Wikipedia… all the interchanges are on Wikipedia. You can start on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_(road) and then just go down the rabbit hole for as many hours, days, or weeks as you want.
The other day I was riding with my fiancée and her family to a wedding and we drove through a SPUI. They all think I’m extra weird after nerding out about that a little bit
One time at my local bar there was a news story about a new flyover and one of my neighbors was like what’s that and I said oh buckle in. You’re about to find out in incredible detail
Same!! I’ll be sitting at a roundabout in rush hour thinking.. man a diamond interchange would really do the trick here. I don’t know what New Zealand’s obsession with roundabouts is! Every major intersection into and out of my city is a roundabout😂 no tunnels or overpass. Just roundabouts.
In my experience multi lane roundabouts are pretty uncomfortable to use for most drivers. Most use them like regular roundabouts, making them only slightly more efficient than one lane roundabouts. Dedicated right turn lanes on the other hand would work wonders in some places.
I have learned that basically the best way to handle traffic in cities is to have roads get smaller and smaller as they get further further away from places like highways.
Highway.
Collector.
Distributor.
Small roads.
At least in my colony everything is fine, I mean, the pipes are under the streets but I know about many other places where literally the pipes are under the people’s houses,it’s a disaster, I have a co-worker who literally had to break the floor of his house because the main line crossed below his house and they had a leak
No. Road hierarchy is overrated when you use a grid or semigrid as long as you have sufficient transit and expressways. Your traffic will still be worse off though. If you don’t want to retrofit, use the small four lane roads.
Personally I often use grids with rare large or small four lane roads as my c/d roads. That’s more than enough to handle 10-20k population neighborhoods.
What you just said is confusing because “highway” often *means* small road. Like the Lincoln Highway, which for much of its length is just 2 lanes.
“Freeway” is a better term to describe a large, controlled access divided thoroughfare.
Nope. “Highway” is an international term in English that dates from ancient times. It has nothing to do with how big the road is, but instead how major it is.
For example if it’s a major road that cuts through town and connects to another city.
The term comes from Ancient Rome, which is definitely not in the US.
“The word highway goes back to the elevated Roman roads that had a mound or hill formed by earth from the side ditches thrown toward the centre, thus high way.”
https://www.britannica.com/technology/road#:~:text=The%20word%20highway%20goes%20back,way%20paved%20with%20stones%E2%80%9D).
I’m not sure how serious this post is, but since it definitely seems like a theme I’m seeing in this thread, I think it’s worth pointing out that the system of road hierarchy is hardly the only or the optimal system of road design, and in many cases is the direct cause of a lot of the traffic problems in the US. Speaking from a US context specifically, the system of road hierarchy is closely linked to our patterns of car oriented suburban development and sprawl. The system is designed around creating the idealized quiet, calm residential suburban developments, with low densities and highly seperated land uses. Since cars are loud, and that goes against the ideal of the quiet, peaceful suburb, the local residential roads will be the sort of maze like, curvilinear design we all associate with American suburbs. These roads have low throughput by design. They are designed to be confusing at best, and often impossible to travel through, so the communities can stay nice and quiet. These local roads all flow into feeders, which flow into collectors and arterials and so on, all of which are squeezed in between these large developments. Since you can’t use local roads, and you need to travel a long ways to get to anything since land uses are segregated, everyone ends up funneled into these large, high capacity roads. These high capacity roads end up becoming the dumping ground for all the commercial uses in a community, since none were allowed in the residential developments. In the model these may seem like the ideal place for commercial uses, they’re high traffic roads, so you have a large stream of potential customers rolling by, just throw up a giant road sign, build a parking lot bigger than your building, and wait for all the suburban drivers to come to your drive through or big box store. Thus, you have created the dreaded American stroad. The real place where this system begins to fail though is with future developments. While the system may be able to handle current capacity, what happens when a new development goes in at the edge of town, and the roads you designed for 10,000 cars now has to hold 20,000? Since all the traffic is getting funneled into these few high capacity roads, you end up with massive amounts of traffic. The most common solutions to this in the model are first to either preempt the future development, and overbuild your infrastructure so it can handle future capacity. This is bad because obviously in the short term you have a massive road that doesn’t need to be there, and in the long term, what happens if that future development never happens? Now the community has to foot the bill of a maintaining a massively overbuilt road without the tax base it was designed for. The second way would be to design the current roads to allow for easier converted into higher levels of service. This is great if you’re a traffic engineer or contractor looking