To stop u-turns, or rather, handle them with some grace, at least in CS1 you simply put another road right next to where the traffic originates. That creates an intersection that the u-turning cars will use. I put almost by default a short dead end right next to utilities, so they can use it to make a u-turn right next to their origin&return point.
in the real world facts don't lie. Roundabouts have proven to be more efficient then a four-way stop. The Mythbusters proved it. a fourway stop only allowed about 90 cars in 30 minutes. a roundabout allowed 345 cars in the same amount of time. However you forgot a key factor. The size of the road has to be taken into consideration to put the right size roundabout. In your first roundabout vs fourways your roundabout were too small. look at stockholm sweden. they have roundabouts the main highway is elevated with a three lane oneway circle road underneath it which allows cars to easily pass through the interchange while keeping it clear for them to get on or off easily
@@BiffaPlaysCitiesSkylines THIS! TM:PE is one of a few critical mods for me that I'm hoping will be made available as soon as Paradox turns on the Mods menu stuff. 👍
The biggest problem with the bad drivers is that there's no way to punish bad behavior or enforce the traffic laws. If I have a highway and some douche is trying to merge into an exit and blocking an entire lane while at it there's nothing to do except either wait for the douche to merge or bulldoze the exit so the traffic reroutes. He could be blocking a fire engine from going to a fire and potentially killing a ton of people, and there's jackshit you can do if you don't notice and manually remove the exit. I have a highway section that gets blocked to all hell because of douche drivers doing U-turns in the middle of it and blocking the lane. I've rebuilt that section like three times and those douches always do it, even though I added an alternate way to let them get to where they want. Highways need concrete lane dividers too.
The problem is that managing traffic is hard if it just does whatever it feels like. This is something I liked more about C:S1, traffic was entirely unable to randomly u-turn, so it was easier to control how they drive and which paths they take.
I think part of the problem with the traffic lights is that they don't behave like actual traffic lights. The two sides will just collide in the middle of the intersection, taking turns on which lanes get through. Some turn, then go straight, some turn then some go straight. Generally there's a dedicated turn cycle that just doesn't happen in CS2. If they can fix this behavior I think you can clean up alot of the traffic seen at lights
This behavior makes sense on smaller roads or if only a few cars are turning across. There should just be an option to toggle individual phases for each side
you can force a 3 or 4 cycle light pattern by have a 6 lane road intersection where the north road is a 2 lane and the south road is a 4 lane. Its barely usable info, but it does mean that in the game theres a system that doesn't make every intersection a 2 phase light pattern. Still no dedicated left turn signal. In the end, we need TMPE
Actually, with today's update, the lights do cycle. I have one intersection, a one way meets head on with a one way, then two other roads that are not one way. When the light changes, it lets the one side go. Then the head on goes next. Then the light changes to go that are both directions. There is more work to be done, but the traffic update they did today has made serious changes to traffic, especially intersections.
@@thegoondockswarcouncil9543 yeah I've stopped playing till then as well. So many little QoL changes that I'm so used to on CS1 that make it unplayable, really hoped they'd have more baked into the game. For me I stopped pretty much the second I couldn't choose individual lane controls, how that was not a baked in option idk.
I think the functionality of TMPE should have been in the game as standard. The ability to have dedicated turns per lane and to fine tune traffic lights alone would solve all the traffic problems I have in my current build.
Agree, we really need tmpe in this game. Also the pesedestrians are dumb, they are jaywalkin whenever they want to. Even if you already place a bridge and remove the pedestrian lanes.
I really wish Cities Skylines 2 started with special industries unlocked. Historically people moved to places with job opportunities so it would be neat to start out with a wheat farm or a coal mine.
Feels as though they didn't think much of CS:2 through to be fair. Many things are completely unfinished or make no sense. Plenty of things I've picked up in a couple hours of gameplay that were fixed by CS:1 mods, which I assumed they would've gladly "borrowed" from at the least.
@whyamibored727 its an unfinished game, evergone knows it, and they didnt mind releasing it as such. The fact that the devs are defending their Ceo and Paradox makes them blameworthy. It will take 1-2 years for the game to be where it should've been on release. And even then it will have things missing
you remove them everywhere you can and build tunnels or overpasses for the walkers never allow pedestrian to walk over 4+ lanes of traffic or near roundabout
Correct, they even cross a 4-lane roundabout road connecting to a trumpet intersection. Even tho there are no crosswalks. Seriously can't wait for TMP.@@rccookie6202
Im up to 360k population and I can say this is the biggest issue you find with traffic when you have strong public transport. Worst part is the footpath system is hit and miss with tunnels and overpasses.
Seems to me that the majority of the despawning was related to bigger vehicles like busses and lorries blocking eachother on the smaller roundabouts. Therefore the bigger roundabouts had a slightly higher traffic flow i think
Same thing in the intersections-it looks like when the traffic simulation deadlocks (i.e. gridlock type situations), it will start despawning vehicles after a short delay in order to ensure progress.And the larger vehicles are much more likely to produce this, particularly in smaller intersections or roundabouts.
Exactly. It looks like they're literally gridlocked. They get into a position where none of them can drive forward without hitting another vehicle. In real life, one of them would have to back up, but the game can't do that.
An interesting thing this implies: larger intersections are needed in areas with heavy freight traffic compared to where traffic is primarily small passenger vehicles. At least, if there is any penalty in the simulation when the gridlock happens. (Presumably having traffic halt and then recover has a cost, but do the despawned vehicles teleport to their destination? Have to restart their trip? Is the cargo just lost?)
i noticed in my city, cars are despawning very often. Even Busses will despawn if they have to wait to "long". I followed a Bus and he instantly despawned after many people crossed a steetwalk where he needed to wait.
come to cities skylines 2. we made the traffic simulation even better and more detailed, it even runs multicore... ... and if the slightest problem occurs, we despawn your vehicles, so you always enjoy your traffic design skill ;)
@Biffa. Last night I tried an experiment with fertile land on an particular section I had two farms that took up the entire area. I demolished them and put a road right through the centre and placed 12 farmlets along both side and extended the fields way out into the non fertile land and all had real high productivity. I would like you to look into and test out if you can this may be a great way to increase production of vegetables and cotton. I hope this helps
@@BiffaPlaysCitiesSkylines +1 it's a great idea! Just a best practices and tutorial series would be great as well. Also since the devs listen you you, i got an idea for a feature, saving layouts either locally or in a cloud library. Like that final intersection you just did here. You could have a snipping tool to select the part you want to save and then re-use it at will later. This could be done with bigger layouts, say a starting layout you really like.
Thats interesting. Are you finding more truck traffic to more but smaller farms? I'm wondering if the larger farms are bottlenecked by the way transportation handles moving goods.
Hi Biffa, I've found pedestrians are causing most of the traffic in my city at the moment. With over 200k population now I find the crossings have well over a few hundred people crossing at any given time, and the pedestrian traffic lights aren't connected to the main lights, so pedestrians are told to cross while traffic is trying to move. Do you think you could do a similar video for pedestrian crossings? Keep up the great content!
Pedestrians are killing the traffic in my city, even after adding overpasses/underpasses and removing crosswalks they'll still just walk through the middle of a VERY busy main road right next to an intersection because ig it's quicker?
@@Jake-dq2xwyes I've noticed the same thing. The other tools like turning off the left or right turn traffic seems to always follow the rules but pedestrian traffic does not, even if you turn the cross walks off a lot of people will still cross at intersections even with pedestrian paths. Which I get would happen in real life but they only do it at where cross walks would have been. If they did it throughout the whole street it would be more realistic and would keep intersections from being as bad. So either make it more realistic or make them listen more. I've also noticed that if you don't turn off turning lanes into a pedestrian street regular cars will just drive on them, not ambulances or police cars just regular cars to cut through to the other side.
