Show us Your Interchanges!

[PaulSawyer 219]

A while ago I played with a huge region, in which I managed to build a lot of highways with cool interchanges. Several days ago I stumbled upon it while browsing my region folder; the original plugin pack was lost somewhere, so a lot of textures and props are missing, but the interchanges are intact, so I thought why not sharing them?

[Haljackey 17,271]

Couple turbines zoomed in and out

Not all directions fully used yet... need some more growth to the south.

(no generators- some proof if you need it)

Click for full size

[Haljackey 17,271]

Single-Point Urban Interchange (SPUI)

 

[PaPa-J 778]

That bridge interchange is really cool looking!

[Haljackey 17,271]

Either too busy or too empty

[Haljackey 17,271]

 

New interchange & highway expansion

[art128 4,618]

Such good stuff in this thread.

 

Since these are part of a region i will be discarding, I shall post them before they're gone.

 

[Naomi57 2,985]

A Quirky Little Paperclip Interchange

Notice the dilapidated commercial lot, that's just one of many commercial lots with low customers in this awkward coastline corner of Breezy Point.  Here's a quirky little paperclip interchange I just built, that will solve these business woes, by drawing more customers to this isolated locale.

I could have done a SPUI, being a simple little avenue x highway interchange, but a SPUI didn't fit with my intentions for this obscure spot of Breezy Point coastline,  near Lighthouse Point, so I did this quirky creation instead.  

Special Features:

• All suburban roads at ground level.
• Frontage roads to take advantage of every piece of prime commercial real estate.   
• Highway is primarily for an underground busway.  This is one of just three points for car access (so far), with eight points for bus access en-route.  The rare privilege of car access to this part of the underground busway, is one of the things that will (intentionally) draw extra traffic to improve business customer levels.
• 90 degree turn implemented using inline transition to AVE-4.  Ooooh, I know, that's a really dirty trick, but this highway is built for speed, not for large masses of cars and buses, and yes, the traffic is required to slow down to 50km/h to make the corner, before accelerating back up to 150km/h.    In city tiles where I'm concerned about upcoming traffic volumes, I put the underground busway through a couple MHW 45 degree bends instead.

Those weird looking highway ramps do actually funnel the traffic well, both from a SimCity 4 NAM perspective, and from a real-life perspective, too, by minimising weaving and crossing traffic.  Get a look at the ramps with Ctrl+X  drawpaths on .  It's realistic for a paperclip interchange, which has relatively low ramp traffic.

Admittedly, I've squeezed those ramps into the smallest space that works, but the in-line transitions on either side only gave me 6 ramp tiles to play with, which just happens to be the bare minimum for an (asymmetrical) paperclip.  If I'd had 7 ramp tiles, I probably would have gone for folded wye ramps instead.

Car access to the busway here is optional, long term.  If traffic levels overwhelm the interchange, I'll very happily bulldoze the ramps, just keeping the frontage roads and highway bus interchange points to pick up on the C$$ and C$$$ commercial benefits.  By then, this commercial locality will have established it's bona fides with a virtuous cycle of business growth.

PS.  I really do love my concrete highways, no asphalt reskins for me.  

[Haljackey 17,271]

Eastern frontier trumpet variant

Zoom in

Location in region

Bonus: Original design I didn't like as much

Bonus 2: with development

[Abrams 1,744]

It's been a long time since i built an interchange, so this took a bit longer than expected

[Naomi57 2,985]

Grown and terraformed ...
progress on my Quirky Paperclip Interchange:

To recap on my earlier post in this thread, here's the original zoning for my quirky paperclip:

... and here it is, terraformed and beautified:

Click on the images to zoom in, and arrow around to compare before and after.

Notice buildings have cleaned up, and upgraded, the additional commuter traffic (and trucks) providing some much needed oil and grease for the economic machinery of this locality, that used to be an isolated corner of the shoreline.  A bit more work to do, but this 'ere is a good start.

This same interchange is the subject of a Mosaic I did recently, if you'd like to see a little more of the city.  

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/14932-show-us-your-mosaics/?page=10&tab=comments#comment-1724711

[Edvarz 1,984]

A while ago I built this interchange between a major highway and a boulevard with a canal in the middle. It's one of my favorite builds ever. It serves a big industrial area and also helps with avoiding saturation in a transited avenue further ahead.

 

[iwin vital 6]

What a brilliant build. Amazing result 

[matias93 7,535]

That's... a really big canal. It should have made this all more difficult, no?

[Edvarz 1,984]

1 hour ago, matias93 said:

That's... a really big canal. It should have made this all more difficult, no?

Kind of, the height transitions are always hard to figure out! but it's otherwise very similar to a T interchange. Originally I planned to build a sunken highway, that's why the canal is so big, but that also made the process a bit easier.

[Haljackey 17,271]

Almost unrecognizable.

This was the last Maxis Highway I ever built, back in 2010. 10 years later, it's gone.

[Haljackey 17,271]

Highway terminus interchange

Plus a few others nearby

[Haljackey 17,271]

Trumpet in the wilderness

[Haljackey 17,271]

Diagonal Diamond Interchange

[Naomi57 2,985]

Tram-Avenue x Highway Interchange

Feeling chuffed!    I think this might be the only configuration for a Tram-Avenue x Highway Interchange.  I'd be super interested if someone has spotted another way to do it.  The Straight Tram-Avenue Station near the orange hang glider also provides a highly effective bus/tram interchange point, while still being a highly effective interchange for cars, too.

As an aside, I use SAM-1 and SAM-6 for non-tram streets in my tram suburbs, so that they show up well.  Fire engines can't fight fire when called to Tram-on-Street, Tram-in-Road and Tram-Avenue and Elevated Rail Dual Networking pieces, so I need a few non-tram streets around, too.