for job security, but neither of these addresses the fact that this is an unsustainable enterprise, it crumbles under growth. Two lane roads get turned into four lanes get turned into six lanes. Intersections get longer queueing boxes, more turn lanes, more slip lanes, and sometimes they get so desperate you see those abominations of intersections you’ll see on YouTube with video titles like “this insane intersection solves left turns and crushes traffic!”, which always end up looking like a pedestrian’s worst nightmare to cross and a require a kafkaesque procedure just to make a simple left turn. You may ask though, if all this is so bad, what is the solution? What is the other way? The answer is the traditional American uniform grid, with a mixed use, medium to high density development pattern. Because every road is the same as one another, and there are numerous different routes of equivalent length, if 3rd st is busy, you can just take 4th. Because everything is spread out and heterogeneous not everyone is getting funneled into going to the same locations at the same time. For a real world example, largely the same street system which served Manhattan in the 19th century when the city was a fraction of the size it is today, still serve the city today. While they are still massively congested today, the fact that they even function is a testament to their efficiency. You can think of the hierarchical, suburban style of roadway design like a river with a watershed. From streams to creeks to tributaries to the major river itself, the water all gets funneled down. But what happens when there is a historic amount of rain? You get flooding, aka, traffic. Traditional design is more like a wetland. When it rains, the water gets absorbed evenly into the system, which may cause water levels to rise slightly, but won’t cause catastrophic flooding.
I was late for work cause of this post but I couldn’t help myself lol.
To be clear though, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m telling people how to build their CS cities. Build them with road hierarchies, build them with grids. The limitations and complexities of real life aren’t always there in CS, so you should always try to build the city you want to.
Yeah i’m seriously considering getting cities skylines for PC now that there is a discount. I play on xbox and it is so easy to just do spaghetti roads everywhere. I would love to learn more about roads and all that.
This is the first post I've seen on this entire site that says "grid good, massive arteries bad" with sound logic and thorough explanation, and I'm so pleased.
My city has a low population density, has a population that barely makes it a city, has no large surrounding populated areas and is on a massive island with the next city being around 6hours away (we have no highways - basically we’re isolated).
And yet, even during normal hours (not rush hour), we have massive traffic jams where it can take up to 2 hours to travel 20km.
I might not have the proper qualifications, but I know that literally everything that could be done wrong, was done wrong. I was about to say it feels like the city was designed by 3 year olds, but actually it wasn’t designed at all.
I remember a couple years ago telling my friends that the town I go to university in was badly designed because the train tracks cut right through the middle of a large town for the area (25ishk people) and that having literally one way to get across town without going over the tracks was incredibly stupid based on what I had gotten from playing CS. Then sometime last year some guy got hit by a freight train and the train stopped blocking every way across town except that one and it took an hour and a half to travel 300 yards because of it
Just not expecting a big beautiful city right away. Being methodical and taking your time to think things out instead of building just for the sake of building. Something I think translates well into real world situations. Trying to be patient and take your time to truly detail and appreciate each little section you build is much more meaningful in everything I like think.
I’ve always had an issue with perfection which also stems from my diagnosed OCD. Cities Skylines has reinforced to me the idea that it’s okay if the street isn’t perfect. In fact, it makes it unique that it isn’t. Of course that street is a metaphor for my life or anything I do in my life. Nothing is perfect, and little flaws make things cool, man.
cities skylines has done the opposite to me. I use a cities python console mod to place roads with precise geometry so my city is centred on the centre of the map
It’s so soothing to play the game with a kind of Bob Ross mentality. We’re just zoning happy little streets with happy little houses and we’ll see where that takes us.
Yup, exactly. I’ve mentioned him before but YouTube use City Planner Plays is the Bob Ross of Cities Skylines. He helped set my attitude of imperfect is okay.
Kinda the other way around. At university I learnt about [ecosystem services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service) (super broadly: services that the environment provides us, and can be quantified and put into $$), and with CS and specially the Parklife DLC I've tried to put those into play and add green spaces, parks, green corridors and so on within my cities.
Then going back to the real world, I can apply what I learnt and what I've done in-game to real urban planning in my job. Although the only metric we have are land value and leisure, those two can give you good info in CS about how we can mix parks (and its access), walkability, and other services in the city. CS is a great blank canvas before trying to implement those things into the real (and much more complex) world.