@@BiffaPlaysCitiesSkylines I will most certainly look forward to this kind of testing. I am having all sorts of pedestrian issues where they seem to ignore public transport in favor of hiking across a large distance to my industrial areas.
There is a Bug (wich already was in CS1) so that if you have a Crossroad from Pedestrianroads and normal Roads Pedestrian will cross the Road no matter what you do. They didn't do that on normal crossings though
I just closed the game after solid 2 hours of trying to figure it out myself and trying to get rid of MILES of backed up traffic. it's going to be interesting to see if I came to to the same conclusion
This is my finding related to the issue, excuse me for the copypasta. The traffic AI swerving all over the lanes all the time and pulling moronic U-turns is the biggest enemy of the player in this game. Even off-ramps on highways get congested due to the bad traffic AI wanting to switch lanes all the time in all places. It stops on the other lane of a highway to get onto the lane leading off the highway! And then the whole highway is standing still.
@@audioinfo2 I wouldn't mind the traffic accidents if by and large the traffic would work normally. Now every car is driven by a roadraging lunatic! Also I've seen cars and motorbikes stuck pointing the wrong way on a lane just paralyzed for weeks of game time. Or glitching for days on top of one another until they burst into flames, with no accident marker marking the spot. Only way to cure it was to delete the road in question and the cars with it.
@@gebus5633 I just had that second issue you mentioned last night. Like two or three cars just fused into each other and wouldn't despawn. Left it as long as I could tolerate and just deleted the road like you mentioned. Another annoying part of traffic accidents are emergency services will just hang out in traffic like they're another annoyed commuter! Huge traffic jam from an accident and they can't get to the accident because they're acting like another normal driver. 😭 I wonder how much time that adds to the accidents sitting there waiting to just despawn instead.
@@omegachaos32 It's almost as if no one had spent time testing the game at all... These aren't some obscure things that rarely happen. Or related to a minor mechanic, as traffic and the "traffic AI" was one of the big features they advertised.
I have a hard time believing the traffic management tools haven't been improve. It is such a big part of the game and the fact that you can't even have "give way" sign or choose which lane goes where is crazy to me. Big miss from the Devs
In some countries there is left hand driving, and the United Kingdom is one of the countries that have left hand driving. As a Canadian it looks weird tho
For a game that sells the traffic management system so much it sure could do with the lane editor in place as standard to prevent u-turns. The Mod on CS1 was great and they should have this in the game as standard.
I made a 2km diameter 2 lane highway hand drawn circle with roundabouts every 90 degrees. I don't have an insane population but it's working well so far. It looks awesome 😅 The 4 roundabouts have both inner and outer connections.
Yeah the "Very Large" roundabout is not actually very big at all. I want to see roundabouts at least 20 times larger. Like the proper high traffic volume roundabouts in the UK on motorway intersections.
hey thank u for that great experiment. what u could try is SWITCHING OFF THE CROSSWALKS. u got 3 of them in each direction and i experienced that if u delete them the cars no longer stop there. it prevents the backlog
I find anything but the largest round-a-bout struggles with the 18 wheelers and busses. They will go extremely slow which backs up the traffic quick. I found if you use the largest round-a-about with 7 lane A-symmetrical roads at the intersection and build over the road pedestrian crossings at every round-a-about in the dense city district area it keeps traffic flowing pretty good. So far my population is at 61,000 and the only area I have trouble with is my industrial. There are 2 or 3 businesses that constantly import and export. Which means there are like 50+ 18 wheelers and delivery vans in that area. But I keep my industrial about 10-12 blocks away from my residential.
id love to see your ped crossing design, every time I attempt this i end up fighting the snapping and for some stupid reason the ped paths get stuck to the 7 lane roads and require i delete everything and start over which is frustrating as hell
I had to build over the road pedestrian crossings at every round-a-about in my city district. Then removed cross walks from the round-a-abouts and took away street parking on that 6 lane highway. This improved traffic by about 70% in that area. It was insane how many people were crossing the road lol.
Would like to see your experiment with parking lots and how they affect traffic. I noticed parking lots in my downtown area were causing major traffic issues, deleting them didn't eliminate traffic problems but certainly helped.
It appears that part of the problem is that cars can enter and exit on multiple sides so that if you put it on a corner cars will enter from two sides. This can be problematic if one of the entry/exit points is on an arterial.
I find the biggest issue with traffic is the "improved" path finding and collision avoidance, this you show with the roundabouts. The despawning cars all get themselves stuck bumper to bumper as the yield priority is currently ooooofed.
One of the more frusturating things with highways is how they cause traffic by switching 3-4 lanes at the last minute, not sure if there's anyway around that
@@adept5500 lol, you're not wrong, the bigger difference is in the game once they hit the segment node they suddenly switch lanes instead of starting to get over sooner
The fact that they don't have the ability to block u-turns, assign proper lanes rules, or have actually functioning traffic lights as part of the base game at launch, should be pretty embarrassing for a game about building functional cities, more-so since the community added those things to the previous title almost a decade ago. But the fact that the cars are turning around in the middle of the road without a junction is beyond bad, its abysmal. I know CS2 cant have everything available at launch that the the first has after a decade of development, but I expected that the base gameplay and management of the core elements (like roads and traffic) to be better. I'm not going to rebuy a game and a dozen expansions simply so that its prettier.
Where ELSE can you get such a thorough test? Thanks Biffa - must be so much fun for you making these CS2 videos finally after all these years! Cheers from New York!
I like the "randomness" or "bad driving" that they added to traffic, especially the accidents but it definitely needs some fine tuning, I've noticed very strange behaviors in situations like in the video where almost every car will go from the outside lane to the inside lane at the intersection and clog up everything. I've noticed the same thing happen on highways where they use two lanes and all of a sudden everyone wants in one lane even though there are two going off. And then they will .ove back out into what would have been the same lane further down the road causing traffic for no reason. It gets predictable and if it's predictable it's not random and leads me to believe that they need to work on it a bit.
I think the reason you're getting so many U-turns is because there's literally no other path for them to reach their destination (the spawner on the other side), so they take the more dangerous route there. I think you should actually add U-turns before the intersection just so the traffic wanting to go there doesn't impact that particular intersection and gets filtered out early
The problem with roundabouts is that lanes dont really make sense and cars block eachother in the middle of a roundabout which schould not happpen the cars should stop before entering it.
this amount of roundabouts are way too small for the amount of traffic going through. if a roundabout is filled, its basically dead, if it gets filled, make the diameter bigger... the only thing that is working better, then a big roundabout, is a free flow intersection with dedicated lanes for each direction. such a thing goes over 3 levels (lanes bridging over and tunneling under lanes), so its an engineering challenge
Thank you very much for doing this test! It is appreciated. If you don't mind I would like to tag this video as a learning resource citation. Do you have plans for a series: fixing submitted cities in CS2, like you have for CS?
I'm not surprised the roundabout struggled. The AI in CS1 also struggled on 4 way roundabouts where you had flow going in all directions. Mix in those big trucks and buses and it's destined to not be able to cope.
to me it feels as though there are some 'rebel' drivers who will turn even if there are signs that forbid them to, just how some pedestrians will jaywalk onto incoming traffic if they dont feeling like walking a bit further to a zebra crossing
When trying to plan larger than 20k - 30k pop cities and beyond while establishing a road network to handle loads of heavy traffic, I genuinely got beyond annoyed by how abhorrent the AI CAN be in terms of driving rules. While in many instances it's realistic, I don't believe it's realistic to see as much blatant disregard of traffic law as we do. I came to a lot of the same conclusions and found many similar issues in my own playthroughs before just giving up on managing it. I sincerely hope TMP2.0 comes soon. Being able to tell them no U-turns, U-turn only, phased lights, prevent merges or allow them in certain areas, more road painting tools, and more asymmetrical roads will be so much fun to use. There are some roads I'd love to be able to recreate in my irl city I just cant such as by me, there's an intersection with a 3+1, a 3+1 with street parking, a 5+3 with dedicated turn lanes, and a 4+3 with a dedicated turn on the 4, and the 3 splits into two 1 ways, one splits off the right, the other goes straight, but just before the straight heads up a bridge theres another dedicated turn lane with no u turn but a yield. It sounds very weird but it's been incredibly efficient, and I'd love to recreate it. Anyways, thanks for the vid!
