…And we’re back to the Cities Skylines 2 city I introduced you to last month.
In just about a month, the “city” (better termed a region for how I’m handling it with a large urban core and some connected and disconnected suburban areas) has grown in population by almost 100,000 people.
Part of that has been due to the establishment of a new suburban area, straddling a freeway on what I’ve decided is the eastern side of the region. It houses one of the largest industrial areas outside of the airport region. The good news is that this industrial region has lowered unemployment to the region to between 3 and 4%. The bad news is that it has brought with it a large amount of traffic congestion.
That’s what I’m trying to tackle here.
When I started on this area, I put in a primary freeway exit into town, which exits onto a main street that heads east-west through town and connects the residential section with the industrial core. I decided to be preemptive and put in roundabouts at the end of the entrance and exit ramps (stoplights in these cases really slow traffic). But when I checked in this past weekend, I found the traffic mess shown above.
Let’s look at the area to determine the problem. First, the rest of the “suburb”–the residential and commercial cores, are off to the west of the industrial region. Just for perspective, the suspension bridge at the mouth of the river toward the top left of the second picture above is the same one shown at the top of the picture further up.
There is a lot of mixed density housing, from houses to small and medium apartments to high-rise housing. There is some office space here, along with some extensive commercial areas. And along the waterfront are parks and open space.
But there isn’t too much traffic from the residential area heading over to the industrial area, so they’re coming from elsewhere in the region.
So, one note about traffic in CS2: drivers aren’t…smart. They’ll do the stuff shown above, where they sit in the left lane until they need to exit the freeway. They’ll also always take the “faster” route rather than the route which might get them there sooner or more efficiently. So even though I have that street with a bridge at the lower left of the picture above that leads to another predominantly residential area (with some farmlands), not a lot of people take that.
So what else do I need to do? I’ll be changing the freeway interchange toward the top right of the picture above: making it into a cloverleaf, so that the freeway can extend further to the east. I can put an exit in that will go directly to the two industrial areas to the east of the freeway shown above. That should help.
I also need to extend the transit system. Either extend the subway system, get more busses in this area, or even drop in a regional train station to hub back to the city center’s train station.
So next time, I’ll show off the transit system as it stands now, so we can see how people get around.