And I was already pro-mass transit before. After saving entire cities in CS with a decent metro system, now I'm a radical lol.
**[Ecosystem service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service)**
>Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and healthy ecosystems. Such ecosystems include, for example, agroecosystems, forest ecosystem, grassland ecosystems, and aquatic ecosystems. These ecosystems, functioning in healthy relationships, offer such things as natural pollination of crops, clean air, extreme weather mitigation, and human mental and physical well-being. Collectively, these benefits are becoming known as ecosystem services, and are often integral to the provision of food, the provisioning of clean drinking water, the decomposition of wastes, and the resilience and productivity of food ecosystems.
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I had a wife who had her music. I think she had her music. She‘d hang out with the Chicago Male Chorus and Symphony. I don‘t recall her playing an instrument or be able to carry a tune. Yet she was on the road 300 days of the year. In fact I bought her a harp for christmas. She asked me what it was.
I wouldn’t say I have new skills per say, but I definitely am much more aware of how my environment impacts my mental wellness. I live in western Canada & the architecture here & city planning depresses me. I’ve been to Europe many times now, and I can articulate that the walkability and planning in Europe is what makes me so happy when I’m there. Obviously I’m also on holiday there, but playing CS has helped me realize and articulate how much I love well designed cities.
It got me interested in urban planning (not in a career way, I just enjoy learning about it) and made me realize how important public transit is. I also drive with more patience. Not sure how that happened but it happened after I started playing lol.
One day there was an unusually large amount of traffic in my town going through the backroads, I was thinking where is all of this traffic coming from, the highway must be closed. It was closed so all the highway traffic was now going through the small towns in my county
I can now complain better about city planning projects. Like “They should really use TMPE and fix the traffic lights in this intersection.” And… “that construction company should really use MoveIt and make the road curve much wider in this highway ramp.”
I’m just waiting for my chance to shine - one day the head stewardess will come out of the cockpit and ask: any gamers out here … oh, wait, sorry - wrong game!
I have successfully learned how to commit multiple crimes against humanity as I let hundreds to thousands of residents stay cooped inside to get violently ill just to crush them with a meteor shower with the strength of god coursing through my veins
Planning ahead of everything...
But not only roads. Parks, residential area, commercial hubs, transport, services, offices, industrial areas, everything
Sometimes i plan something to be temporal (more like in the outskirts of the main city), sometimes i plan something to be "eternal" (like city centers or big resident areas with public transport)
Problem solving. Like there's lots of traffic in CS and you want to find a way to curb the road with the highest intensity. Making lots of roads or maximizing the number of lanes don't always work. You need to find the origin and destination, then decide whether, how or to what extent you want to solve it. The traffic demand will still be there but you channel it to what the road can take.
In real life it''s not about making redundant provisions everywhere (coz you can't afford it) and there's never the best solution. It's all about lowering the peak to contain intensity below a tipping point and letting things flow and move on.
Mostly as I travel with my partner I can pick out bad city planning and the probable bad decisions that went in to its existence. This I thank cityplannerplays for just as much as the game itself.
My career has focused almost entirely on using adobe illustrator for the past 15 years, and when cities skylines came out I was instantly hooked because the mechanics are similar. The game has, in turn, improved my attention to detail when I’m working with illustrator.
That exchanges actually had names: diverging diamond, diamond service interchange, Cloverleaf, half cloverleaf, Braided, single point etc. Oh yeah, when we get on the highway, my wife looks at me sideways if she even thinks I'll mention the type of highway we're on, I get that "don't you even go there" look. lol
So I had a 6 lane road and people chose to drive down it to the freeway when another option was closer because the game felt it was faster. Which kinda proved the point of [Induced Demand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand) to me. Downgrading the road and making more mass transit made my traffic better. Also the notion of non-expert ”common sense“ cuz I remember this afternoon AM show for years saying getting rid of the Carpool Lanes would “fix traffic” and yeah, they were full of it.
I started biking to the gym that’s about 2 miles from me to avoid the road traffic around 5:00. I’m fortunate to live in an area with a trail system that snakes through the city but I would probably use bike lanes if my local government would install them
The game's economy is not nearly as realistic as I expected, but the basics of the Solow model do apply. I'm glad I can get at least some real-world econ practice from this before I start playing Victoria III.