Something I see watching this, is it may be a good idea to upgrade roads at busy junctions. Meaning you can use the smaller roads to run around the city but allow more lanes at lights/islands. It's quite common in the UK tbf with regards to roundabouts. Often a 1 or 2 lane road will split into 2 or three lanes for the junctions.
Hey Biffa, have you ever tried to use raised big roads with ramps going off those on smaller roads? Minimize the crossings on the roads you want the traffic to flow and allow merging lanes on the smaller roads almost like a highway system withouth highways. Hope that explanation made any sense
Biffa digging in to the important stuff early on 😂😂 By the way, something that was irritating to me in CS1 (and I hoped that's be gone with CS2) is the way they simulate the car movements: 1) When changing lanes, cars do a sort-of 90 degree turn on to the adjacent lane, which they then also have to do as a counter-turn to proceed along that lane. This looks odd, and slows them down, which slows (or even stops) the following traffic. Which is one of the main reasons for traffic issues ins CS. That horky-borky lane switching thing. Very unnatural. 2) When stopping, cars come to a rather abrupt stop, going from 100 (or whatever they were going) to 0 in an instant. (Which also affects following traffic, especially when horky-borky lane switching.) I noticed this even more in the CS2 preview cinematics, where there was one example of a service vehicle (I think road maintenance) going on an completely empty road, bridge I think, and very suddenly and for no apparent reason comes to a stop. 3) Speaking of the preview cinematics: there were two car vs. tram track instances, that were quite irritiating: no. 1 was a car on a bridge with segregated tram tracks, that lost control and in doing so, was sliding through that little barrier seperating the tram tracks from the road lanes; no. was a car on a similar setting, making a u-turn over the train tracks (which by the looks of the barriers was being allowed there), but just moments before a tram comes along those tracks. All very odd. However: I speak only as a viewer, I am not playing myself (anything, that is). So take all this as you like.
Thanks Biffa - flat out we need individual lane control including no uturn, no right, no left, no straight, stop sign, yield sign, green arrow, red arrow. Where I live in the US we have a few roundabouts with yield signs, we have a ton of stop signed side streets that meet up with main roads where the main roads have no stop signs, we have turn lanes with turn lights separate from the main lights and we have (in the downtown) walk lights that run on their own turn (walkers can walk catty wampus through the whole intersection during this stage). Due to the stop signs being 4 way I am using mostly the smallest roundabout for all main road intersections right now but I will be replacing all of them. The randomness is a feature for me -- I live near the two worst intersections in my city - LOL literally you can walk to your destination faster than you can drive if you have to go through these two intersections during rush hour. That said they are absolute nightmares when there are accidents, I love the fact that I need to account for this in my overall road planning.
I think something that would help the traffic lights a lot is to just not allow the next batch of cars the go ahead until the intersection is clear. All the back up is them running into each other in the middle which I have never seen happen irl
It’s a bummer they didn’t include options like tmpe does. For me it was THE mod to go to, disable despawn, managing roundabout and lanes. It gave it a much more depth to put in thoughts about road layouts
You could actually do kind of an ambience / calming video with just a nice city or so in the background, a well set up roundabout in the foreground and the game music and then like 24h in game. would defo watch it til the end :D
from what i notice from my own observations in this game, is a big problem large traffic. trucks will quickly despawn when they are blocked, and this is more noticeable in roundabouts, people swapping lanes in roundabouts also seem to give problems, as it seems to create a short blockage, making the road ahead drive on to the roundabout, making a longer blockage where heavy vehicles then have to despawn. i think there is some issues with roundabouts and trucks, and how people drive in the roundabout, constantly creating openings for more traffic to get in than it can handle.
I have been waiting for this! Haven’t found an intersection style for heavy traffic yet, mostly relying on multiple pathway options instead. Thanks Biffa!
One thing I notice is the give way isn't working as well on the roundabout, so the cars all slam into the middle until some despawn. Also, how about creating your own roundabout, 4 lanes, or 6 lanes. Does the AI treat a standard roundabout different to a custom one?
one of the problems I have seen is that the cars drive too far out into the roundabout, so it blocks the traffic coming in the outer lanes from going straight through
@Biffa, what a brilliant idea for a video - just the sort of thing we need as we get to grips with CS2... absolutely loving it! Have yourself another cuppa - you've earned it 🙂
I know it's the holy grail of motorway design but I'd love to see you build your own four-way free-flowing interchange using vanilla CS2 and see how compact and conflict-free you could make it. Your handmade interchanges look so good these days, I'd love to see if you can come up with something free-flowing that doesn't take up an entire grid square on the map.
i think it would be cool to have the randomness appear more often when you first build or change an intersection, but lessen over time as the residents get used to it
Great information - currently having terrible issues with traffic in my city. Looking to see if I can implement this with some public transport to fix it.
I've found that lane mathematics isn't working very well in CS2. Cars will dart across four lanes to get to the exit, instead of lining up in the correct lane ahead of time
Actually you could use the tools ingame to quantify the flow and amount of traffic. If you click on the Streetname, you can see the flow and vehicleamount I think. Maybe that is good to quantify things :) Apart from that: Very Nice Video!
22:09 that big truck in the middle of the screen took one odd route! Went all the way to the crossing, went left, then across to the slipway to go back on the straight he was going towards to begin with.
I do agree with the No U-Turn option for intersections! Its a good way to control the traffic and affects its behaviour. Also when you did the highway lane thing, could it work just as well with half of those?
I did some testing of my own in my city Morning Wood Falls and I can confirm that drivers are totally unaffected by flooding. A lot of houses in Stiffy Terrace were damaged but they could walk and drive just fine. Let's hope the devs get a firm even grip on the details soon.
the problem with traffic right now is they "break the rules" too often. Traffic is allowed to break the rules, like in real life, BUT the issue comes from that setting being too high. As in too many vehicles "break the rules" too often which causes a lot of problems. The other issue is the "fill all lanes" at an intersection, while that is nice they do that, it makes them do sudden lane swaps because the lane math system isn't always right, and often breaks with roundabouts.
Biffa realizing his channel wasn't about Cities skylines, it was TMPE channel all along. This is about what I expected. The QoL features they have implemented are dumbed down, and missing they key bits to make it work. The AI from what I've seen really isn't any better. Large cities and complex intersections aren't going to be doable until someone implements things like advanced greens and timed lights, lane connectors and such. It just not worth playing unmoded. The fact that people are screwing with the dev tools, and decompiling DLL's to keep the flow consistent is telling. Moders aren't waiting for a first party platform.
Ive been able to clear up traffic w pretty damn good results by have a robust public transport system, removing crosswalks and using raised paths to move pedestrians, removing all street parking especially near roundabouts, not zoning too close to roundabouts, and keeping things a bit spread out.
I think the further left lane is not used for the roundabout because of the turning left cutting lanes. Those lanes have 2 more intersections than the other ones so they weight lesser interest for AI.
Seems like roundabouts almost work in CS2, but you would have to block trucks from using them. Due to their length they seem to cause the most problems as they block several entrances, especially when using a smaller round about. Sad to see most logic and things like Lane mathematics barely matters in CS2.
