This organization is how pretty much all cities are built IRL. Local roads should be where most people live they’re basically an extension to your driveway, letting you get to the real road network. They don’t bring you anywhere themselves, other than maybe the corner store.Ĭonnecting roads get you around the neighborhood. They’re wider, faster, and people travelling on them get higher priority at intersections than those on local roads. That said, you can still live or work on them. Regional roads are even faster: no intersections, no driveways, high speed limit. Highways obviously fit this, but any kind of road can fit this description if built the right way, e.g. feeding the outskirts of your city with a 6-lane road with intersections hundreds of meters apart. Here’s an example: all high-density with the only escapes the highway to the right and that one slightly orange 6-laner to the “north” and “south”. As you can see, connecting roads don’t have to be single straight lines to the regional ones, so long as their intersections are relatively far apart. Public transit is the same idea: long, fast stretches for regional (e.g. “But why not just make ALL the roads 4 or 6 lanes, if they’re faster and have higher volume?” trains and subways), buses within the neighborhood, and your cims’ own two feet to get to the door. Good question, hypothetical reader! IRL the answer is style and money, the latter of which applies in-game too. More importantly though, your cims select their routes based on time-to-destination, assuming no traffic (I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m pretty confident it’s mostly true). This means they’ll tend to funnel towards the larger roads, if given the choice. That in turn means that, as planned, the only traffic on local roads is going to be those cims who have to use them.

Even with relatively long stretches of high-density development, that’s only a few sims an RL minute at the fastest speed, versus many, many more on the bigger routes. (The following is based on 15 minutes of me watching intersections with a stopwatch).Ĭonveniently, intersection signals in Cities: Skylines seem to be based on detectors: they’ll stay green for the last direction to have traffic, until either ~5 seconds elapse or vehicles arrive in a conflicting lane, whichever comes first. If both roads have similar loads, that’s 50% green time for each, cutting the capacity of both in half.

Cities skylines efficient road layout