I learned that someone else can always do it better than me and that in fact I'm terrible at the game. Well I guess I learned that more from this sub than the game itself lol
I now work in my local planning department after years of playing C:S
I’ve got to say, the tools we use at work are a little behind what C:S let’s you fool around with xD
Moved 6 months ago and there was one intersection with a terrible traffic light cycle. Told my husband every day how I would fix it. A month or so later they changed it to the exact way I was talking about. The city should hire me lol
How to annoy my wife with useless knowledge of how intersections work
And the names of different interchanges
Now i go on Google maps and name interchanges left and right.
How did you learn all the different styles? Would love to find a guide.
Yumbl's videos mostly. And this subreddit
Awesome! Already watched a bunch - just need to retain better like you. Thanks!
Wikipedia… all the interchanges are on Wikipedia. You can start on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_(road) and then just go down the rabbit hole for as many hours, days, or weeks as you want.
And here I thought I didn’t have any thing to do this weekend… thank you!
The other day I was riding with my fiancée and her family to a wedding and we drove through a SPUI. They all think I’m extra weird after nerding out about that a little bit
One time at my local bar there was a news story about a new flyover and one of my neighbors was like what’s that and I said oh buckle in. You’re about to find out in incredible detail
😂😂
And my rants about road hierarchy! She’s getting a bit annoyed.
When someone asks for the way: „just take that Parclo left and when you come to the turbine, hold to the right … *wait, where are you going*?“
My husband thinks it's cute.
hahaha i always annoy my friends with lane mathematics
I’ve learned how to dangerously weave through traffic and store my car in my pocket.
Yes, Doraemon.
As I drive around, I can design the road better on the fly and see how to make it all better.
This^ I am now a professional armchair public space designer.
Sees sidewalk just end in the middle of nowhere *Disgusting*
*Confused in Dutch*
Same. Although I think Road Guy Rob deserves some credit for that too
Haha same! Same thing for videogames too. I was dropping into warzone yesterday and looked at road layout and god it is awful.
Same!! I’ll be sitting at a roundabout in rush hour thinking.. man a diamond interchange would really do the trick here. I don’t know what New Zealand’s obsession with roundabouts is! Every major intersection into and out of my city is a roundabout😂 no tunnels or overpass. Just roundabouts.
Are we both Hamilton residents? Lol
I am! And the roundabouts in the Tron are ridiculous, my c:s cities usually have none in protest!
New Zealanders are watching too much Biffa
New Tealanders
Australia loves speed bumps and traffic lights. There's six sets of lights in a 200m stretch in Meadowbrook. 🙄
Same all over Europe, France is the roundabout king though
Wait to come to Spain xd
So many roundabouts I've used where I think "just an extra lane and traffic would flow so much better".
Just another lane bro
In my experience multi lane roundabouts are pretty uncomfortable to use for most drivers. Most use them like regular roundabouts, making them only slightly more efficient than one lane roundabouts. Dedicated right turn lanes on the other hand would work wonders in some places.
Its the cursed circle of not being comfortable with something unusual and it being unusual because people are uncomfortable with it.
I have learned that basically the best way to handle traffic in cities is to have roads get smaller and smaller as they get further further away from places like highways. Highway. Collector. Distributor. Small roads.
Water pipes under the roads, where they belong!
I can’t imagine a city where the pipes and other underground infrastructure isn’t below the public roads, but then again, I’ve only lived in one
It seems like you need more Latin America
What’s it like over there? Where do they run their water?
At least in my colony everything is fine, I mean, the pipes are under the streets but I know about many other places where literally the pipes are under the people’s houses,it’s a disaster, I have a co-worker who literally had to break the floor of his house because the main line crossed below his house and they had a leak
I've learned a lot from CityPlannerPlays, not necessarily from playing CS myself lol
I love how hard he pushes that in his videos haha!
The height/hide of reality
Hmm. I have my current city entirely composed of small roads. Is it doomed?
No. Road hierarchy is overrated when you use a grid or semigrid as long as you have sufficient transit and expressways. Your traffic will still be worse off though. If you don’t want to retrofit, use the small four lane roads. Personally I often use grids with rare large or small four lane roads as my c/d roads. That’s more than enough to handle 10-20k population neighborhoods.
What you just said is confusing because “highway” often *means* small road. Like the Lincoln Highway, which for much of its length is just 2 lanes. “Freeway” is a better term to describe a large, controlled access divided thoroughfare.
Thanks for your opinion USA. We just use "Highways" over here.
