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Just suggesting. This could solve the traffic jams that occur lategame. Busses and Trams could be excluded. But cars should totally stop in turns.
I’m just wondering how hard it is to implement.
I mean simply adding working traffic lights in cycles is not difficult to make.
But the timing… how do you make sure vehicles won’t have to stop at almost every intersection?
In real life these things are timed. Main roads have priority and the red/green timing is such that allows vehicles to pass through like a dozen intersections if we take the speed limit…
Something like that may not be plausible, considering how everything is random.Question is, would random set of traffic light cycles be suitable enough? I guess only testing would determine it… It’d probably still be better than no lights at all
I won’t pretend to have put much thought into what I am about to say, but… how about lights you place yourself with an option for short / medium / long duration which pops up similar to how the one way for rail signals show.
Yeah, but would it even make a difference? Personally, I don’t think that’s the problem. The cars will try to make a turn in the middle of the street which causes backups. I think that’s more of the problem rather than traffic lights. I like the idea FX2K just presented but I don’t think it’ll help. I could be wrong tho.
There just needs to be a way for people to take traffic jams into account when planning a journey, making them more likely to take the train when they have to pass through a backed up area.
I was thinking they could record the time taken every time they take their car, then for the next 5/10/15/20/100/whatever of that same trip they do (Work -> Home, Home -> Leisure etc.) they could use THAT as the time estimate. So if they try to drive home from work and it takes them 30 minutes, then they would almost certainly take the train for the next X number of trips. Then they can try their car again and repeat. This should result in higher ridership and less traffic (especially in areas that are already congested). I don’t know how feasible it would be in terms of RAM requirements and such but it’s just an idea.
It would also help if they actually used lanes correctly and didn’t all just pile up in one on a four lane road.
Well, since they evaluate their path for each type of journey, home <> work, home <> leisure, home <> shopping… I would think timing a trip once then using the same x times would be a lighter load than evaluating each and every time.
Of course, changes to the network would mean that they would have to be re-evaluated, but still.I sometimes watch an individual civ for a few game years, whilst doing other things and keep checking back to see what they are up to.. Train to work… Drive home.. hmmm, thieves! ( I know its my route causing this btw) but it show’s that each time they are about to set out on a journey, they evaluate the trip.
Thinking about the traffic lights, whilst it may be nice to have some control, it could lead to some insane amount of micro-management, to a point of being an annoyance.
Oh and… One way roads anyone? Surely that should help?
Just been experimenting by blowing my hard earned cash. Late game using bus routes town to town, as the inevitable gridlock occurred thought I might as well get radical before starting a new game.
Routes into town are via large country roads with bus lanes, cars behave properly on these. On reaching town I’ve split the roads into two, one medium street no bus lanes, the other a small street with bus lanes, I haven’t completed the full conversion in town yet so there are still problem areas but…. Playing for an hour (real time), not a single car has turned into or spawned on these narrow bus routes. Could this be a temporary work around the gridlock problem? I know it’s expensive but, if done early game whilst traffic is light and railways profitable it should be a bit cheaper to implement.
Might keep things flowing until traffic lights and one way streets appear.
Of course, changes to the network would mean that they would have to be re-evaluated, but still.
Not necessarily. I mean, the trip time could be kept separate to the pathing (because most of the time they’re just using a stored value to decide whether to path by car or not) and although it would mean that they might choose the train even though their usual route is clear after an alteration to the network, or there’s a newer, faster route, this would only last a few trips until they tried the car again so it’s not really a big deal.
What I’m basically envisioning is that every X trips they would run the normal routine of deciding whether to go by car or whether public transport is faster but then the actual travel time would be recorded and they’d then use that value for X trips before running the normal routine again, setting off in their car, the time being recorded again and repeat. This decision on whether to take the car or not necessarily comes before they do their pathing, so alterations to their route would not necessarily need to be detected and recalculated immediately, they would just have a delayed effect. Now, if they decide that car is faster because of the stored value, but then they fail to find a path (because a critical road has been demolished for example) that could just cause the normal routine to run immediately again.
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