Thank you Biffa, and all the comments. I think I had an older version of tmpe installed. Some of it was set up but didn’t seem to transfer over. The irony is I come from a small town with no grids, but there is something satisfying about straight lines. Will work through and make adjustments. May need to overhaul my metro, (my underground spaghetti, as your subscribers called it). Thanks again for the help and advice :)
You're welcome. I do enjoy a good grid city too. I reckon a nice metro overhaul will really help as your city grows even larger 👍 thanks for sending it in 😁
One tmpe version decided that it wasn't necessary to keep saving my changes. So every time I loaded my city the setups were gone and had to re do all again. Session after session the city got bigger and the traffic even worse! Since then, every time biffa complains or suggests to use tmpe, I wonder if it is the tmpe version missmatch or just like my case...
@@peronohaynada There's a TMPE:President and a TMPE:Labs. President is the stable release, and labs is the new and sometimes buggy features. Biffa uses Labs.
@@BrokenMonocle I think it was stable version. I built a city with, np. Lost all saves, started a new one. And suddenly, after 3 session or so, it started buggy. Stable does not mean no bugs :D When the city was too large to set all again, I started using biffas version and all went fine :D
(Police motorcycle going through the traffic, stop besides you) According to our record, you've lived here for 5 years and is considered to be a citizen here. Just to remind you that you've missed the deadline of tax. Please pay it in 3 days with late charge or you'll be arrested
@@EvlEgle In high density traffic with cyclical build-ups, extra lane capacity can be the solution to traffic problems. In the time it takes for traffic to stop, build up and go again, there needs to be enough capacity to store that traffic without it interrupting nodes or junctions further back.
I think something a lot of people don't get about this game is that more lanes don't fix traffic issues, as each individual vehicle spawns with it's route and destination without taking current traffic into account. So sometimes you can have a 6 lane road with every car sitting in one lane, stuck. It's my one gripe with the game 😦
There's actually an egg-about somewhere near where I live, it's challenging to drive if you haven't driven it before. Basically just a regular roundabout with one point ending in a sharp hairpin curve.
11:53 from my console experience I learned you can add a road coming off the segment, delete it and the intersect node will stay... very helpful for short lane changes and close roundabout exits where nodes will not come naturally
I like to do something I call “grid adjacent” that is pretty much grid style but I’ll use bends and curves along river, ocean, and mountain sides. Imo it’s really pretty
I like modified grids, where each "cell" is say, four blocks by four blocks. Then, within that cell you can do whatever you want, make a suburb type neighborhood, add some curves and bends to the roads, as long as road heirarchy is followed properly it works well.
I leave this planning idea after my 5th city but I still use one large road/highway access every 4-5 big blue grids. Commonly, I use 4 *6 big blue grid as a cell, each cell have their 1-2 Metro station and 4 bus stops covered, one school, one medical centre and "Plop" park.
Look up "fused grid" -- it's a thing invented by a Canadian housing research place that uses "quadrants" that are 5x5 blocks. I'm still trying to find the perfect design inside there -- the game refusing to zone on the outside of bends makes the ones from the paper not work well -- but I think it's really promising. Here's a good intro paper: fusedgrid.ca/docs/HippodamusRidestoRadburn.pdf
Lane mathematics sometimes isn't too visually appealing, so control clicking instead gets you like 90% of the benefit without your highways looking super funky.
@@MonoMan1 Ctrl-clicking does great for the offramps, but when it's an interchange (instead of just a random slip lane), it means there ends up with a Hugo problem at the merge on the other side because there's too many incoming lanes.
I watch all your city fixes, I feel like you have taught me everything about traffic fixing but it's still fun to watch and see other people's cities. Compliments to the creator of this one, it looks perfect. Those pesky postal vans though. I sometimes don't bother at all with postal service because they cause so much traffic that when I do, I usually end up deleting them.
I feel like the benefit of a grid system is all about public transportation. City Skylines right now is mainly a game about car traffic. I hope when the second game comes around that there are better tools for foot traffic and public transportation.
