I would like some suggestions on the starting road layout

[Fujiwara Taiki 0]

Hello

I always run into dept because roads in CS are much more expensive than in SC4, which I find really annoying. However I'm totally not into cheats or unlimited funds. Could you suggest me some road layouts that are affordable but yet effective?

Thank you!

[Koesj 659]

Dirt roads everywhere, watch all your problems disappear.

[Horus_Kol 118]

Sounds like you're building too much infrastructure from the get-go... This is fine if your are sandboxing or modelling, as you can just turn on unlimited funds.

However, if you want to play the progressive development game, with normal funding, then you're going to have to restrict your infrastructure to "just what is needed".

So, like Koesj suggests, start with dirt roads. Leave space for highway corridors and avenues, but only upgrade when traffic starts getting heavy.

On similar notes - use windmills for power - okay, a coal or gas plant is more efficient in terms of dollar per output, but that's a lot of unused power you're forking out on at the start.

 

Same goes for fire, police, education, public transport, and health - only build it when you need it.

[Fujiwara Taiki 0]

I see  Only the bare necessity then. Would you mind if I ask you for some example pictures? :DDDDD

[Ltw 401]

On 1-2-2016 at 1:06 PM, Fujiwara Taiki said:

I see  Only the bare necessity then. Would you mind if I ask you for some example pictures? :DDDDD

Something I could recommend is the Network Extensions Project I was talking about in this thread earlier. You could actually really lower costs of roads without degrading roads to dirt-roads. I'll give you some examples below:

Above you could see a photo of my city when I just started with it. All the buildings are high density and all the green places you can see in the distance are being developed. Still I'm using roads with the same width in here. The two one-way roads you can see were upgraded to two 4-lane one-way roads, which makes it a nice boulevard that could handle a lot of traffic. This solution is quite cheap and is good for further developments in the future.

However, when I'm zoning a new area with as main goal to make it high density from the start this approach might work less good. Especially at junctions you could get into trouble. In those cases I'm often building two-way roads like you could see below:

I could upgrade these roads to 6-lane or 8-lane roads if needed and it works better than two one-way roads. However, this is more expensive. Thus when starting the first approach might be better.

I don't use dirt-roads that often. I only use them in villages outside of the city where there are no future expansions planned. These roads are for local traffic only and don't need to handle that much traffic. These roads are very cheap but you could get traffic jams if you intent to use it for something else than local traffic. You could see a picture of dirt-roads in a village near my city below:

The Network Extensions Project recently added some new roads that are intended for neighborhood-traffic (tiny roads). These roads look kinda cool but I haven't used them that much yet. Might be nice to look into that.

Edit:

If you are having problems with generating enough income it might be nice to look into the city-planning policies Big Business Benifactor and Small Business Enthusiast. Those disctrict-policies generate a lot of tax-income because commercial buildings start selling more products. I use that and it is really helpful. You'll need enough products though, so make sure you have a lot of industry. Placing industrial zones next to highways is recommended.

  Edited February 2, 2016 by Ltw  
Added something about tax-income.

[DiArmada 16]

when starting a new city I like to connect the highway to a roundabout. At first you aren't allowed to build highway, the one way three lane road creates trafficlights, but with the low traffic this isn't an issue. In this case all industry is on the right. A gap is left for the future highway. A small strip of commercial zone lies close to a residential block on the left. All roads are two-way, except for the roundabouts ofcourse.

later on I like to build highway connections like this. the roundabouts lead to 4 or 6 lane roads but all zoning is restricted to the small 2 lane roads.

one leap ahead and the highway is connected to the existing one on the right. on the left side the highway still has a dead end, but it does a good job for local traffic.

this is the end result. it's not as beautiful as some of the more "organic" cities I've seen people build but the traffic flows pretty well. 

[DiArmada 16]

so far I've only built four cities and this was the best solution I could come up with so far. it works but it's not perfect. I'm sure somebody else has a better way.

[hbn 244]

How I've started usually is to build a roundabout on your first interchange. I've usually built my industry separate from the other city, having access to that roundabout.

