streets streets everywhere

[EmpNap1 0]

okay, so i look at all of the wonderfully created cities in the journals forum and see that you guys build massive sprawling suburbs that are gridded with streets surrounded by roads in a cell network; but i've noticed. how do you guys manage to grid so many streets together without any roads neaerby without suffering from massive amounts of congestion? streets look SO much better for my light residential neighbourhoods than roads do, but they become traffic nightmares if as little as five blocks of them are put together with homes. is there any kind of street capacity increaser, or perhaps a road mod that's just a road that looks like a street (but has the capacity and specifications) of a normal road?

thanks for the help!

[psander5 195]

Do you have the Network Addon Mod (NAM)?  When you install the NAM you're given the option to choose capacity and pathfinding options.   That's the only traffic mod I use, and it does exactly what you're after, plus lots more cool stuff.

[Spinmaster 75]

NAM is the answer. Without it sims commute by shortest distance, which means using streets a lot, and often ignoring mass transit completely - they won't go out of their way to get to a higher-capacity road or transit station if it's not directly in their path and goes directly where they want to go. With NAM the paths are chosen by time (not exactly but effectively). Be sure to read the full documentation that comes with NAM to ensure you select the options you want during installation, how to use everything, etc....

[Dukat 2]

If you chose a setting in the NAM, that extends capacity of the network, it is almost like cheating. Some settings even double the capacity, I think.

[Bones1 96]

If you have jobs fairly close to where the sims live, then they can still get to work even if there is massive congestion on the streets. At the absolute worst-case congestion, sims will be able to drive up to 38 tiles on a street before giving up. Farther if they can get to a bus stop. You can try putting a parking garage plus a bus stop right next to the garage, somewhere in the residential neighborhood.

You do NOT need NAM's cheats to make a nice city. The only traffic mod I use from NAM is the "perfect pathfinding", but I do not use the commute distance, speed, capacity, etc. cheats. "Perfect pathfinding" will make the sims smarter about the route they use to get to work, so it will help a small bit with commuting problems. (But it will cause slow-downs of the simulator when your city gets big... it uses a lot of CPU.)