I'd rather get all the traffic down to the testing area than have them mostly U-Turn further back down the road. I guess we need do need a no u-turn button as well :-)
the most important thing about the larger roundabouts (outside of accomodating larger roads on the sides) is that the larger turn buys more time for people to enter the roundabout. There is definately more room for the logic to improve. There are many more variable in play in complex city/street layouts, where cars changing lanes at the very last moment etc can cause really big congestion. And there are several confirmed bugs with ai behaviour on roads, where something can cause cars to just stop for no apparent reason etc
Also assymetrical loads on roundabouts can cause big problems where "all" cars have a direction they want to go, and start to block other directions, then it all comes to a stand still as these different interests conflict.
yeah, in normal life when it comes to a traffic light, there are scheduled turn lights that help protect turn lanes. Which is something this game separately needs for this level of management.
As far as i understand, IRL roundabouts are the way to go until the traffic gets really heavy. At that point it just clogs up and having a normal intersection with traffic lights is better.
You likely have traffic despawning because you placed those traffic spawners on one-way roads right after saying they both spawn traffic and act as an end point for traffic. Surely traffic wants to go to those spawners and cannot reach them.
27:43 When you turn off left-hand turns and it doesn't change the road decal, you click a total of four times on the first Hillside Street, which would leave left-hand turns 'on' from that direction. You then click once on the other three sides, to turn it 'off'. That's probably why traffic continues to use the left-hand lane to go straight ahead from that one direction. (I also wonder if with the larger roundabouts, the game detects vehicles as 'turning left' when they enter the roundabout just because the entry road connects at a right-angle, so when you turn off left-hand turns on the entry roads, it turns off that lane completely. I guess that doesn't make sense though because it's a full-road setting and not lane-specific, but maybe because the other lanes have a smoother route over the roundabout, it's not enough to count as 'turning left'.)
Towards the end of the video, when using the roundabout with slip roads, you couldn't turn off no left hand turns on the roundabout. I think this is fine as all exits are available to road users when on a roundabout. It would be great if we had more granular traffic light control. I've noticed, especially with 4 way intersections like you have in the video, there are times where you'd want some lanes to go and others to not. Particularly, to stop lanes crossing in the middle of the intersection, as it can cause stop-start traffic that backs up roads.
I pre purchased the deluxe edition and I have not even fired it up and WON'T until more of the crap I feel is unfinished or broken or that requires someone to create a mod to "un cluster F this or that issue", gets fixed.
I do transport modelling for a living, and the software we use, VISSIM and Paramics, which actually look alot like CS, allow for people speeding and breaking rules on lane management etc, to allow for a more realistic model
In my humble opinion, it's not a question of whether you like realism in games or not. It's more a question of how much of a headache realism causes the player. If you ask me, the old saying "too much realism kills the game" still applies in this regard. Looking at your analysis, I realise that Collossal Order hasn't changed the AI very much. Crossing lanes should take a longer way on the road. And funnily enough, that's what would happen most of the time in real life. Also, there's this rule you learn in driving school. In Germany, it's called the zip procedure. That means that every second car threads its way into the traffic. That's something Collassal Order should build into their AI.
What's been a real pain in the behind is the pedestrian crossings everywhere. Even if i build a dedicated pedestrian bridge even the most major junctions still get pedestrian crossings, and i have a million cars just waiting to let pedestrians through. Can't wait for traffic mods!
I had thought I had heard something about how the random bad driving decreased with education levels and also is part of how the random accidents come about, made more likely when there's bad weather. Yeah, it's a pain, but it's also -- as was said in the video -- more realistic as far as how real life traffic works.
Despawning on roundabout is probably when the roundabout is so full they completely block eachother from ever going. Yes if they can improve the keeping junction clear with stop signs on roundabout and normal traffic lights behavior it would make all the difference
The despwaning traffic can be reduced by moving the traffic emitters closer to the junction. It's the total entities being counted, so make a shorter distance so they are on the road for less time.
From what I could see with the small roundabout, it seems where it struggles is with the large vehicles, trucks and busses. They can't quite fit into it properly and trigger start and stop traffic, which dominoes into sporadic traffic jams, then when those clear up and it's all smaller cars, the traffic flows again, until a wave of larger vehicles arrive and get slowed. IMO that's interesting, so if you have a route with many big vehicles, don't use the small roundabouts, they'll jam up the large busses and trucks.
At around 22:00 I think you need to remove the crosswalks and the cars will enter the blocked intersection. At 25:59 you did not modify the inner part of the lower asymetrical road from 4-3 to 3-2, that's why they aren't properly taking the dedicated lane.
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@@peterbelanger4094stop being so rude
To stop u-turns, or rather, handle them with some grace, at least in CS1 you simply put another road right next to where the traffic originates. That creates an intersection that the u-turning cars will use. I put almost by default a short dead end right next to utilities, so they can use it to make a u-turn right next to their origin&return point.
Is Instant Gaming legit, or is it just reselling stolen keys?
in the real world facts don't lie. Roundabouts have proven to be more efficient then a four-way stop. The Mythbusters proved it. a fourway stop only allowed about 90 cars in 30 minutes. a roundabout allowed 345 cars in the same amount of time.
However you forgot a key factor. The size of the road has to be taken into consideration to put the right size roundabout. In your first roundabout vs fourways your roundabout were too small.
look at stockholm sweden. they have roundabouts the main highway is elevated with a three lane oneway circle road underneath it which allows cars to easily pass through the interchange while keeping it clear for them to get on or off easily
Biggest problem is that we can't separate left hand turns at traffic lights. That hugely affects efficiency of intersections.
Roll on TMPE v2!
@@BiffaPlaysCitiesSkylines THIS! TM:PE is one of a few critical mods for me that I'm hoping will be made available as soon as Paradox turns on the Mods menu stuff. 👍
The biggest shock to me about CS2 was that they didn't add this into the base game...
Well you can make dedicated lanes with the highway ramp. Fairly realistic to where I live to have median separated dedicated right turn lanes (Canada)
@@dylanboyd6147 Yeah, lane mathematics helps, but dedicated (protected) turn lanes aren't possible.
I think the random u-turns and lane changes are realistic but are unrealistically common.
as a bus op, its closer to realistic then you would hope for. though it still too common
The biggest problem with the bad drivers is that there's no way to punish bad behavior or enforce the traffic laws. If I have a highway and some douche is trying to merge into an exit and blocking an entire lane while at it there's nothing to do except either wait for the douche to merge or bulldoze the exit so the traffic reroutes. He could be blocking a fire engine from going to a fire and potentially killing a ton of people, and there's jackshit you can do if you don't notice and manually remove the exit. I have a highway section that gets blocked to all hell because of douche drivers doing U-turns in the middle of it and blocking the lane. I've rebuilt that section like three times and those douches always do it, even though I added an alternate way to let them get to where they want. Highways need concrete lane dividers too.
The problem is that managing traffic is hard if it just does whatever it feels like.
This is something I liked more about C:S1, traffic was entirely unable to randomly u-turn, so it was easier to control how they drive and which paths they take.
@@JGD714 I hope there will a mod, or a dlc for something like this
same.@@GalihIbnuAngkoso
I think part of the problem with the traffic lights is that they don't behave like actual traffic lights. The two sides will just collide in the middle of the intersection, taking turns on which lanes get through. Some turn, then go straight, some turn then some go straight. Generally there's a dedicated turn cycle that just doesn't happen in CS2. If they can fix this behavior I think you can clean up alot of the traffic seen at lights
To be fair, that's how traffic lights worked in CS1 as well. It was only mods that allowed us to have timed traffic lights.
