I’m a hardcore fan of Cities Skylines 1 and have been playing it for several years now. One issue I have though is how I go about making a highway system. It seems so complex, I don’t understand how I can connect place to place in a reasonable way and I feel like the only proper way to do it is to ravage through regions of my city to make massive interchanges and efficient routes. My strategy as a result is just using 6 lane roads as my “highways” and kinda just avoiding the idea of highways altogether. I’m so bad at it that my idea of creating an on/offramp is retrofitting roundabouts. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this and also how to get my mind thinking of the right ways to make good highways.

  • gfleEnglish
    8•2 months ago

    I always go with the following strategy:

    • Tons of public transport to ensure that local commute doesn’t have to rely on cars. In general, if I start to get the feeling that I need to place a highway in the city to solve the congestion problem, then I look what route is under served by public transport.
      • Buses or trams (if I want to be fancy) for shorter routes, metro for longer distances.
      • Passenger trains for inter-city and longest local transport.
      • Cargo trains in industrial hubs, but careful with those, as they tend to generate a lot of traffic when trucks come and go. I usually do some sort of a traffic sponge (one-way road that leads only to the cargo train station) for trucks to wait without blocking other traffic.
    • I use highways sparingly and only for longer distances, like connections between cities. I try to build them outside of the city, so it would also act as a bypass - the cars which are not going into my city but through it won’t generate traffic in the city itself this way.