Once you get more industrial areas and they start becoming larger, it is very important to have a road layout that can deal with high volumes of traffic and having dedicated connections for them to the highway network. Once you have rail then that would help transport goods around. Most of the traffic will be towards the cargo terminus. Highways are expensive to build but they are important for shifting high volumes of traffic. Properly designed interchanges are most important as well as ensuring traffic flow doesn't back up. Your two lane roads typically don't have traffic lights. All four and six lane roads (minus those in the highway section) have traffic lights at every junction (unless you have a mod that can get rid of them) or they have a roundabout at that junction. I suggest later building your own roundabouts rather than picking from the prebuilt selections since you can design them to fit your road layout more easily.

Also just because your road has high traffic (it shows up red traffic info tool) doesn't necessarily mean you have to mess about with it. It only becomes an issue if it is becoming backlogged and gridlocking your city.

^ That is how not do it. From a very early version of that city not long after I got the game. Should note that I'm using left-hand traffic. That was being caused by the traffic lights entering that four lane road. Causing traffic to build up. Situation is resolvable by putting a roundabout there or by putting a direct link to the highway. As soon as it's on the dual carriage way, it flows out of the city northwards. Traffic coming in on the left hand lane is also getting blocked up though.

Once your city is up and running you'll find income is fairly easy to make unless you're running a sandbox game with a bunch of unique buildings.

Unless you're not bothered about steam achievements I'd also consider getting some traffic mods such as the Network Extension Project. That will give you more road types to choose from and expand your options. I'd also look at Traffic ++ to control your lanes since lane switching is somewhat primitive in this game. I do now sometimes switch between the two and three lane roads intermittently to provide a turn lane in the middle when it suits. Traffic Manager is something also to look at but I disabled mine ages ago because it was abandoned and a CS update started causing save issues (it didn't save). I believe it has been forked now and I'm not sure which one to recommend. Mind you, Traffic ++ hasn't received an update since Sept 15 so I'm not sure if that is still active either but it still works in my game for now though.

[Ltw 401]

I would like to elaborate a little bit further about industry and traffic. Like said before roundabouts could help a lot in improving traffic-flow. However, you could also control a lot with the 'ban heavy traffic' policy. You can see that in the example below:

I've placed a large roundabout in the middle of this six-lane road (you could also make a smaller one and upgrade when needed). On the right you can see a district in my city which has the 'ban heavy traffic' policy. This way the lorries from the industrial area on the left have two options. They could either enter the highway on the right or go left to the cargo train terminal and ship the goods from there. This works pretty well. There is some waiting-time at the exit of the highway but in general there aren't a lot of traffic-jams in this situation.

Even though you were having issues with roads I would like to address the usage of rails for your industry. If your industry is getting larger and you're exporting a lot of goods you could have problems with roads and highways. There are some ways in making highways work efficiently but using trains is in my experience even more efficient and the rail itself is quite cheaper than large highway systems. Cargo train terminals are quite good to use. Trains can ship a lot of goods which is especially nice if your city is getting larger. Even though some solutions I'm showing below are very expensive in the beginning it could be nice to save the space for later. Otherwise it could get quite expensive later on.

In the example above I'm using a train-terminal with a loop. I prefer this approach because I've noticed that terminating trains are quite annoying; It takes quite some time which decreases efficiency and I don't really like it when the trains are driving backwards (for realism-reasons). In the situation above I've implemented this approach from the start and I therefore have saved space for this solution. However, there are situations where I haven't done that. Like the station below:

The train-terminal above was located somewhere else but I've moved it because the other place was in the residential neighborhood you can see on the left. However, demolishing all the industrial buildings you see wasn't desirable in my opinion, thus I've built some tunnels in which the trains are returning to the other side. This approach works just as fine but is quite expensive. Therefore it is recommended to think about how big your city will get in the future. This way you could avoid spending too much on tunnels and so forth.