If you build it they will come. If you put in public transportation then cims will use it, if you put in bike lanes they will ride bikes, and if you make things within walking distance of each other they will walk. Grids actually get a ton of foot traffic in my cities.
Jason Poole The devs already explain why they didn’t do it. The problems is: with 50+ of the BEST mods/tools added to the game as a DEFAULT feature, how would it affect gamers who plays this game on a Low end PC? I’m playing this game on a LOW end pc and I’m holding onto 50K population. Assuming they put 50 mods/tools into the game as a default FEATURE, it’s going to slow my PC to the point it’s unplayable, which means I have to buy a better PC. That’s why they didn’t do it. For a console, they can handle it. The downside is they can’t download mods. Pc gamers CAN but the downside is that they need a strong pc. This game is a CPU heavy. You’re gonna have to spend $1,000+
I feel like a lot of people have never seen a real subway map, so they plot stations really far apart, with no stops in between and metro lines that don't intersect at a single station for people to transfer lines. If your stations aren't where people would work or shop, and they can only transfer lines at the main depot (ex: trains) people will drive.
@@alohatigers1199 I plan on reusing parts on from my old HP prebuilt built a really good pc for sub $750. The parts I have to replace is the case, psu, cpu,gpu, and mobo.
As someone living in the Philippines, seeing someone fix traffic at this scale is just so cathartic. It's also probably the reason why I still play the game every now and then.
I've been using grids too, but laying my city out somewhat like LA with mostly low residential with just a city center of high density, so far it's going ok, up to 120k with minimal traffic problems
Great vid as usual Biffa. :-) Couldn't believe how low the Buses and Metro was in a city with that large a population! I have one with 50-60k with 7-9k using public transport. It would have nice to see how many were using the Metro to the industrial areas that you set up at the end. Keep up the good work, :-)
Bif: "I can see that a lot of you watching aren't actually subscribed." Me, an erratic viewer for over a year: *looks at subscriber count of 480K then looks at view count of 1.2M* Also me: *subscribes in guilt*
I never could force myself to make grids, I think too much Sim City made me allergic to grids. I understood quite early in Cities: Skylines that 4 way road intersections were the worst for traffic, so I always restrict regular intersections to 3 ways or nothing. For larger intersections, I make a big roundabout instead and make it usually a 6 way intersection roundabout. So my cities end up looking like a large hexagonal grid linking big roundabout nodes with straight avenues, filled with a lot of random organic roads in-between all of that. So either 3 ways small intersections, or big many ways roundabouts, and never ever a single 4 way intersection. I never had traffic issues with this kind of setup. However the problem again is that I can't anymore force myself to build cities any other way, which makes my cities often too similar and too easy. So yeah, I want some day to try actually forcing myself to make a grid for the challenge of it.
i don’t even play the game but i used to watch my dad play sims city growing up and i’ve always had an attachment to these games since and now i lay awake till 4am watching these everyday and they make me so happy even tho idk what’s going on completely
Thank you Biffa for featuring a larger city with traffic problems. While I do enjoy your Fixit series most cities featured are around 100k population and not this massive. I'm always looking for fixes for bigger cities so this was a nice change.
Love the traffic fix videos. Would love it if you did some guides, e.g. how to create an "ideal" industry area, with minimal traffic problems and good connections etc.
May I suggest this gem: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-retHuqy5PcI.html Also, from watching many of Biffa's vids, he mentions several things quite a bit when it comes to Industry and traffic. A) Spread them out. Don't place all your industries in one area. B) Give your industry traffic multiple ways in and out of said area C) Working with B) make sure your traffic has multiple ways in and out of your commercial and other industry areas. Inter commercial traffic can be a nuisance D) Working more with B) & C) Allow trains and other large transport options to move your industry goods. Whether internally or exporting. If you can remove a truck from transporting goods then you can have better traffic flow and make a ton of money; because no one is waiting for goods.
especially design heavy cs youtubers allways says "perfectly grided cities doesnt look estetic" but i think this person realy done a great job with power of order and math, it is eye pleasing. and as allways Biffa you've done a great job with traffic fix :)
this is the first one of these traffic fixing videos i've ever found, and i applied some of these concepts to my own city, which didn't have nearly that bad traffic, but sitting around 65%, and after doing so, it was like literally watching the traffic get flushed down the toilet (i have 2 major spiral roundabout interchanges in my downtown)
Greetings, Biffa! I got into this game when I got it for free about 3 months ago, and I am obsessed with it. Your traffic guides have helped me immensely! One of my favorite activities is watching your videos while sipping some Earl Grey! Cheers!