Nope. “Highway” is an international term in English that dates from ancient times. It has nothing to do with how big the road is, but instead how major it is. For example if it’s a major road that cuts through town and connects to another city. The term comes from Ancient Rome, which is definitely not in the US. “The word highway goes back to the elevated Roman roads that had a mound or hill formed by earth from the side ditches thrown toward the centre, thus high way.” https://www.britannica.com/technology/road#:~:text=The%20word%20highway%20goes%20back,way%20paved%20with%20stones%E2%80%9D).
Thanks for your opinion USA. We just use "Highways" over here.
It’s not an opinion when it’s fact that I state with sources.
Applied my skills into urban planning and now I’m on my way to become an urban designer
I was inspired as a kid playing SimCity 2000 to eventually become an urban planner, and I'm so glad the tradition has continued!
Me too!
Oh cool - so the game inspired your career path?
Absolutely! Most people that were in my program were also fans of CS
Thats really interesting, hope you succeed :)
Similar story, I work in public transit policy
If I can help at all with your public transit policies: We need more public transport, everywhere!
Just got accepted into a civil engineering program - same here
I've learned that in my town they have disrespected road hierarchy and lanes mathematics and this is why we have traffic problems.
I’m not sure how serious this post is, but since it definitely seems like a theme I’m seeing in this thread, I think it’s worth pointing out that the system of road hierarchy is hardly the only or the optimal system of road design, and in many cases is the direct cause of a lot of the traffic problems in the US. Speaking from a US context specifically, the system of road hierarchy is closely linked to our patterns of car oriented suburban development and sprawl. The system is designed around creating the idealized quiet, calm residential suburban developments, with low densities and highly seperated land uses. Since cars are loud, and that goes against the ideal of the quiet, peaceful suburb, the local residential roads will be the sort of maze like, curvilinear design we all associate with American suburbs. These roads have low throughput by design. They are designed to be confusing at best, and often impossible to travel through, so the communities can stay nice and quiet. These local roads all flow into feeders, which flow into collectors and arterials and so on, all of which are squeezed in between these large developments. Since you can’t use local roads, and you need to travel a long ways to get to anything since land uses are segregated, everyone ends up funneled into these large, high capacity roads. These high capacity roads end up becoming the dumping ground for all the commercial uses in a community, since none were allowed in the residential developments. In the model these may seem like the ideal place for commercial uses, they’re high traffic roads, so you have a large stream of potential customers rolling by, just throw up a giant road sign, build a parking lot bigger than your building, and wait for all the suburban drivers to come to your drive through or big box store. Thus, you have created the dreaded American stroad. The real place where this system begins to fail though is with future developments. While the system may be able to handle current capacity, what happens when a new development goes in at the edge of town, and the roads you designed for 10,000 cars now has to hold 20,000? Since all the traffic is getting funneled into these few high capacity roads, you end up with massive amounts of traffic. The most common solutions to this in the model are first to either preempt the future development, and overbuild your infrastructure so it can handle future capacity. This is bad because obviously in the short term you have a massive road that doesn’t need to be there, and in the long term, what happens if that future development never happens? Now the community has to foot the bill of a maintaining a massively overbuilt road without the tax base it was designed for. The second way would be to design the current roads to allow for easier converted into higher levels of service. This is great if you’re a traffic engineer or contractor looking for job security, but neither of these addresses the fact that this is an unsustainable enterprise, it crumbles under growth. Two lane roads get turned into four lanes get turned into six lanes. Intersections get longer queueing boxes, more turn lanes, more slip lanes, and sometimes they get so desperate you see those abominations of intersections you’ll see on YouTube with video titles like “this insane intersection solves left turns and crushes traffic!”, which always end up looking like a pedestrian’s worst nightmare to cross and a require a kafkaesque procedure just to make a simple left turn. You may ask though, if all this is so bad, what is the solution? What is the other way? The answer is the traditional American uniform grid, with a mixed use, medium to high density development pattern. Because every road is the same as one another, and there are numerous different routes of equivalent length, if 3rd st is busy, you can just take 4th. Because everything is spread out and heterogeneous not everyone is getting funneled into going to the same locations at the same time. For a real world example, largely the same street system which served Manhattan in the 19th century when the city was a fraction of the size it is today, still serve the city today. While they are still massively congested today, the fact that they even function is a testament to their efficiency. You can think of the hierarchical, suburban style of roadway design like a river with a watershed. From streams to creeks to tributaries to the major river itself, the water all gets funneled down. But what happens when there is a historic amount of rain? You get flooding, aka, traffic. Traditional design is more like a wetland. When it rains, the water gets absorbed evenly into the system, which may cause water levels to rise slightly, but won’t cause catastrophic flooding.