The next part I'm going to talk about is going to be too expensive when beginning your city. Even though I would like to address this because the layout of your rails are having great influence on how easy it is to implement this. At a certain moment you could buy the cargo hub, like you could see below:

Looking at this cargo hub you rarely see any traffic on the road itself. However, there are a lot of trains coming in. In this city I have a lot of train-terminals (I'm using five at the moment). Basically this is being caused by the fact that I'm also producing oil, ore and agricultural product which are located somewhere else on the map. Furthermore the other industrial areas are located quite close to the city itself which makes a train-terminal desirable. All those train-terminals are connected to this cargo hub. The rails you can see are also in a loop and are connected to the city border, this way this hub could process a lot of traffic. The combination train-ship is in my opinion a lot better than the combination car/ship/train because it leads to less traffic jams. However, these terminals need to be connected properly in order to function this way. Thinking about how to connect these rails to (future) train-terminals is kind of important. I went for the expensive '36-meter deep tunnel underneath my city-option' but considering the costs that are involved with digging deep tunnels for such a distance I might have chosen for a solution above the ground instead. You could also go for an elevated rail instead. Furthermore going for rail instead of roads is working better because the road you could see in front of the cargo hub can't be upgraded. There are some assets in the workshop but focusing on rail makes that redundant anyways.

Next item I would like to address is the highway. Even if you are focusing on trains the highway is needed. In a lot of cases exporting/moving goods by truck could be preferred (furthermore it has to be moved to the train terminal first thus you can't never get rid of them completely). The standard interchanges are kinda flawed because they're too short and use one-lane wide exits. You could easily improve this by upgrading parts of the interchange:

This approach could help a lot but it is still not the best way in improving it completely. Thus it could be necessary to build your own interchange if needed. One recommendation is using quite some space. An example of an interchange I've recently made in order to improve traffic-flow is the one you could see below:

Don't get me wrong, these interchanges are expensive. But they are needed at some point. In my experience money isn't going to be a problem if you are focusing on industry, especially when having the 'industrial spatial planing' policy and the two commercial policies I was talking about early turned on you could generate quite some income. However, the problem will be space. This interchange was actually quite difficult because it is close to the city. The exits are as far from each other as possible and the curves are wide (those narrow curves in the default interchange are kind of annoying I think and you can see that this could lead to some traffic-jams). Thus it is important to make sure you have enough space in order to build large interchanges in the future.

Next to that I'm trying to use enter/exit-lanes on highways. Letting cars enter the highway without an extra lane leads to cars waiting and therefore more traffic-jams. Even though cars/trucks are changing lanes quite often with this approach it works better than not having extra lanes at all. You could see an example below:

As you could see this highway starts with four lanes, after that six and after that four lanes again. This approach works quite well in my experience. You can build those lanes with the Network Extensions Project I was talking about earlier.

I know a lot of my suggestions might be too expensive at this moment (especially in the beginning) but my main goal was to show you some tricks I'm using when dealing with traffic issues. Especially industrial zones could give you quite some problems regarding traffic. I thought about approaching some issues differently when my city was already quite big and I had to solve them in another (expensive) way. Three out of five train-terminals are having tunnels because there was no room anymore to make the loop above ground. Furthermore I had to do some large investments in making some things work. At the second interchange I've showed in here I had to rebuild the highway all the way from the other side of the river to the right side of the interchange, basically because I didn't have enough space to do so otherwise. Don't get me wrong, I really like solving those problems but it would've been easier (and in the end cheaper) if I thought about those issues earlier.

[hbn 244]

Since @Ltw has started on rail usage I'd like to elaborate on that a bit. It would also be advisable to separate local and regional rail traffic when your cities grows and your budget allows, and also if required separate freight from passenger or at least put a passing loop around the station/terminal. The game has a habit of making regional trains turn up quite a lot and regional trains stop at random stations on the map rather than a central station. It is expensive to do it this way but makes your network a lot more efficient otherwise you'll find your rail system become gridlocked as well. I do find subways are much more useful for transporting people around than rail so you could always leave that for freight. Having a local freight loop will allow your goods to be transported around the city. Having a dedicated cargo terminal for your outside connections would help stop unnecessary traffic going wherever the damn it pleases. Passing loops and gaps between rail junctions should at least be a trains length otherwise it can and will block stuff up as well. I have had instances in the past where two trains wouldn't move because a third was blocking the exit and that couldn't move because it needed to go somewhere where the other train was.

