Show us Your Interchanges!

[huzman 445]

This is not from Simcity4 but from real life. I find this pic awesome and there are many similarities with what people are doing and posting here.

English
 This exchanger of Huan jue wan was finished recently in the periphery of Chongqoing, enormous metropolis in the south-west of China, after eight years of construction.

 The work superimposes five levels where the tallest one is 37 meters tall. No less than 15 ramps had to be constructed to allow the traffic to go from one level to another, in eight directions.

French
 L'échangeur de Huang jue wan a été achevé récemment en périphérie de Chongqoing, immense métropole du sud-ouest de la Chine, après huit années de travaux.

 L'ouvrage superpose cinq voies de circulation dont la plus haute culmine à 37 mètres. Pas moins de 15 bretelles ont dû être construites pour permettre aux véhicules de passer d'un niveau à l'autre, en huit directions.

 

[Dgmc2013 873]

A simple cloverleaf interchange...

[Haljackey 17,270]

Busy diamond interchange

Zoom out

Due the fact it's the only highway crossing for a long stretch, it also receives heavy pedestrian traffic

[huzman 445]

2 hours ago, Dgmc2013 said:

A simple cloverleaf interchange...

Why so big? Looks like it could be a lot tighter, specially with curved roads. Maybe I'm missing something...

I'm going to try it meself.

[Haljackey 17,270]

On 2017-07-08 at 1:58 PM, Haljackey said:

Busy diamond interchange

It's so busy that I converted it to a SPUI / Single Point Urban Interchange and widened the highway. It's my first SPUI since my 'Building A City From Scratch' series. It was a tight fit!

It's too bad the SPUI pieces can't be 7.5m yet, would make things a little easier. Wasn't too much work to retrofit this to 15m, however.

[huzman 445]

Awesome! You should write more tutorials.

[rkagerer 2]

New to this, and looking for feedback on my first service interchange attempt.  I wanted to design a narrow "freeway corridor" suitable for upgrading dense urban areas where you're tight on space.

Here's a peek beneath:

More details:

Spoiler

Nothing protrudes more than 2 tiles from the highway thoroughfare.  Ignore the dirt roads, they're just to illustrate zoning availability and pillar clearances for ground-level underpasses.

On-ramps extend from both the left and right lanes of the roundabout (which itself is made up of a pair one-way highways), to load-balance lane usage and shorten queue lengths at intersections further back along the avenue.  If the avenue mainly feeds loops of one-way streets like pictured (i.e. no left turns) you could double-down on this tactic by bulldozing the two little right-hand on-ramp connectors (under the magenta arrows), forcing all highway-bound traffic into the left lane.

Spoiler

I'd intended to isolate the two halves of the roundabout from each other and dedicate the middle lane to local through-traffic.  This proved tricky under the vanilla game (e.g. seems there's no way to force the innermost lane of a roundabout to be right-turn-only where it meets an intersection - so I couldn't achieve the dark yellow arrows from the second screenshot).  I'm also a little unhappy that drivers making a "left turn" off the highway need to travel 270° through the circle and merge into the middle lane to complete their transition.  As a result, the interchange might function a little better where traffic entering a highway tends to be heavier than that leaving it.

The roundabout's interior only fits two connections, and initially it was a tough choice whether to make them on-ramps or realign them as off-ramps.  The latter would eliminate the merges, but leave less knobs and levers to control upstream traffic.  If I was playing with Traffic++ and had the ability to toggle lane arrows, I might have considered creating an inverse version optimized for sucking traffic out of a highway, and use the two in a complimentary fashion (especially after reading it's good to have major arteries carry traffic off your freeways and disperse it to networks of smaller "veins" that collect it back up and feed it back to the highway at multiple locations).

I know the ramp turns are tight, but like I said I'm trying to maintain a narrow footprint.  The slight asymmetry between the left and right side of the interchange is because I was experimenting with different lengths / curvatures / underpass options.

Here's how it looks in my still-nascent town:

Spoiler

I also toyed with bringing some ramps up in between the two highways, but didn't complete that revision.  If you offset the heights of the two highways, it's actually possible to cram them directly adjacent to each other and still keep ramps entirely under the footprint of the highway!

Would love to hear your critiques on all this, especially if you see any major flaws in my reasoning above (like I said, still new at this!)

 

[Haljackey 17,270]

@rkagerer

Looks like Cities: Skylines. You might find this thread is a better home:

(This thread is for SimCity 4)

[rkagerer 2]

@Haljackey WHOOPS, thanks!  Funny thing is I perused that whole thread then skipped to the end of this one assuming it was simply a continuation.  That explains why the more recent screenshots look so "funny".

[huzman 445]

The problem of one thread getting posted in another -say a SC3k topic coming up in SC4- seems to be increasing. Maybe some coding could be implemented, like with colors or icons.

5 hours ago, Haljackey said:

Looks like Cities: Skylines.

Haljackey seems to think along these lines, but I'm not putting words in his mouth.

  Edited July 13, 2017 by huzman  

[Tarkus 6,932]

On 7/9/2017 at 8:33 PM, Haljackey said:

It's too bad the SPUI pieces can't be 7.5m yet, would make things a little easier. Wasn't too much work to retrofit this to 15m, howeve

NAM 37 will be right up your alley.  The new FlexSPUIs will actually be interfaced with the upcoming FLEX Turn Lanes, providing several new configurations in terms of the number of through and turn lanes.  Here's a taste:

-Tarkus

[bladeberkman 714]

This is completely inefficient and a huge waste of space. However, I love how it looks, the curves are super-smooth, and I had to share.  