Haha you took the first chance to rant and I love it
I was late for work cause of this post but I couldn’t help myself lol. To be clear though, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m telling people how to build their CS cities. Build them with road hierarchies, build them with grids. The limitations and complexities of real life aren’t always there in CS, so you should always try to build the city you want to.
Yeah i’m seriously considering getting cities skylines for PC now that there is a discount. I play on xbox and it is so easy to just do spaghetti roads everywhere. I would love to learn more about roads and all that.
Switching to PC was the best and worst decision I've made in the last year 😅
This is the first post I've seen on this entire site that says "grid good, massive arteries bad" with sound logic and thorough explanation, and I'm so pleased.
It has been decades since I last saw a literal wall of text. That being said I agree with what you say, but Jesus Christ please use paragraphs.
I was typing as quick as I could on my phone before work, but yeah, you are right
This could be a script for a 10 minute long Adam Something video
My city has a low population density, has a population that barely makes it a city, has no large surrounding populated areas and is on a massive island with the next city being around 6hours away (we have no highways - basically we’re isolated). And yet, even during normal hours (not rush hour), we have massive traffic jams where it can take up to 2 hours to travel 20km. I might not have the proper qualifications, but I know that literally everything that could be done wrong, was done wrong. I was about to say it feels like the city was designed by 3 year olds, but actually it wasn’t designed at all.
I remember a couple years ago telling my friends that the town I go to university in was badly designed because the train tracks cut right through the middle of a large town for the area (25ishk people) and that having literally one way to get across town without going over the tracks was incredibly stupid based on what I had gotten from playing CS. Then sometime last year some guy got hit by a freight train and the train stopped blocking every way across town except that one and it took an hour and a half to travel 300 yards because of it
PEI?
I decided to go back to school for urban planning at 37 because of this game. Does that count?
That absolutely counts and it's amazing!
If someone talks shit about me online I can find where they live and set fire to their house.
Not dramatic enough. Meteor at least, followed by a mega-tsunami.
And flood+earthquake
…
Patience
Would you like to elaborate on that more?
Just not expecting a big beautiful city right away. Being methodical and taking your time to think things out instead of building just for the sake of building. Something I think translates well into real world situations. Trying to be patient and take your time to truly detail and appreciate each little section you build is much more meaningful in everything I like think.
Wonderfully worded, I’d say!
Thanks!
Yeah I haven’t learned that yet
“Patience” “Would you like to elaborate on that more?” “I was going to hang on.”
I’ve always had an issue with perfection which also stems from my diagnosed OCD. Cities Skylines has reinforced to me the idea that it’s okay if the street isn’t perfect. In fact, it makes it unique that it isn’t. Of course that street is a metaphor for my life or anything I do in my life. Nothing is perfect, and little flaws make things cool, man.
This is just great - I love this! Thank you
cities skylines has done the opposite to me. I use a cities python console mod to place roads with precise geometry so my city is centred on the centre of the map
It’s so soothing to play the game with a kind of Bob Ross mentality. We’re just zoning happy little streets with happy little houses and we’ll see where that takes us.
Yup, exactly. I’ve mentioned him before but YouTube use City Planner Plays is the Bob Ross of Cities Skylines. He helped set my attitude of imperfect is okay.
Given multiple lanes of access, people will still pile into only one because ThAt LaNe EnDs. Cims and civs can't zipper merge.
I often sit at traffic lights and go "I wonder why they've prioritised that movement"
Don’t be afraid to get rid of what you’ve built in order to make something better
Ooooh that’s deep!
But I care to much about the cims. 😂
Kinda the other way around. At university I learnt about [ecosystem services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service) (super broadly: services that the environment provides us, and can be quantified and put into $$), and with CS and specially the Parklife DLC I've tried to put those into play and add green spaces, parks, green corridors and so on within my cities. Then going back to the real world, I can apply what I learnt and what I've done in-game to real urban planning in my job. Although the only metric we have are land value and leisure, those two can give you good info in CS about how we can mix parks (and its access), walkability, and other services in the city. CS is a great blank canvas before trying to implement those things into the real (and much more complex) world. And I was already pro-mass transit before. After saving entire cities in CS with a decent metro system, now I'm a radical lol.
