Element_Zero

What's so odd about that, reminds me of my childhood home

Well, if routes are weighted by congestion then you should still see an improvement because important vehicle can keep moving despite a gridlock - you routinely see vehicles taking massive detours to avoid traffic jams. So it seemed to work, I had a service road with multiple exits, and my delivery trucks didn't all exit at the same place. I need to try this in a larger city, but I see potential here!

Jim, your point about benefits to crime/fire/garbage is very important. I try to keep my sims very educated, and even in cities of 100K I have hardly any crime or fires and they all recycle Love it! Also, healthcare seems to be affected to some degree?! Thou I keep trying low pollution cities, so that could very well be the only cause.

Honestly, I'd prefer if you needed a grade school, high school and then either a college, university or both. I mean, how are people getting educated to attend high school if there is no grade school? Similarly, how would one go strait from grade school to college or university. I know it doesn't work this way, but I can't help but have all 3-4 in my cities unless I go for a college/university city, where I have regional traffic commuting for each level of education.

The service roads are not the same as 'dirt' roads, and I don't believe that the services roads can be shared across services. Service roads are unique to each service you lay down, for example when you lay down your garbage, notice that when you edit the dump, there is an option to add a service road. This is the service road the poster is talking about, you can draw this road out from the dump anywhere, and only the garbage trucks will use it. Hmmm scratches head.. I wonder if you stretch a service road across the back of a city, say for recycling, would it help with collection by spreading out the trucks better, or would they all follow shortest route and take the first exit off of the service road. Experiment time!

As someone who didn't even think he liked 'sim' games, I've been sooooooooo obsessed with Sim City, and that obsession in the past week has been focused on traffic control... so I hope what I've found in my experiments and research proves useful to you (sorry some of these are duplicates of other replies, not trying to take credit away from anyone!). My last city layout, I was up to a population of 25K, college town, no public transit and zero traffic problems all on .... dirt roads: - Do not zone avenues, you don't understand why this is painful until about the 150K population mark, then when traffic goes to hell you never think about the fact that zoned avenues are causing your problems. - Avenues have a 5:3 ratio with streets. So don't lay down too many, but also make sure you lay down enough in your city to handle the high traffic areas. - Use the population data map frequently. Two very useful stats you can track that you'll immediately find useful, notice your shopper/commercial population traffic. It's a good indicator of the high traffic areas. Second, notice the 'at home' and 'at work' bar graphs, if you are in the middle of the day and the 'at home' bars are large, those people live to far away from work. You may want to rethink how you zone things. - Curves are your friends, curve the corners on your avenues (i.e. if you circle your city with an avenue) to eliminate intersections. Use L shaped side roads, but curve the corner to eliminate the intersection. Round abouts help, again smart placement of curves as you identify your high traffic zones. Also, people seem to walk more on curves, this is a tip I got from a youtube vid, but I feel ashamed that I forget from whom I heard it. - Zoning... OMG where and how you zone things are CRITICAL. Zone residential and commercial together, on the same side of the street if possible. It makes people walk to work and helps with traffic significantly. The further these two are from each other, the more likely you are to cause commuter traffic. Think about where your traffic comes from, it primarily is commuters right... so think about where your commuters are coming from and how the traffic works in this game (shortest route for the most part). I'm stressing this point, because when you are zoning industrial it will increase commuter traffic, so place your residential in a way that your commuter traffic spreads nicely across the city (I find this easier to do by trying to make my commuter traffic split by going around the edges of the city) by making sure there are short routes to the industrial without having to pass through other parts of your city. - Place things like supply depots close to the city exits (road, rail, water), away from commuter traffic. Centralizing it works well too. Similar to services like garbage/recycling/etc.. if they are in the center they seem to spread out better and have less traffic to combat. - 3 way intersections are WAY better than 4 ways. - If using street cars, don't lay down too many cars or stops. Balance your car traffic with street cars, I find with too many street cars, you get crazy congestion and your wait times increase. Also, see the points above about zoning avenues and square corners, the more stops they have to make..... Also don't put street cars on all of your avenues, again too many intersections. - Buses, like services, seem better if centralized so they can spread out and have less commuter traffic to compete against. Don't lay down too many stops. - Low density side roads in your residential and commercial areas seem to work really well if not driving for 100% high density. They don't have stop lights, so when commuters are exiting from those areas, they don't have to stop at those intersections unless there are pedestrians/traffic to stop for. That's all I can think of right now, hope this helps!