This behavior makes sense on smaller roads or if only a few cars are turning across. There should just be an option to toggle individual phases for each side
you can force a 3 or 4 cycle light pattern by have a 6 lane road intersection where the north road is a 2 lane and the south road is a 4 lane. Its barely usable info, but it does mean that in the game theres a system that doesn't make every intersection a 2 phase light pattern. Still no dedicated left turn signal. In the end, we need TMPE
Actually, with today's update, the lights do cycle.
I have one intersection, a one way meets head on with a one way, then two other roads that are not one way.
When the light changes, it lets the one side go. Then the head on goes next. Then the light changes to go that are both directions.
There is more work to be done, but the traffic update they did today has made serious changes to traffic, especially intersections.
Crossing traffic, right turn here, should yield to traffic going straight. You don't need a cycle if you have that
My biggest take away from this is I can't wait for TMPE 2.0
Preach! :-)
Yeah, I’m waiting on buying the game until all the necessary mods are available. (Although they should have been built into the game, IMO)
@@thegoondockswarcouncil9543 yeah I've stopped playing till then as well. So many little QoL changes that I'm so used to on CS1 that make it unplayable, really hoped they'd have more baked into the game. For me I stopped pretty much the second I couldn't choose individual lane controls, how that was not a baked in option idk.
@@MaD0MaT I also need to wait until I can afford a 4090 , apparently 😂
At least your traffic isn’t changing lanes at the last second like happens in my city
I think the functionality of TMPE should have been in the game as standard. The ability to have dedicated turns per lane and to fine tune traffic lights alone would solve all the traffic problems I have in my current build.
Agree, we really need tmpe in this game. Also the pesedestrians are dumb, they are jaywalkin whenever they want to. Even if you already place a bridge and remove the pedestrian lanes.
I really wish Cities Skylines 2 started with special industries unlocked. Historically people moved to places with job opportunities so it would be neat to start out with a wheat farm or a coal mine.
Always found it strange that rail was tucked away under mid-game unlocks. There are a ton of towns that started as rail cargo stops or waypoints.
@dycedargselderbrother5353 the unlockings make no sense whatsoever and every game system is illogical and unbalanced
Feels as though they didn't think much of CS:2 through to be fair. Many things are completely unfinished or make no sense. Plenty of things I've picked up in a couple hours of gameplay that were fixed by CS:1 mods, which I assumed they would've gladly "borrowed" from at the least.
@whyamibored727 its an unfinished game, evergone knows it, and they didnt mind releasing it as such. The fact that the devs are defending their Ceo and Paradox makes them blameworthy.
It will take 1-2 years for the game to be where it should've been on release. And even then it will have things missing
Don't forget that when you add pedestrians crossing the intersection, it brings more traffic because the traffic has to slow or stop for them.
you remove them everywhere you can and build tunnels or overpasses for the walkers
never allow pedestrian to walk over 4+ lanes of traffic or near roundabout
The footprint of pedestrians is enormous...@@SickPrid3 Still, you are right
@@SickPrid3Try it out - they just don’t care and run across the road anyways in CS2 (even if you have an overpass available)
Correct, they even cross a 4-lane roundabout road connecting to a trumpet intersection. Even tho there are no crosswalks. Seriously can't wait for TMP.@@rccookie6202
Im up to 360k population and I can say this is the biggest issue you find with traffic when you have strong public transport. Worst part is the footpath system is hit and miss with tunnels and overpasses.
Seems to me that the majority of the despawning was related to bigger vehicles like busses and lorries blocking eachother on the smaller roundabouts. Therefore the bigger roundabouts had a slightly higher traffic flow i think
Same thing in the intersections-it looks like when the traffic simulation deadlocks (i.e. gridlock type situations), it will start despawning vehicles after a short delay in order to ensure progress.And the larger vehicles are much more likely to produce this, particularly in smaller intersections or roundabouts.
Exactly. It looks like they're literally gridlocked. They get into a position where none of them can drive forward without hitting another vehicle. In real life, one of them would have to back up, but the game can't do that.
An interesting thing this implies: larger intersections are needed in areas with heavy freight traffic compared to where traffic is primarily small passenger vehicles. At least, if there is any penalty in the simulation when the gridlock happens. (Presumably having traffic halt and then recover has a cost, but do the despawned vehicles teleport to their destination? Have to restart their trip? Is the cargo just lost?)
@@hypatian_kat - all interesting questions. I wonder.
i noticed in my city, cars are despawning very often. Even Busses will despawn if they have to wait to "long". I followed a Bus and he instantly despawned after many people crossed a steetwalk where he needed to wait.
come to cities skylines 2. we made the traffic simulation even better and more detailed, it even runs multicore...
...
and if the slightest problem occurs, we despawn your vehicles, so you always enjoy your traffic design skill ;)
@Biffa. Last night I tried an experiment with fertile land on an particular section I had two farms that took up the entire area. I demolished them and put a road right through the centre and placed 12 farmlets along both side and extended the fields way out into the non fertile land and all had real high productivity. I would like you to look into and test out if you can this may be a great way to increase production of vegetables and cotton. I hope this helps
Good idea for a test, thanks :-)
@@BiffaPlaysCitiesSkylines +1 it's a great idea! Just a best practices and tutorial series would be great as well. Also since the devs listen you you, i got an idea for a feature, saving layouts either locally or in a cloud library. Like that final intersection you just did here. You could have a snipping tool to select the part you want to save and then re-use it at will later. This could be done with bigger layouts, say a starting layout you really like.
Nice to know 😂
the fertile area piss me off... where in the real world are farmland dotted around... xD
Thats interesting. Are you finding more truck traffic to more but smaller farms? I'm wondering if the larger farms are bottlenecked by the way transportation handles moving goods.
Hi Biffa, I've found pedestrians are causing most of the traffic in my city at the moment. With over 200k population now I find the crossings have well over a few hundred people crossing at any given time, and the pedestrian traffic lights aren't connected to the main lights, so pedestrians are told to cross while traffic is trying to move. Do you think you could do a similar video for pedestrian crossings? Keep up the great content!
I shall and thank you :-)
Pedestrians are killing the traffic in my city, even after adding overpasses/underpasses and removing crosswalks they'll still just walk through the middle of a VERY busy main road right next to an intersection because ig it's quicker?
@@Jake-dq2xwyes I've noticed the same thing. The other tools like turning off the left or right turn traffic seems to always follow the rules but pedestrian traffic does not, even if you turn the cross walks off a lot of people will still cross at intersections even with pedestrian paths. Which I get would happen in real life but they only do it at where cross walks would have been. If they did it throughout the whole street it would be more realistic and would keep intersections from being as bad. So either make it more realistic or make them listen more.
I've also noticed that if you don't turn off turning lanes into a pedestrian street regular cars will just drive on them, not ambulances or police cars just regular cars to cut through to the other side.
@@BiffaPlaysCitiesSkylines I will most certainly look forward to this kind of testing. I am having all sorts of pedestrian issues where they seem to ignore public transport in favor of hiking across a large distance to my industrial areas.
There is a Bug (wich already was in CS1) so that if you have a Crossroad from Pedestrianroads and normal Roads Pedestrian will cross the Road no matter what you do. They didn't do that on normal crossings though
I just closed the game after solid 2 hours of trying to figure it out myself and trying to get rid of MILES of backed up traffic. it's going to be interesting to see if I came to to the same conclusion
This is my finding related to the issue, excuse me for the copypasta.
The traffic AI swerving all over the lanes all the time and pulling moronic U-turns is the biggest enemy of the player in this game. Even off-ramps on highways get congested due to the bad traffic AI wanting to switch lanes all the time in all places. It stops on the other lane of a highway to get onto the lane leading off the highway! And then the whole highway is standing still.