Nice fix. But there is one thing I've seen on these video - there are big jams in the metro and train network which also is used to calculate traffic flow.
I recently have been watching too much City Planner Plays and during the first 50 seconds, all I thought was, "Lack of connectivity and roadway hierarchy was not respected..." But of course, in the opening scene, we also can see no lane mathematics, your favorite Biffa :)
man, im so happy you use the lane connectors more often now with LABS. I tend to use them alot in my cities because i get frustrated with cars changing 2 or more lanes at one node (which would cause fatal crashes in real life) and use them to force no more than 1 lane change at each node. Doing that along with changing the individual speed of certain lanes ive found is very good at making cars choose to be in different lanes at different times and overall clear up traffic. Its particularlly effective in industry sectors to encourage free movement to have 6 lane roads with a high speed middle, and low speed outer and forced 1 lane changes to make trucks choose to leave the fast lane earlier when they need to get to thier stopping point
I bought C:S just because of these videos and when you buld cities. Then I realized my PC can run C:S in 6FPS. Now I'm just watching this videos and waiting for new GPU.
Hello Biffa! I watched a lot of your videos, but unfortunately I can't play Cities because my pc is not powerful enough to handle it. Since I work with graphite systems, I was wondering if you could ever make a city with the honeycomb lattice as roads. I checked other videos for something similar, but I only found hexagon blocks, not a proper honeycomb lattice as a graphene sheet would be. Thank you and keep up with the great stuff!
the funny things is that i've seen a looot of this traffic fix videos, and basically everytime the things to do are the same but i'm still kind of hypnotized looking at them, like if in my brain-city there are no roundabouts and i'm stuck in these youtube videos!
Man, I'm watching your videos when I'm sleepless and it works so well. This is no critique, I don't know what it is about your voice, but it relaxes me quite a lot. Thanks for the sweet dreams and making me think of you all the times I see a roundabout.
That density is off the charts. I was responding to someone in a forum asking for help with a grid city, and when I asked them to show me their zoning it was all high density. When I looked at my real-life city's layout on Google Earth (a fairly large grid city) there were about 6 blocks by 10 blocks of skyscrapers, in the entire city. If you're going to have giant, huge grid sections of nothing but high density you're going to have traffic. It's not a problem with the grid itself. The other thing is that grids are supposed to have moderate traffic in certain sections. The idea is that the main roads should be clear and flow freely, while interior roads have more traffic. If you zone carefully and keep residential off the really big streets then your grid will operate like this. If you just zone an entire grid section as residential and commercial without paying attention to road hierarchy then you're going to get heavy traffic because everyone is going to the exact same place at the exact same time on the exact same roads.
well... mostly the problems in NYC are down to too many cars, not enough bike infra and not enough investment in rail infra over the years. Can't do a megacity based on cars and have it work.
@@nuxxism within the administrative borders of NYC, yes. Which is mostly irrelevant. What matters is the population of the greater metropolitan region. Which is at over 20M.
Gustav Löwgren If you’re planning a solution, you’re gonna convince a lot of people why they should lose their jobs and houses to improve the road system in NY.
Great to be rewarded with a critical city fix overview outro when watching to the end, as satisfying as watching the traffic clear with the split road roundabout fix.
I have literally never heard of this game, and I have never seen any of your videos before, but for some reason this was recommended to me. I thoroughly enjoyed it though, and even watched the video all the way through! Thank you!