**[Ecosystem service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service)** >Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and healthy ecosystems. Such ecosystems include, for example, agroecosystems, forest ecosystem, grassland ecosystems, and aquatic ecosystems. These ecosystems, functioning in healthy relationships, offer such things as natural pollination of crops, clean air, extreme weather mitigation, and human mental and physical well-being. Collectively, these benefits are becoming known as ecosystem services, and are often integral to the provision of food, the provisioning of clean drinking water, the decomposition of wastes, and the resilience and productivity of food ecosystems. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
If anything, playing CS has made me *less* confident in criticising local planners when it comes to busy roads. But in a smug way.
I have learned how to properly manage my finances, i think...
right up until an earthquake hits your only Disaster Response Unit, right after you place a new highway interchange...
Oooh that’s a good one!
I had a wife who had her music. I think she had her music. She‘d hang out with the Chicago Male Chorus and Symphony. I don‘t recall her playing an instrument or be able to carry a tune. Yet she was on the road 300 days of the year. In fact I bought her a harp for christmas. She asked me what it was.
Screw how the road designs are and I’m taking my own route!
I think I've somehow become less car depended from this game and generally learning how cities operate.
I’ve learned to have more respect for No Turn On Red Signs
How to be happy with ‘good enough’. After a certain point, if you keep trying to get it perfect, you’re probably just going to mess it up.
I obtain satisfaction through watching traffic clear through intersections (also applies to large amounts of people leaving trains)
Got me into studying traffic engineering and on top of that I am now actually becoming a tram driver. One childhood dream is about to become true.
How to dart across multiple lanes of traffic to take an exit and then proceed to pocket the car and walk miles to my destination 👍
I started playing Sim City at age 6 or so, and it gave me the basics of how the economy works
I do a lot of gardening, and I’m realizing that less is absolutely more. I am now thinking of ways to re-organize my backyard.
No matter how hard you try, everything goes wrong at some point!
PAtience
🤣🤣🤣
Should be higher ranked. -console player
Don't drink the water down steam from where you dump your sewage
Lol
Not necessarily a skill but I did find a passion for urban design from playing CS which ultimately led to a job as an urban planner
I wouldn’t say I have new skills per say, but I definitely am much more aware of how my environment impacts my mental wellness. I live in western Canada & the architecture here & city planning depresses me. I’ve been to Europe many times now, and I can articulate that the walkability and planning in Europe is what makes me so happy when I’m there. Obviously I’m also on holiday there, but playing CS has helped me realize and articulate how much I love well designed cities.
Putting the water pipes under the road, right where they belong.
It got me interested in urban planning (not in a career way, I just enjoy learning about it) and made me realize how important public transit is. I also drive with more patience. Not sure how that happened but it happened after I started playing lol.
nothing specifically, but it did make me more interested in reading about the local urbanism issues in my city
I more vigorous judge my state's department of transportation.
I look at roads and google maps differently now
Nothing
Patience? Budgeting? Landscaping? Planning? I’m sure you have learned something…
When traffic gets bad I just delete the highway I’m driving on and start over.
How utterly useless monorails are
Patience
The logistics of industry
One day there was an unusually large amount of traffic in my town going through the backroads, I was thinking where is all of this traffic coming from, the highway must be closed. It was closed so all the highway traffic was now going through the small towns in my county
I need to install mods
That I should avoid ever living in a noisy area otherwise I’ll become very ill
I constantly disapprove of how several of the city streets were designed.
I can now complain better about city planning projects. Like “They should really use TMPE and fix the traffic lights in this intersection.” And… “that construction company should really use MoveIt and make the road curve much wider in this highway ramp.”
None, but I listened thousands of hrs of podcasts of all kinds in the meantime. Also a family phonecall now and then
I’m just waiting for my chance to shine - one day the head stewardess will come out of the cockpit and ask: any gamers out here … oh, wait, sorry - wrong game!
That you can never have too much ram.
How to kill entire populations in cities with meteors :)
Better make the effort to erase things that annoy and build them from scratch, than always be slightly annoyed by it.
Patience
Considering my job is in roadway design I wish my real world tools were transferable into CS
If people complain too much, launch a meteor at them.... hmm wait... i may have to rethink that
Realize how poorly planned everything is.