[Fujiwara Taiki 0]

Oh hi everyone thank you for all your replies and sorry for the late response   

I just returned from mom's hometown where it's hard to get strong and stable wifi connection (third world countries story  ) We went there to visit my grandma and relatives for lunar new year. We had a great time but I'm glad that we finally returned to civilisation  

Anyway, thank you again for all your tips and suggestions. I'd never thought that roundabouts, rails and interchanges could be that helpful. For someone who only trusted the checkerboarded road network with extensive bus stops and subway stations, this is a real eye-opener. This time I'll definitely try those 3 out, as well as the Network Extension Project and the 2 policies that you recommended  

One more question, though: what do you usually do with the huge empty space between residential area and industrial area that we usually leave to keep residences from the pollution? And the area around the industrial district, do you build anything right next to it or leave a huge space as well?

[Judazzz 1,936]

I usually buffer industrial area's with service/utility buildings such as garbage, energy and (if the ground is pollution-free) water - visually they work well with industrial buildings.
Next, in the Workshop you can find lots of Park assets that are actually industrial in nature, such as oil storage tanks, construction sites, cranes, container yards, etc. - these are very nice additions to an industrial estate.
Another thing I sometimes do is adding a few low density commercial buildings (not all have the right looks for such a setting, but assets like big box shops, gas stations/workshops, shabby fastfood joints, etc. work really well), as they too look pretty decent in a more industrial setting (plus they don't moan about pollution).
Finally, really on the edges of my industrial zones, I sometimes build some low density residential area's with trailers, caravans, shotgun houses, small row houses, etc. - basically resulting in pretty $%&^!ty low-income neighborhoods. They may complain about getting sick, but hey, no one forced them to buy a house in that neighborhood!

Also, for open spaces that aren't developed I frequently use the More Beautification and Prop Anarchy mods, which allow you to place props directly in your city where-ever you want. With props like fences, containers, shacks, machinery and vehicles you can fill up empty land quite nicely, especially in combination with some suitable (tall) grass and plant assets.

All this combined can result in a pretty realistic and natural-looking transition from (sub-)urban to industrial.


To wrap up, here's some screenshots taken a few months ago, of my previous city, to illustrate the above:

[Ltw 401]

It also depends on how it used to be developed in the first place. If you zoned the industrial zone first in an area out of town it gets quite undesirable to build residential zones next to that. An example below:

It might look strange that this zone was placed over here but looking at the resources map it makes more sense:

Basically this part of the map had a lot of oil which makes it a desirable place for an industrial zone specialized in oil. However, this makes the rest of the area much less desirable for me. Especially when you consider the fact that this industrial zone could expand even further. You could also see that the closest residential area is at some distance from this industrial zone with a highway between those zones. Thus there is no need to expand any zone further because it is simply not the best place to build.

There are some other possibilities though. One possibility is dividing it with a highway. This highway will have some noise-pollution but that will be less than the noise-pollution of the industrial zone. Which means that residential zones will have less negative effects from this industrial zone than if they would've been placed right next to it. Furthermore you could direct traffic through the highway instead of the neighborhood which will decrease noise-pollution a little bit further. You can do this by activating the 'ban heavy traffic' policy I talked about earlier in the residential neighborhood next to the industrial zone. Trucks will go over highways but will avoid normal roads, so be sure that the borders of your district aren't intersecting with any important normal roads.

You could also just not care off course. In the picture below you could see a neighborhood which is placed between a highway next to an industrial zone. Originally this was meant for low-income housing (which could be seen in real life too) but it kind of got better. This resulted in the picture below. I think it is less realistic than the big housing blocks I intended to build over here but the residents aren't complaining too much so I just leave it like this.

[DiArmada 16]

On 10-2-2016 at 3:17 PM, Fujiwara Taiki said:

what do you usually do with the huge empty space between residential area and industrial area that we usually leave to keep residences from the pollution? And the area around the industrial district, do you build anything right next to it or leave a huge space as well?

at first you aren't allowed to zone office space, but that's a great buffer between residential and commercial or industrial zones. Industry also requires a great road connection, so the area around it is covered in highway entrance/exits and roundabouts connecting to 4 or 6 lane raods./