At 15:54 the question finally arises that should have been asked *before* doing all the lane rework. Everyone is going in a giant loop to get to the industrial areas. Right when Biffa says "That tells you you need public transport," look where the cursor is hovering as he says "need" (16:05). A single cloverleaf ramp at that spot would allow all of the traffic to go directly from the large highway to the road entering the industrial zone.
One suggestion for you to try (it would take less time): as you already do the "you go there" at the junctions, there's really no need for the lane mathematics. As the traffic goes back to normal, there is never that much cars on the highway junctions, you can just get the the outer lane (which is always less used) and merge together with the middle one, the important part of these junctions is the joining lane to have a dedicated lane. This will not cause any problems once the traffic has settled, I have a 70k ppl city with no lane mathematics (just using the junctions lines) and 85/87% traffic always =)
As a person who builds for a living AND a lover of sim-games, what most people don't get is that 'nice & neat' doesn't = efficient. Keeping all the city services in separate districts looks good on paper, and makes it easier for the bureaucracy to keep track of everything (in RL), but suffers heavily from the 'law of diminishing returns'. A military commander could design a better running city than most artistic types, because they understand supply-line economics, and don't give a rat's arse about how pretty things look. Bottlenecks have lead to the death of entire armies.
Very new to cities. Your video gave me a way better perspective on how handle traffic. I haven't even touched that part yet, even thought is so fundamental to the game
I'm always surprised noone else seems to use my method of total industry isolation. I like to have my industry areas late-game set up so there simply are no roads in/out, force everyone to walk/subways to work and the goods are forced onto ships for external or trains for internal distribution. I haven't played in ages but this city really makes me want to try again
Might be beneficial to set max population or something so that the simulation speed dosen't plummet. By the way. The reason for so few using subway was that the subway was backing up.. Great video as always! :-) Found it before I got a notification :-D
The game has a built-in limit of just over 1 million population and several other built-in limits that are usually hit before that. For instance, there is a limit of only a few tens of thousands of vehicles that can be simulated at once. Try to go beyond that and it anyone needing to spawn a vehicle, for example a hearse to pick up a dead person, they just have to wait until some other vehicle despawns.
Switching between LABS and regular TMPE completely ruined my city. It deleted every TMPE thing I had ever adjusted and I had to go back and redo the WHOLE CITY all over again. WARNING: Stick to one or the other and do not switch!!
that is very lucky you said so. I was literally about to update to labs version after watching those sweet ctrl and shift click lane marking automation. Saved me a lot of work and as it is my first big city, nearly 100k population and only about 100 hours in game so far, I likely would have dumped it to begin another. Thank you, some good came from it.
That may be the case for your city and that sucks but, I moved from the original version to LABS and now to STABLE and have had zero issues. I vaguely remember one of the modders for TPME stating they are all interchangeable and the only "loss" is any of the features you may get with either LABS (which is BETA btw) original or STABLE. This comment may be better suited for the workshop and the TPME Mods.
Hah, finally subscribed. I love your city fixes too much to miss them at this point! And, how about a city fix about trains? It seems that after I have enough stations the city gets a terrible "train jam" even if all my train connections are long enough to avoid deadlocks (IE longer than 1 train length).
You can get the roundabouts even smoother, if you make the inner two lanes stay straight and the outer two lanes turn for any nodes on the connections then merging traffic will have a much easier time getting on. The same way you would make them stay straight when joining an intersection. You can also stretch the nodes for connections to make the turn less sharp, also increases the amount of time the cars are made to "stay straight".
You mentioned the bottlenecks into the industry sections, but there are still not enough connections between districts. Add a few bridges over the highway to connect them and prevent cars from using the highway interchanges just to get across to the other side. Also, add bike and pedestrian walkways over the highways. The citizens will walk if they are given a path to walk on.
videos like yours really make me wish I didn't suck at this game. It's so fun to watch but when I try to play I'm so bad, I don't know what to do, and it gets boring. Love your videos.
Simulator: you can tell drivers which lanes to use and they will politely yield. RL: drivers in the left-turn-only lane will cut across three lanes to turn right at the last moment without signaling.