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/758794-is-tram-in-road-incompatible-with-fire-fighting/?tab=comments#comment-1724510

[Naomi57 2,985]

Perhaps My Weirdest Interchange so far ...

This weird interchange resulted from 3 highways from the "south" merging into a single "north"-bound highway.  I briefly considered some variant of a basketweave interchange, but discarded that as taking up way too much space, and not really a good fit for what was required.

This solution evolved over a period of a couple weeks.  It looks really odd, but it works well.  

I put in the OWR-3 with the hope that it would handle higher levels of traffic.  Sadly, my testing revealed that OWR-3 x MIS junctions get congested just as much as OWR-2 x MIS junctions, so that didn't really help, but it still looks super neat, so I'm keeping it.  

My observations so far indicate that OWR-3 handles high traffic on straight stretches, but have very nasty congestion on intersections, bends and corners.

I'll do some more testing on OWR-3 traffic capacity as traffic levels increase in this Jamaica Bay large city tile.

[Haljackey 17,271]

Something a little different- bullet train interchange (with congestion)

[Terring 6,473]

And after so many epic interchanges and intersections, let's put something small and humble, just for some variety

[Haljackey 17,271]

A couple interchange upgrades

[Alejandro24 575]

An unfinished interchange:

Another one, I'm trying to find a way to optimize the space in this one:

And a three way interchange:

[Darrius11able 728]

This is sort of the combination of multiple interchanges on the outskirts of my future downtown area. 

The first part:

The second part directly to the right of this^ picture:

View from further way:

 

 

[Naomi57 2,985]

A RHW-6S FLUPs Paperclip Interchange

While FLUPs under highway causes surface highway congestion, the traffic through the FLUPs tunnel seems to flow really well, and RHW-6S as the surface road helps reduce congestion going over the FLUPs tunnel.

There's some really nice terraforming in this one, if you look closely.  The gentle ramp up to the bridge.  The dip in the far-side OWR-2, for the Disease Research Center entrance.  The hill for the near-side OWR-2, to make the highway connection a little less steep—though I think that slope still contravenes the state highway building codes.  

The trickiest piece of terraforming, was to manage the issue that 90º intersections have to be flat.  You can see there's still a slight dip in the highway at the centre of the paperclip interchange, where the RHW-4 tiles adjacent to the MIS x RHW-2 intersections are likewise forced to be flat.  I really should get myself a slope mod, but terraforming is relaxing, and I'm pretty sure that learning a new slope mod is not!  

 

Those bus stops are dual level, providing quick mass transit for both the highway and the vanilla tunnel underneath it, with an integrated lift for disabled access.  Very convenient for all those working (or visiting) at the Disease Research Center and surrounding businesses.

Now I've got some serious zoning and tree planting work to do!  

[Durfsurn 539]

[Naomi57 2,985]

My First RHW Cloverleaf Interchange

The Belt Parkway, in East New York, is my first regional highway, stretching across three city tiles so far, and will eventually be a regional throughfare across nine of my city tiles.  My Jamaica Bay large city tile contains the busiest interchange on the Belt Parkway, which you can see on Google satellite below.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Jamaica+Bay/@40.5586564,-73.9119515,3888a,35y,29.25h,38.96t/data=...!4d-73.8713099

Yep, that ginormous cloverleaf interchange is now built and operational.  

My first RHW cloverleaf, and possibly my last, we'll see.  It's such a feature on the Google Satellite image of the real Jamaica Bay, that I felt almost compelled to do it, but I'm not a fan of cloverleaf interchanges, because:

1. Sims don't like having to travel extra tiles out of the way, which cloverleaf interchanges force half of the turning traffic to do (though the NAM Traffic Simulator goes a very long, long way to minimising that issue).  For a cloverleaf to get much use, it has to be in clearly an ideal position for commute routes, without any competing highway interchanges nearby.
2. RHW cloverleaf interchanges are enormous (this one is 38 x 38 tiles including 3 tiles on each approach), and the Maxis vanilla cloverleaf interchanges are far too undersized to be realistic.  Real-life cloverleaf interchanges are among the largest highway interchanges in the world, and so they are in RHW, too.  I begrudge using up so many tiles.  
3. Half the turning traffic goes through the centre of the interchange TWICE, which is bad for traffic congestion, as much as it's fun to watch them do it!    Notice I've used RHW-8S for that centrepiece, for extra heavy duty traffic volume.
4. It's rather difficult, and really unrealistic, to zone commercial development inside a cloverleaf interchange.

In this case, I'd already decided that most of this interchange was going to be green space, which in the real-life Jamaica Bay is called the North Forty Natural Area.  Here it is, the greenest part of Jamaica Bay!

Oooh, btw, this screenshot is facing southward, whereas the Google Satellite image is facing northward.

Two Cemetaries (6x6), a Television Studio and Radio Station, two Large Water Pumps, and a hillock, inside the confines of those impenetrable rings of curvy RHW.  None of those buildings need RCI access, because they have no employees  ... and they look kinda nice in there.

Up near the Country Club, the hang glider is doing a flyover of my highway bus interchange.  That's one of my favoured layouts, using two NAM Elevated Road Bus Stop and Subway Station (1x2) plops as highway tunnel caps, providing a high performance bus interchange point across all four directions. and pedestrian subway shuttle under the RHW-6S.  That station is supposed to be used for elevated roads, but I rather enjoy seeing the RHW-6S funnelled between those two impressive structures.  

[Don_Pato 527]

Vesto, Metzú Republic

Population: 22.099