And they even added traffic accidents just to spice it up 😐😤
@@audioinfo2 I wouldn't mind the traffic accidents if by and large the traffic would work normally. Now every car is driven by a roadraging lunatic!
Also I've seen cars and motorbikes stuck pointing the wrong way on a lane just paralyzed for weeks of game time. Or glitching for days on top of one another until they burst into flames, with no accident marker marking the spot.
Only way to cure it was to delete the road in question and the cars with it.
@@gebus5633 I just had that second issue you mentioned last night. Like two or three cars just fused into each other and wouldn't despawn. Left it as long as I could tolerate and just deleted the road like you mentioned.
Another annoying part of traffic accidents are emergency services will just hang out in traffic like they're another annoyed commuter! Huge traffic jam from an accident and they can't get to the accident because they're acting like another normal driver. 😭 I wonder how much time that adds to the accidents sitting there waiting to just despawn instead.
@@omegachaos32 It's almost as if no one had spent time testing the game at all...
These aren't some obscure things that rarely happen. Or related to a minor mechanic, as traffic and the "traffic AI" was one of the big features they advertised.
I have a hard time believing the traffic management tools haven't been improve. It is such a big part of the game and the fact that you can't even have "give way" sign or choose which lane goes where is crazy to me. Big miss from the Devs
Give ways are there when you remove traffic lights 👍
But First.. Why are they driving on the WRONG side of the road?
Edit: Guess I made another controversial take lol sorry guys it was meant to be a joke
Maybe he enabled left-handed traffic.
@@jimmyopjrwrong-sided traffic*
In some countries there is left hand driving, and the United Kingdom is one of the countries that have left hand driving. As a Canadian it looks weird tho
I disagree, we say it's right side..I mean correct side!! ;-)
Looks correct for South Africa as well 😊
For a game that sells the traffic management system so much it sure could do with the lane editor in place as standard to prevent u-turns. The Mod on CS1 was great and they should have this in the game as standard.
I'd love to see your take on the "Magic Roundabout" in Swindon. I wonder how a round-about of roundabouts would cope with traffic
I made a 2km diameter 2 lane highway hand drawn circle with roundabouts every 90 degrees. I don't have an insane population but it's working well so far. It looks awesome 😅
The 4 roundabouts have both inner and outer connections.
I built one in my skylines 2 city, it worked pretty well once I convinced pedestrians to stop crossing the dang thing with some walking bridges.
Would have been interesting to see a bigger, handmade roundabout
If you use the highways it will behave like a roundabout👍
One of the pre-made intersections has a large custom roundabout in and it seems to work like a roundabout should.
@@MaD0MaT❤motorways work perfectly fine for this
Which is kind of sad, that we can't just build a custom made roundabout.@@iniehawk4472
Yeah the "Very Large" roundabout is not actually very big at all. I want to see roundabouts at least 20 times larger. Like the proper high traffic volume roundabouts in the UK on motorway intersections.
If lanes could be setup correctly it would have a huge effect on all of this
hey thank u for that great experiment. what u could try is SWITCHING OFF THE CROSSWALKS. u got 3 of them in each direction and i experienced that if u delete them the cars no longer stop there. it prevents the backlog
I find anything but the largest round-a-bout struggles with the 18 wheelers and busses. They will go extremely slow which backs up the traffic quick. I found if you use the largest round-a-about with 7 lane A-symmetrical roads at the intersection and build over the road pedestrian crossings at every round-a-about in the dense city district area it keeps traffic flowing pretty good. So far my population is at 61,000 and the only area I have trouble with is my industrial. There are 2 or 3 businesses that constantly import and export. Which means there are like 50+ 18 wheelers and delivery vans in that area. But I keep my industrial about 10-12 blocks away from my residential.
id love to see your ped crossing design, every time I attempt this i end up fighting the snapping and for some stupid reason the ped paths get stuck to the 7 lane roads and require i delete everything and start over which is frustrating as hell
@@admiraltbags I’ll add a picture on my profile or something.
I had to build over the road pedestrian crossings at every round-a-about in my city district. Then removed cross walks from the round-a-abouts and took away street parking on that 6 lane highway. This improved traffic by about 70% in that area. It was insane how many people were crossing the road lol.
Did the same. I wish there were stairs and elevators for pedestrians, the ramps are kinda janky rn and end up taking up too much space.
@@Sundara229 very true. They really need to add stairs. It would clean it up SO much.
Would like to see your experiment with parking lots and how they affect traffic. I noticed parking lots in my downtown area were causing major traffic issues, deleting them didn't eliminate traffic problems but certainly helped.
It appears that part of the problem is that cars can enter and exit on multiple sides so that if you put it on a corner cars will enter from two sides. This can be problematic if one of the entry/exit points is on an arterial.
I find the biggest issue with traffic is the "improved" path finding and collision avoidance, this you show with the roundabouts. The despawning cars all get themselves stuck bumper to bumper as the yield priority is currently ooooofed.
I would love to see how some of the interchanges work compared to what you've done here. A turbine of something of that nature.
One of the more frusturating things with highways is how they cause traffic by switching 3-4 lanes at the last minute, not sure if there's anyway around that
To be honest, I see that on my RL highways a lot…
@@adept5500 lol, you're not wrong, the bigger difference is in the game once they hit the segment node they suddenly switch lanes instead of starting to get over sooner
The fact that they don't have the ability to block u-turns, assign proper lanes rules, or have actually functioning traffic lights as part of the base game at launch, should be pretty embarrassing for a game about building functional cities, more-so since the community added those things to the previous title almost a decade ago. But the fact that the cars are turning around in the middle of the road without a junction is beyond bad, its abysmal. I know CS2 cant have everything available at launch that the the first has after a decade of development, but I expected that the base gameplay and management of the core elements (like roads and traffic) to be better. I'm not going to rebuy a game and a dozen expansions simply so that its prettier.
Where ELSE can you get such a thorough test? Thanks Biffa - must be so much fun for you making these CS2 videos finally after all these years! Cheers from New York!
More to come! Thankyou 👍 😁
This kind of test is normally Yumbl's speciality, but I've not seen anything of this sort from him yet in CS2...
I don’t know why but I really needed a video of timelasped traffic, so satisfying 😅
I like the "randomness" or "bad driving" that they added to traffic, especially the accidents but it definitely needs some fine tuning, I've noticed very strange behaviors in situations like in the video where almost every car will go from the outside lane to the inside lane at the intersection and clog up everything. I've noticed the same thing happen on highways where they use two lanes and all of a sudden everyone wants in one lane even though there are two going off. And then they will .ove back out into what would have been the same lane further down the road causing traffic for no reason. It gets predictable and if it's predictable it's not random and leads me to believe that they need to work on it a bit.
I think the reason you're getting so many U-turns is because there's literally no other path for them to reach their destination (the spawner on the other side), so they take the more dangerous route there. I think you should actually add U-turns before the intersection just so the traffic wanting to go there doesn't impact that particular intersection and gets filtered out early
Both are needed, roundabouts for maintaining good flow and lights to sort of control the flow. for me it has worked in city skyline 1
The problem with roundabouts is that lanes dont really make sense and cars block eachother in the middle of a roundabout which schould not happpen the cars should stop before entering it.
this amount of roundabouts are way too small for the amount of traffic going through. if a roundabout is filled, its basically dead, if it gets filled, make the diameter bigger...
the only thing that is working better, then a big roundabout, is a free flow intersection with dedicated lanes for each direction. such a thing goes over 3 levels (lanes bridging over and tunneling under lanes), so its an engineering challenge
Thank you very much for doing this test! It is appreciated. If you don't mind I would like to tag this video as a learning resource citation.
