[MOD] Traffic DeCongestion

[flanker]

Hi everyone. This is my first try on modding Train Fever. This small update definitely helps in solving a huge problem that Train Fever has: Traffic Congestion.

The mechanics behind traffic congestion in this game are somewhat blurry to an end user, but I’ve been trying to reproduce the problem in order to find a solution, and I think I found it. The main problem was emerging when your cities grow to a substantial size (500+), especially if roads aren’t wide enough to support the incoming traffic from other cities. You’ve probably noticed that after setting up a successful line between two cities, a whole new world opens up, cars start to spawn from one city, hurrying to get to the other side before your train or bus which eventually leads to a nightmare and a complete standstill of traffic. Now, with this tiny replacement of personal cars in-game, the citizens on the map will be forced to drive SLOWER, which will result in more people choosing the train over a car, and more people giving up on car travel completely because the calculated time needed to reach other cities will be quite longer now. Imagine that world speed limit for personal cars on roads is now 50kph, while your trucks & buses retain their original speed. Of course, if you keep the default road connection with 2 lanes, your trucks & buses will also be forced to follow any cars in front of them, resulting in slower truck lines. This can be solved by expanding your road network (which is also realistic because you will have to invest more money on truck lines that were OP anyway)

Note that citizens will still use the cars even if they’re slower, but that will definitely be a balanced way of car usage, so your buses and trains won’t stay empty neither full, which is much more realistic than what we have in the vanilla version of the game. I know it’s not much of a fix, think of it more like a temporary solution until the devs finally balance it out properly. Of course, if you have more ideas, I’ll be happy to hear any other solutions to this problem.

Also, I want to note that this was a trial & error process, and in the end I found the most satisfying result with limiting the fastest cars to 50kph, while the older cars run at either 30 or 40 kph. Feel free to experiment with different speeds and report your own results here.

Download: https://www.sendspace.com/file/1hxbkf

Install using TFMM manager, but if you decide to do it manually, remember to backup the folders that you’re overwriting 😉

Tip: This ‘fix’ is best used in combination with early city planning.

• Try to expand your road network inside the city in the very beginning of the game; build bus lanes on 4 lane streets, and avoid using bus lanes on streets you won’t use for bus traffic. Bus lanes squeeze the traffic, so use them wisely, try not to create any bottlenecks. Best practice is to have a bus lane along the main two-three streets, while leaving another four lane street for car traffic. Upgrade all streets that you can, never leave cities to go wild because you’ll have to spend many millions in late game to undo the overcrowded areas.
• When you build train stations, try to build them away from external road access points, so that your bus lines that connect railways with your intra-city network won’t have to deal with incoming traffic from other cities.

            For example, if your city has 2 road entry points (let’s say in North and South), try to build the train station                 either in the East or West, and then build the main bus (or tramway) station right next to it. Branch out a few             bus/tram lines along the bus lanes you constructed earlier if your city has 500+ population. One circular                       bus/tram line is enough for smaller cities.

• This topic was modified 9 years, 5 months ago by flanker. Reason: added an external link

[Tattoo]

Good idea if it works.

[flanker]

I really hope it works for everyone out there. It definitely made impact in my 2 long games so far. One thing though, after you load a saved game that has a huge traffic problem, don’t expect things to get settled immediately. It will take 1-2 years of game time to completely de-congest the city.

A quick solution is that you just demolish the connection to the neighboring cities and re-build it so all the calculated lines will be reset.

[splifsend]

first of all I would like to thank you for the effort although it had no effect on my twin cities (I have a map with 2 cities that have merged into one with a population over 3000) I have no idea about how to mod the game but I do have a few good suggestions

1 instead of the citizens visiting each place for 10 seconds they could stay a little longer say 40 or 50 seconds, this would reduce the amount of the population trying to move at any given time, however the drawback is there will be less using the transport provided

2 the spawn point for each building is always the nearest lane to the building and always heading to the right, they could spawn either in the middle lane or on the opposite side of the road, the drawback for this would be that it would still mean a lot of junctions would become gridlock and I also think this would take a lot of coding

3 would be a to make one-way roads which for obvious reasons I cannot say what the outcome would be but if it could be done then this – http://i.imgur.com/ZTiRHds.jpg or even this – http://i.imgur.com/q7MC3UV.jpg could be a work around.. these two junctions take ages to build

Personally I would like to at least try suggestion 1 if this could be done, I am sure that in the long run it would make the game playable even when you have a few thousand citizens

[splifsend]

my city http://i.imgur.com/CURD1lj.jpg

 

[FX2K]

I gave this a quick test on one of my saves and it appears to be doing what it says on the tin…
Here is a before and after letting it run for only 6 months… regardless of the poor junction I have setup, which is the cause of the bottleneck it clearly shows the effect it has.

Before:  Traffic build up on the overpass and a long que into the city
http://i.imgur.com/d8uu5cM.jpg

After:  Traffic on the overpass is clear, still a build up entering the city but doesn’t stretch as far.
http://i.imgur.com/DXFkZ6W.jpg

Great work!

If I gave it more time I’m sure the comparison would be a lot clearer.

[Tattoo]

I tried something similar today to fix the traffic jams but I went with 2 mph. After upgrading roads to clear out the sitting cars, I only see a very few cars driving around the city. I don’t see ANY on the road between the cities any more and my train stations have a bunch of people waiting again. This also made my all my buses work again.

This was a GREAT idea. I now have no more traffic jams and won’t have any more in the future.

Thank you very much.

[Author]

Posts