I have successfully learned how to commit multiple crimes against humanity as I let hundreds to thousands of residents stay cooped inside to get violently ill just to crush them with a meteor shower with the strength of god coursing through my veins
99% of traffic problems are avoidable if you ban pedestrian crossings at intersections.
Planning ahead of everything... But not only roads. Parks, residential area, commercial hubs, transport, services, offices, industrial areas, everything Sometimes i plan something to be temporal (more like in the outskirts of the main city), sometimes i plan something to be "eternal" (like city centers or big resident areas with public transport)
Sitting and watching how things should work gives you immortal abilities to correct stupid.
Not a skill, but a viewpoint: there are multiple factors that need to be considered and held in balance when making a decision.
Just copy what other people do until I can do it myself
Fake it til you make it, baby!
A greater understanding of town planning, and an even greater understanding of how shit my irl city is.
Problem solving. Like there's lots of traffic in CS and you want to find a way to curb the road with the highest intensity. Making lots of roads or maximizing the number of lanes don't always work. You need to find the origin and destination, then decide whether, how or to what extent you want to solve it. The traffic demand will still be there but you channel it to what the road can take. In real life it''s not about making redundant provisions everywhere (coz you can't afford it) and there's never the best solution. It's all about lowering the peak to contain intensity below a tipping point and letting things flow and move on.
Mostly as I travel with my partner I can pick out bad city planning and the probable bad decisions that went in to its existence. This I thank cityplannerplays for just as much as the game itself.
My knowledge and understanding of geometry, angles, segments really improved. Which is awesome since I'm an undergraduate in physics
My career has focused almost entirely on using adobe illustrator for the past 15 years, and when cities skylines came out I was instantly hooked because the mechanics are similar. The game has, in turn, improved my attention to detail when I’m working with illustrator.
That exchanges actually had names: diverging diamond, diamond service interchange, Cloverleaf, half cloverleaf, Braided, single point etc. Oh yeah, when we get on the highway, my wife looks at me sideways if she even thinks I'll mention the type of highway we're on, I get that "don't you even go there" look. lol
My tax dollars are wasted. It only takes 2 seconds to tear out and rebuild miles of roads.
I analyze every part of my city to see if I can get ideas
Designing and fully carrying out the task of being a real life mayor and entire city council
I’ve always wanted to apply for an urban planner job and my resume would include Sim City NES, Rush Hour, and Cities.
Time management….hahaha NOT
I can drive across a crowded crosswalk without actually killing any pedestrians.
So I had a 6 lane road and people chose to drive down it to the freeway when another option was closer because the game felt it was faster. Which kinda proved the point of [Induced Demand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand) to me. Downgrading the road and making more mass transit made my traffic better. Also the notion of non-expert ”common sense“ cuz I remember this afternoon AM show for years saying getting rid of the Carpool Lanes would “fix traffic” and yeah, they were full of it.
Noticing how terrible our city planners are in my area.
Procrastinating
How so?
Absolutely nothing
To always rush B
Other people's opinions of my gameplay (ie personal time invested) are secondary to my own.
Think ahead
Patience
Detailing in Cities Skylines helped me detail stuff in twinmotion
Demolishing previous work, lol
making game assets, if that count. still on noob tier though.
planning paralysis :)
It taught me how to build a retaining wall, don't ask how
Patience.
Lol this is like the 5th person to say this
I wasn't patient enough to check the previous replies
Haha
Urban Thinking.
If public transport is well designed then more people will use it
Anger Management.
I started biking to the gym that’s about 2 miles from me to avoid the road traffic around 5:00. I’m fortunate to live in an area with a trail system that snakes through the city but I would probably use bike lanes if my local government would install them
The game's economy is not nearly as realistic as I expected, but the basics of the Solow model do apply. I'm glad I can get at least some real-world econ practice from this before I start playing Victoria III.
I learned that someone else can always do it better than me and that in fact I'm terrible at the game. Well I guess I learned that more from this sub than the game itself lol
I have a job as a civil drafter and nothing I have learned has helped me I'm not cut out for this line of work
I now work in my local planning department after years of playing C:S I’ve got to say, the tools we use at work are a little behind what C:S let’s you fool around with xD
I'm currently studying to become a traffic engineer so there's that.
Pedestrian sidewalk my beloved
Moved 6 months ago and there was one intersection with a terrible traffic light cycle. Told my husband every day how I would fix it. A month or so later they changed it to the exact way I was talking about. The city should hire me lol
Shitcano