Do you have plans for a series: fixing submitted cities in CS2, like you have for CS?
I'm not surprised the roundabout struggled. The AI in CS1 also struggled on 4 way roundabouts where you had flow going in all directions. Mix in those big trucks and buses and it's destined to not be able to cope.
to me it feels as though there are some 'rebel' drivers who will turn even if there are signs that forbid them to, just how some pedestrians will jaywalk onto incoming traffic if they dont feeling like walking a bit further to a zebra crossing
You know it's gonna be a good day when Biffa and CPP uploads video!!!🎉
When trying to plan larger than 20k - 30k pop cities and beyond while establishing a road network to handle loads of heavy traffic, I genuinely got beyond annoyed by how abhorrent the AI CAN be in terms of driving rules. While in many instances it's realistic, I don't believe it's realistic to see as much blatant disregard of traffic law as we do. I came to a lot of the same conclusions and found many similar issues in my own playthroughs before just giving up on managing it. I sincerely hope TMP2.0 comes soon. Being able to tell them no U-turns, U-turn only, phased lights, prevent merges or allow them in certain areas, more road painting tools, and more asymmetrical roads will be so much fun to use. There are some roads I'd love to be able to recreate in my irl city I just cant such as by me, there's an intersection with a 3+1, a 3+1 with street parking, a 5+3 with dedicated turn lanes, and a 4+3 with a dedicated turn on the 4, and the 3 splits into two 1 ways, one splits off the right, the other goes straight, but just before the straight heads up a bridge theres another dedicated turn lane with no u turn but a yield. It sounds very weird but it's been incredibly efficient, and I'd love to recreate it.
Anyways, thanks for the vid!
Something I see watching this, is it may be a good idea to upgrade roads at busy junctions. Meaning you can use the smaller roads to run around the city but allow more lanes at lights/islands. It's quite common in the UK tbf with regards to roundabouts. Often a 1 or 2 lane road will split into 2 or three lanes for the junctions.
Hey Biffa,
have you ever tried to use raised big roads with ramps going off those on smaller roads? Minimize the crossings on the roads you want the traffic to flow and allow merging lanes on the smaller roads almost like a highway system withouth highways.
Hope that explanation made any sense
I think we need some EU traffic light setups for CS2. Making right turns (for UK) separate from ongoing will solve some of the issues.
Biffa digging in to the important stuff early on 😂😂
By the way, something that was irritating to me in CS1 (and I hoped that's be gone with CS2) is the way they simulate the car movements:
1) When changing lanes, cars do a sort-of 90 degree turn on to the adjacent lane, which they then also have to do as a counter-turn to proceed along that lane. This looks odd, and slows them down, which slows (or even stops) the following traffic. Which is one of the main reasons for traffic issues ins CS. That horky-borky lane switching thing. Very unnatural.
2) When stopping, cars come to a rather abrupt stop, going from 100 (or whatever they were going) to 0 in an instant. (Which also affects following traffic, especially when horky-borky lane switching.) I noticed this even more in the CS2 preview cinematics, where there was one example of a service vehicle (I think road maintenance) going on an completely empty road, bridge I think, and very suddenly and for no apparent reason comes to a stop.
3) Speaking of the preview cinematics: there were two car vs. tram track instances, that were quite irritiating: no. 1 was a car on a bridge with segregated tram tracks, that lost control and in doing so, was sliding through that little barrier seperating the tram tracks from the road lanes; no. was a car on a similar setting, making a u-turn over the train tracks (which by the looks of the barriers was being allowed there), but just moments before a tram comes along those tracks. All very odd.
However: I speak only as a viewer, I am not playing myself (anything, that is). So take all this as you like.
Thanks Biffa - flat out we need individual lane control including no uturn, no right, no left, no straight, stop sign, yield sign, green arrow, red arrow. Where I live in the US we have a few roundabouts with yield signs, we have a ton of stop signed side streets that meet up with main roads where the main roads have no stop signs, we have turn lanes with turn lights separate from the main lights and we have (in the downtown) walk lights that run on their own turn (walkers can walk catty wampus through the whole intersection during this stage). Due to the stop signs being 4 way I am using mostly the smallest roundabout for all main road intersections right now but I will be replacing all of them. The randomness is a feature for me -- I live near the two worst intersections in my city - LOL literally you can walk to your destination faster than you can drive if you have to go through these two intersections during rush hour. That said they are absolute nightmares when there are accidents, I love the fact that I need to account for this in my overall road planning.
I think something that would help the traffic lights a lot is to just not allow the next batch of cars the go ahead until the intersection is clear. All the back up is them running into each other in the middle which I have never seen happen irl
Just as I was thinking this you uploaded it, perfect timing Biffa haha
Enjoy :-)
It’s a bummer they didn’t include options like tmpe does. For me it was THE mod to go to, disable despawn, managing roundabout and lanes. It gave it a much more depth to put in thoughts about road layouts
seeing those semi's turn 180 degrees on a dime lol
I'd be interested to see if an engineer's design of intersections that require no traffic lights would work well.
I love these 'test' videos you do.
I've roundabouts everywhere in my 70k city.
I think that if traffic was really that high it would be an overpass rather than a stoplight regardless.
You could actually do kind of an ambience / calming video with just a nice city or so in the background, a well set up roundabout in the foreground and the game music and then like 24h in game. would defo watch it til the end :D
from what i notice from my own observations in this game, is a big problem large traffic. trucks will quickly despawn when they are blocked, and this is more noticeable in roundabouts, people swapping lanes in roundabouts also seem to give problems, as it seems to create a short blockage, making the road ahead drive on to the roundabout, making a longer blockage where heavy vehicles then have to despawn. i think there is some issues with roundabouts and trucks, and how people drive in the roundabout, constantly creating openings for more traffic to get in than it can handle.
I have been waiting for this! Haven’t found an intersection style for heavy traffic yet, mostly relying on multiple pathway options instead. Thanks Biffa!
One thing I notice is the give way isn't working as well on the roundabout, so the cars all slam into the middle until some despawn.
Also, how about creating your own roundabout, 4 lanes, or 6 lanes. Does the AI treat a standard roundabout different to a custom one?
This is hilarious. Biffa made himself famous by removing Traffic. Now he's creating it. Love it!
one of the problems I have seen is that the cars drive too far out into the roundabout, so it blocks the traffic coming in the outer lanes from going straight through
@Biffa, what a brilliant idea for a video - just the sort of thing we need as we get to grips with CS2... absolutely loving it! Have yourself another cuppa - you've earned it 🙂
I know it's the holy grail of motorway design but I'd love to see you build your own four-way free-flowing interchange using vanilla CS2 and see how compact and conflict-free you could make it. Your handmade interchanges look so good these days, I'd love to see if you can come up with something free-flowing that doesn't take up an entire grid square on the map.
i think it would be cool to have the randomness appear more often when you first build or change an intersection, but lessen over time as the residents get used to it
Great information - currently having terrible issues with traffic in my city. Looking to see if I can implement this with some public transport to fix it.
I've found that lane mathematics isn't working very well in CS2. Cars will dart across four lanes to get to the exit, instead of lining up in the correct lane ahead of time
Actually you could use the tools ingame to quantify the flow and amount of traffic. If you click on the Streetname, you can see the flow and vehicleamount I think. Maybe that is good to quantify things :)
Apart from that: Very Nice Video!
Maybe it’s despawning because the whole grid is gridlocked. Otherwise traffic could get endlessly stuck
22:09 that big truck in the middle of the screen took one odd route! Went all the way to the crossing, went left, then across to the slipway to go back on the straight he was going towards to begin with.
I do agree with the No U-Turn option for intersections! Its a good way to control the traffic and affects its behaviour. Also when you did the highway lane thing, could it work just as well with half of those?
