yes, but not the "Fix Your City" kind of awful. 😉 If I'm playing modded and 81 Tiles, sandbox-style, I have been known to replace the initial system interchange with a service interchange at the get-go--which you can't do if you play the build-the-achievements style. Both styles of play have their appeal. Thus, this startup video is very helpful. :)

Dude, you kind of make me mad. I end up sitting and watching your videos instead of playing! Seriously though, great videos! Thanks!😁

Woo! Shoutout to ImperialJedi!

I’ve done your Virginia Beach method a couple times but didn’t put this much forethought into it. I see it all along the Atlantic side. I wanna say Melbourne or Cocoa Beach Florida does something similar. Since a divided highway is essentially a couplet, it ends with a block-sized, square-about.

My aunt zelda said the "hammer-of-thor" interchange is the bee's knees and it's swell and neat o

Top tricks for a better city start. If you play on PC and have the game on Steam, use Mods. Traffic Manager: President Edition is a game changer for the traffic issues. Without this you cans till do the following: Always give a local area more than one route to the connectors, you don't want to cul-de-sac an area or focus your traffic on a single spot. Give your industry area its own separate access to the highway. Don't make them share a single access point with commercial and residential traffic. Plan to relocate that factory area after a bit to outside the town, or start another industry area elsewhere in addition to the small starting industry entirely, especially for the Industries DLC. Don't put that DLC content in the city limits unless you like to suffer. If you use a roundabout make it 3x the size shown in the video and run the highway OVER it with ramps down to the roundabout to enter/exit the city, the higher speeds in the highway will let the traffic move deeper into the city before it splits off to the connectors. Do this several times across the city and it can be an amazing difference. This kind of highway is typically either elevated or sunken down so that city roads can pass over/under the highway to keep the local roads connected to each other and not be a huge barrier to residents. Never use 4 lane roads at the start, your future major roads that will be eventually be that size should have no zoning on them at the beginning, so the switch from 2 lane to 4 lane will not cause buildings to be demolished. Don't waste the initial starting cash on oversized infrastructure, or upkeep on the same. Keep a good spacing between roads at the entry of the city, don't make short roads that lack distance for the vehicles to que up on the collectors especially, "T" intersections are better than a 4 way stop at those choke points, with roundabouts as another option. If you need mass transit at 5k or 10k pop to "fix" traffic, you messed up somewhere. Badly. P.S. Lane math and asymmetric roads are your friends. /Sippa tea.

One think I prefer with sim city is that all the maps are unique, I don’t like starting off with the highway and the vanilla intersections tend to break down eventually

All great ways to enter a city. I quite frequently use the reduced highway start, primarily because I don't like having a highway in the middle of city and having to plan for it. It also pins the city in a way, as I expand off the branches, and try not to expand towards the highway.

Traffic getting to Virginia Beach was always way less than any of the others in the area. Another thing with it is even though like you said it is expensive, it’s not hard to convert the previous two starts to a VB. Start with a reduction, until there is too much trafffic, and then split that arterial into two veins that service the neighborhood that has already developed there. Just looking at the buildings in Virginia Beach I get the impression that the freeway didn’t always go directly to the strand. It seems like they probably took a couple of older major streets and converted them into the reduction that it is now.

Tue best guide for Skylines on the Tube. Plaese continue the guide so you can explain how to use the dlc's, pedestrian Downtown for example

Going to try the first option when the new update drops with the Cape Apple map, think its perfect for it!

I like that you explain the thought process behind the roads placement; ie, "roads go somewhere". But, and this is a gripe I have with every video I've seen by every 'tuber I watch, you don't touch on the corollary of that thought-- roads DON'T go some places. It doesn't appear especially relevant to this particular map, but an easy way to make more realistic, interesting cities is to let the terrain guide roads the way it does in real life. Using the freeform road tool, turn on the terrain lines in the info panel and draw your roads to follow the lines. On many maps this can have a massive impact on the layout of your city. Roads don't go straight up cliffs or across the widest part of a river. Finding believable routes for roads often forces you to make interesting choices about where to put things. Typically, rich neighborhoods are at higher elevations while the peons live in the flood plain. City hall, disaster response, hospitals all tend to be up out of harm's way. Industry usually sprouts up along rivers and in valleys for easy access to transport. Thinking about all of this from the start can tell you not only where to build, but also what to build. I had a map with a big plateau obviously meant to be the city center. But there was a bit of a rise adjacent to it. I built a large observatory/research center on the rise and decided the city was renowned for science, invention, and education. The terrain determined what my city was. A very hilly map could be a mining town or maybe a tourist town with lots of nature parks. A flat map might be a farming town. A coastal map could have started as a fishing village. The terrain really helps determine how to start the city. Sorry to ramble. The TL;DR is that terrain isn't just a nuisance to be flattened out.