[Razip 153]

On 13.07.2017 at 7:47 AM, Tarkus said:

NAM 37 will be right up your alley.  The new FlexSPUIs will actually be interfaced with the upcoming FLEX Turn Lanes, providing several new configurations in terms of the number of through and turn lanes.  Here's a taste:

Look forward!

[matias93 7,535]

9 hours ago, bladeberkman said:

This is completely inefficient and a huge waste of space. However, I love how it looks, the curves are super-smooth, and I had to share.  

Mind it, could have a big footprint, but it's certainly an elegant solution, which helps to keep adequate speeds (thus avoiding bottlenecks) and doesn't abuse of viaducts. I'll keep your design in mind, because I think it will be very useful for my region later. 

[Razip 153]

[Razip 153]

[huzman 445]

That's better! Maybe it could be tighter. Moving the ramps by one tile closer to the intersection could save you lots of tiles.

[Razip 153]

25 minutes ago, huzman said:

That's better! Maybe it could be tighter. Moving the ramps by one tile closer to the intersection could save you lots of tiles.

Thanks! I am completely satisfied, so I am not going to modify it.

It was weird but I wasn't allowed to add any text to my previous messages, so anyway I'll say what I wanted to say now. The first picture is about my today's discovery that clover leaves can be even more round. In the second picture, you can see the interchange being completed.

At first, I wanted to build a simple Diamond interchange in that place, but later realized there would be too much traffic because of commuters' cars and freight trucks.

[huzman 445]

If you don't mind I'll try it myself. Anyway, those interchanges -all of them- seem out of proportion to me. That's one thing I've been thinking about. The proportions of not just roads and all but let's say between the size of vehicles and the size of street/roads/avenues. It's a minor detail, but I think it should be looked into. Have you noticed that rural roads are as wide as city roads?

I wonder if I'm not Don Quixote charging into dead walls...

[Razip 153]

8 hours ago, huzman said:

If you don't mind I'll try it myself. Anyway, those interchanges -all of them- seem out of proportion to me. That's one thing I've been thinking about. The proportions of not just roads and all but let's say between the size of vehicles and the size of street/roads/avenues. It's a minor detail, but I think it should be looked into. Have you noticed that rural roads are as wide as city roads?

I wonder if I'm not Don Quixote charging into dead walls...

Oh, sure! I've noticed that a rural road is as wide as the regular two lane road.

[Razip 153]

A trumpet interchange for future's highway expansion and the industrial zone's traffic jam which the interchange barely resists (imagine how it would've been looking if I hadn't chosen a Cloverleaf over a Diamond interchange).

[Razip 153]

Undeveloped.

[Razip 153]

Haljackey, I am very glad you liked my pictures! By the way, I watch your Youtube channel and I would like to see more real life highway driving videos, but I like it ! : P

[Haljackey 17,270]

Here's my latest real-life inspired interchange creation in SimCity 4.

Click the link below the image for full size (a whopping 6485x3868)

Full size: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4318/35181620833_13397f1017_o.png

[AsimPika3172 1,129]

Wow! Too much real... HIGHWAYS!!!!

[mertzigzag 48]

4 hours ago, Haljackey said:

Here's my latest real-life inspired interchange creation in SimCity 4.

Click the link below the image for full size (a whopping 6485x3868)

A whopping image for a whopping interchange!  I was just through there earlier this week... could even make it more complicated if you include the adjacent on/off-ramps for Sheppard, which have a really strange configuration.  Not that the main interchange isn't complicated enough

[harryloko20 33]

On 15/06/2017 at 0:31 AM, Haljackey said:

New interchanges in a old city as part of a major redevelopment and bridge project.

3/4 exchange

The north-south highway used to be a Maxis highway, upgraded to RHW as part of the project.

New parclo

Again, this replaces an old Maxis Highway, you can see the old route terminate at the top and bottom of the image.

Bonus: Partial-y at the other end of the bridge

Man, Nice , Really Nice!! Love u Flora!! U used just 2 type of flora?What is the tree?:D

[Haljackey 17,270]

7 hours ago, mertzigzag said:

A whopping image for a whopping interchange!  I was just through there earlier this week... could even make it more complicated if you include the adjacent on/off-ramps for Sheppard, which have a really strange configuration.  Not that the main interchange isn't complicated enough

Adding the Sheppard collector / HOV tunnel / etc would have upped the scale of the project immensely. Since that isn't the focus, I chose not to include it. What I made is just inspired by the junction.

 

 

[Ganbare Shamiko 45]

Spaghetti goodness...

[huzman 445]

On 7/15/2017 at 7:18 AM, Razip said:

Oh, sure! I've noticed that a rural road is as wide as the regular two lane road.

Yeah, Rural roads as big as Roads/Streets? I"m missing something here. I ran NAM several times in the last few days, and I can not get it right: fer inztanze, I still I get LHD,  Some repeated posts in the flora and such -I might have to purge the plugs-, but I want some dirt roads. I"m building a lot of little hamlets with a lot of farms and some few Industrial/commercial lots and I want to join them with very basic rural 'paths'.

Maybe i should get back to Vanilla and the hell with all those plugs.