I did some testing of my own in my city Morning Wood Falls and I can confirm that drivers are totally unaffected by flooding. A lot of houses in Stiffy Terrace were damaged but they could walk and drive just fine. Let's hope the devs get a firm even grip on the details soon.
the problem with traffic right now is they "break the rules" too often. Traffic is allowed to break the rules, like in real life, BUT the issue comes from that setting being too high. As in too many vehicles "break the rules" too often which causes a lot of problems. The other issue is the "fill all lanes" at an intersection, while that is nice they do that, it makes them do sudden lane swaps because the lane math system isn't always right, and often breaks with roundabouts.
Biffa realizing his channel wasn't about Cities skylines, it was TMPE channel all along. This is about what I expected. The QoL features they have implemented are dumbed down, and missing they key bits to make it work. The AI from what I've seen really isn't any better. Large cities and complex intersections aren't going to be doable until someone implements things like advanced greens and timed lights, lane connectors and such. It just not worth playing unmoded. The fact that people are screwing with the dev tools, and decompiling DLL's to keep the flow consistent is telling. Moders aren't waiting for a first party platform.
Ive been able to clear up traffic w pretty damn good results by have a robust public transport system, removing crosswalks and using raised paths to move pedestrians, removing all street parking especially near roundabouts, not zoning too close to roundabouts, and keeping things a bit spread out.
I don't mind the realistic traffic, as long as there is no despawning. That bugs me when cars start despawning . Great experiment!! 🤩 It surprised me
I think the further left lane is not used for the roundabout because of the turning left cutting lanes. Those lanes have 2 more intersections than the other ones so they weight lesser interest for AI.
Seems like roundabouts almost work in CS2, but you would have to block trucks from using them. Due to their length they seem to cause the most problems as they block several entrances, especially when using a smaller round about.
Sad to see most logic and things like Lane mathematics barely matters in CS2.
The issue with U-turns could be alleviated by just allowing those U-turns to occur before the main intersection.
I'd rather get all the traffic down to the testing area than have them mostly U-Turn further back down the road. I guess we need do need a no u-turn button as well :-)
21:10 that big 18-wheeler just blocked 5 lines in the top-left! 😆
the most important thing about the larger roundabouts (outside of accomodating larger roads on the sides) is that the larger turn buys more time for people to enter the roundabout.
There is definately more room for the logic to improve.
There are many more variable in play in complex city/street layouts, where cars changing lanes at the very last moment etc can cause really big congestion.
And there are several confirmed bugs with ai behaviour on roads, where something can cause cars to just stop for no apparent reason etc
Also assymetrical loads on roundabouts can cause big problems where "all" cars have a direction they want to go, and start to block other directions, then it all comes to a stand still as these different interests conflict.
"There doesn't seem to be any traffic despawning now" - I think one car disappeared right when you said the word 'be'
yeah, in normal life when it comes to a traffic light, there are scheduled turn lights that help protect turn lanes. Which is something this game separately needs for this level of management.
As far as i understand, IRL roundabouts are the way to go until the traffic gets really heavy. At that point it just clogs up and having a normal intersection with traffic lights is better.
You likely have traffic despawning because you placed those traffic spawners on one-way roads right after saying they both spawn traffic and act as an end point for traffic. Surely traffic wants to go to those spawners and cannot reach them.
They can go to the spawners on the other side, which is what they chose when they appeared 👍
The AI in CS2 is literal garbage. 90% of the Cims just ignore the law and most of them will gridlock an area given the chance.
i mean, its kinda realistic if you think about it 😂
Randomness is neat. makes it feel more natural and flowing. Its no longer like ants following a strict dedicated pheromone trail
27:43 When you turn off left-hand turns and it doesn't change the road decal, you click a total of four times on the first Hillside Street, which would leave left-hand turns 'on' from that direction. You then click once on the other three sides, to turn it 'off'. That's probably why traffic continues to use the left-hand lane to go straight ahead from that one direction.
(I also wonder if with the larger roundabouts, the game detects vehicles as 'turning left' when they enter the roundabout just because the entry road connects at a right-angle, so when you turn off left-hand turns on the entry roads, it turns off that lane completely. I guess that doesn't make sense though because it's a full-road setting and not lane-specific, but maybe because the other lanes have a smoother route over the roundabout, it's not enough to count as 'turning left'.)
5:56 I'm sorry but why did you turn in to Snape for a moment there?
Towards the end of the video, when using the roundabout with slip roads, you couldn't turn off no left hand turns on the roundabout. I think this is fine as all exits are available to road users when on a roundabout.
It would be great if we had more granular traffic light control. I've noticed, especially with 4 way intersections like you have in the video, there are times where you'd want some lanes to go and others to not. Particularly, to stop lanes crossing in the middle of the intersection, as it can cause stop-start traffic that backs up roads.
Now you just have to test the Michigan turnaround :)
@Biffa keep up the best content there is on CS 1 and now 2 i'm loving you're original videos !
I pre purchased the deluxe edition and I have not even fired it up and WON'T until more of the crap I feel is unfinished or broken or that requires someone to create a mod to "un cluster F this or that issue", gets fixed.
I can't wait to get CS 2!!! I'm waiting a bit (hopefully they'll release performance patches by then) to make CS 2 my Christmas present to myself :)
I do transport modelling for a living, and the software we use, VISSIM and Paramics, which actually look alot like CS, allow for people speeding and breaking rules on lane management etc, to allow for a more realistic model
In my humble opinion, it's not a question of whether you like realism in games or not. It's more a question of how much of a headache realism causes the player. If you ask me, the old saying "too much realism kills the game" still applies in this regard.
Looking at your analysis, I realise that Collossal Order hasn't changed the AI very much. Crossing lanes should take a longer way on the road. And funnily enough, that's what would happen most of the time in real life. Also, there's this rule you learn in driving school. In Germany, it's called the zip procedure. That means that every second car threads its way into the traffic. That's something Collassal Order should build into their AI.
It's crazy how big the trucks and buses are. If you did this experiment with just small cars the results would be so much better.
What's been a real pain in the behind is the pedestrian crossings everywhere. Even if i build a dedicated pedestrian bridge even the most major junctions still get pedestrian crossings, and i have a million cars just waiting to let pedestrians through. Can't wait for traffic mods!
I had thought I had heard something about how the random bad driving decreased with education levels and also is part of how the random accidents come about, made more likely when there's bad weather. Yeah, it's a pain, but it's also -- as was said in the video -- more realistic as far as how real life traffic works.
Despawning on roundabout is probably when the roundabout is so full they completely block eachother from ever going. Yes if they can improve the keeping junction clear with stop signs on roundabout and normal traffic lights behavior it would make all the difference
Not a expert, but isn't that bit of road after the slip road rather small? Loving seeing this type of content!
It's nice to see how smooth the traffic tools are in vanilla CS:2, but I think I'll wait until the mods start coming out
The despwaning traffic can be reduced by moving the traffic emitters closer to the junction. It's the total entities being counted, so make a shorter distance so they are on the road for less time.
From what I could see with the small roundabout, it seems where it struggles is with the large vehicles, trucks and busses. They can't quite fit into it properly and trigger start and stop traffic, which dominoes into sporadic traffic jams, then when those clear up and it's all smaller cars, the traffic flows again, until a wave of larger vehicles arrive and get slowed. IMO that's interesting, so if you have a route with many big vehicles, don't use the small roundabouts, they'll jam up the large busses and trucks.
I love some good statistics. Thanks for the video!
At around 22:00 I think you need to remove the crosswalks and the cars will enter the blocked intersection.
At 25:59 you did not modify the inner part of the lower asymetrical road from 4-3 to 3-2, that's why they aren't properly taking the dedicated lane.