Yumbl you have a great 'radio' voice.

here's another trick: use one collector and branch out grid blocks that use only one way roads. not mahattan style grid, but each junction has two one way roads going out and two coming in. the number of blocks in the grid must be even. this layout has good capacity so i use it for my industry. the weakest point is the entrance to the block from the collector

I tend to use the roundabout option more often than not, but the Virginia Beach option does make a certain sense, spreading the load out from what can often be a major bottleneck.

Good video! I'm starting to revisit CS Vanilla using a more systematic approach. 🤣 This channel helps me a lot. Also, which mod allows you to see how many road units you're laying down? Thanks in advance for answering.

Good technique, Yumble. Thanks... 👏

Good ideas to access the fun potential. cheers :)

Funnily enough, as you were making the first example, I was thinking that you could just continue the highway from the overpass down to the railway tracks and slowly fizzle it out, like with your Virginia Beach example at the end.

As far as running out of money is concerned, start with the game paused, so you aren't paying maintenance on roads which aren't being used yet. And while I understand that the focus was initial road layout, beginners need to be aware of the need for water, sewer and electricity, without which your city won't grow or earn any money.

thx for the vid.I am missing my icon for the unlimited Oil and Ore ( like you have ) Mod is enabled.

I like how I'm watch this am I'm playing on a base game map.... Or it dlc idk

How do you lifted the road? (I am playing on a laptop with a trackpad)

What are the mods used in this video and what are the ones recommended for a beginner to make it easy to start playing

Always enjoy your videos yumbl

Road layouts are tough

I just started playing the game a few days ago and surprise surprise I suck at street layouts. This video is helpful but I dont think I can use it to fix my city. May be best to start fresh. Right now my city is during a decent profit. How viable would it be to just let it collect up as much income as I can and then bulldoze the whole thing and start over with a much larger budget?

Does not work well for Virginia Beach lol. Half the time one of the highway entrances is closed! Also doesn’t help it all funnels back into an underwater bridge. I avoid VA beach at all costs. I think it only works in cities skylines because car collisions don’t exist

How did you build a 4-lane road that goes to only one direction? (that bridge at the beggining). I can only find 4 lane two-way roads

Am I able to also do this with train station only?

The Virginia beach method seems nice, but I'd take it one step further, splitting the highway entry and exit and have them go separate directions. My idea would be to create a ring-way, not sure if that's a Dutch thing? It's like an artery going around a city with several big roads branching of it. As it's a circle around the city it might function like a huge roundabout! Would that work nicely?

Hi Yumbl. Im always love ur video to inspire me and watch a lot of ur video. But i just want to ask u. Is realistic population fun to build dream city?

How do you have all those options with the roads? And im not able to get the one lane roads rotated, plz help.

Nice grid, however I would have saved some of that forest area for my 1st industry.

If I had to nitpick, a rail network should be built before the city itself

That's an awfully fat diamond, which kind of loses one of its advantages of having a narrow profile so's you can develop closer to the primary road. I suppose if you're planning to convert it to a partial cloverleaf or something else with loop ramps down the line, reserving space could make sense...

Howcome you have everything unlocked?

🔥👍👍👍

I'm not sure in whose video I saw this, but you can remove the zoning around arteries, right? That might make it easier to plan your zones.

Can we preface this video with what I believe is most of those roads being locked, if you're playing with achievements/unlocks? I don't think 4-lane roads exist on a brand new city, do they?

It's shaped like a Diamond. But does it shine bright like a diamond?

How do i make my game look like yours ?

Have the traffic lights changed recently. I use to be able to control the settings depending on what roads I used. I don't see that option on PS4 version anymore. Could you please help with this issue. Thank you!

How do you start with so much money?

If you want to end the highway as quickly as possible, an idea that I just had would be to split it by using a "Y" connection (which is probably subconsciously inspired by T4rget Gaming's "Design and Manage season 1" city - although he split his highway into 3). ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FLoSsFue8qs.html Splitting the traffic should ensure that it won't overwhelm a roundabout or a "Virginia Beach" highway end. And you can scale it down to a pair of 2-lane one-way roads or 2-lane highway after the split without it looking unrealistic. You can probably build it with as little as a 10 unit long pair of highway segments (the incoming direction staying flat and the direction out elevating to 10m, or vice versa). From that point, the 2 different incoming roads and the 2 outgoing roads should pass over top of each other cleanly. And a length of 20-30 u of the split corridors should be enough to space the 2 connections into your city far enough apart for the junction distance that you'd want on your arterials.