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Playing "Cities: Skylines" on PC and growing your small village into a metropolis will teach you a lot of things about traffic. More options for cars are usual

Playing "Cities: Skylines" on PC and growing your small village into a metropolis will teach you a lot of things about traffic. More options for cars are usually not good for traffic flow. The drivers in that game don't crash, and otherwise their behavior is greatly simplified, but each vehicle in that game has a start and a destination, and you can follow delivery trucks as they deliver packages and then go back to the Depot to pick up more. It's very fascinating, and may offer us some small window into the kinds of things that traffic engineers deal with without trying to find or write traffic simulation software. And, of course, there are mods to give the player (the Mayor) greater control over lane usage and where stop signs and traffic lights are placed and how they operate. Doing things wrong will quickly result in localized gridlock.

ptmcc 8y ago
The biggest flaw in C:S traffic flow, even with the popular traffic improvement mods, is that routes and lane choices are pre-calculated when the vehicle departs and don't really take into account alternative routes/lanes or current traffic load very well or at all. You quickly run into issues where you'll have a 3 lane road that has 99% of the cars backed up in one lane while the other 2 are wide open. Coincidentally it kind of mimics an induced demand problem, but for the wrong reasons. Of course having every vehicle continually recalculate and optimize its path is computationally prohibitive. Given the limitations it does a pretty good job, though!
- naikrovek 8y ago
  The vehicles aren't situationally aware, you're right. Nothing beyond basic "go when the car in front of you goes, and stop when they stop" kind of thing. That said, there is a non-zero percentage of human drivers that do the same pre-calculated route and lane selection.
- dawnerd 8y ago
  I found that frustrating too - all the cars piling up into one lane. I'm sure there's some stuff they could have done to pre-calculate and have some "randomness" in there to use the other lanes. There was a plugin, might still be, that kind of fixed it. Maybe I should fire it back up and see whats all new.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  Isn't this how most of us operate? I almost always take the same route to work, regardless of traffic.
  - ptmcc 8y ago
    Route, perhaps (though I personally like to mix it up), but if the right lane of a 3-lane highway is backed up due to an offramp that isn't yours, I imagine you'd move over one lane to get past it! That's what doesn't happen in C:S, unfortunately.

ptmcc 8y ago

The biggest flaw in C:S traffic flow, even with the popular traffic improvement mods, is that routes and lane choices are pre-calculated when the vehicle departs and don't really take into account alternative routes/lanes or current traffic load very well or at all. You quickly run into issues where you'll have a 3 lane road that has 99% of the cars backed up in one lane while the other 2 are wide open. Coincidentally it kind of mimics an induced demand problem, but for the wrong reasons. Of course having every vehicle continually recalculate and optimize its path is computationally prohibitive. Given the limitations it does a pretty good job, though!

naikrovek 8y ago
The vehicles aren't situationally aware, you're right. Nothing beyond basic "go when the car in front of you goes, and stop when they stop" kind of thing. That said, there is a non-zero percentage of human drivers that do the same pre-calculated route and lane selection.
dawnerd 8y ago
I found that frustrating too - all the cars piling up into one lane. I'm sure there's some stuff they could have done to pre-calculate and have some "randomness" in there to use the other lanes. There was a plugin, might still be, that kind of fixed it. Maybe I should fire it back up and see whats all new.
mywittyname 8y ago
Isn't this how most of us operate? I almost always take the same route to work, regardless of traffic.
- ptmcc 8y ago
  Route, perhaps (though I personally like to mix it up), but if the right lane of a 3-lane highway is backed up due to an offramp that isn't yours, I imagine you'd move over one lane to get past it! That's what doesn't happen in C:S, unfortunately.