Gridlock Expert Takes On Sim City Streets

Thanks to the Gaming-Age messageboard regulars for pointing to an EA webpage interviewing real-life traffic engineer Sam Schwartz, aka 'Gridlock Sam', and discussing "ways to alleviate traffic congestion in your own virtual metropolis" for Maxis/EA's PC game Sim City 4: Rush Hour. Schwartz notes some of the tricks gamers use to get round traffic congestion in-game: "I have read on the Sim City message boards, and seen screen shots of cities where mayors build roads at certain angles to avoid the creation of a traffic light", but goes on to suggest relevant real-world tactics, particularly noting players should "...use underground rail where [traffic] density is the greatest." However, 'Gridlock Sam' found unexpected social issues even in the virtual city: "One time I made the mistake of turning all my roads into streets thinking I was improving the level of service and therefore congestion would lessen. It did, but now I had Sims yelling at me because their once bucolic roads became bustling streets."

Comments

Re:Roundabouts.

[Tofino]

Wrong kind of roundabouts, AC. Those are the small, common, mini-roundabouts that as far as I can tell are only found in North America. In England and elsewhere, roundabouts are the equivalent of highway ramps. You are driving down a highway, or on a major street in a city, and suddenly there's a huge, 3-lane-wide roundabout. You need to pick your lane carefully and aggressively so that you end up on the outside at the precise moment that your exit from the roundabout comes up (there are usually 4 or 5 exits from a roundabout).

It sounds like chaos, and it looks completely disorganized when you first think of or see it, but you quickly realize that there's a reason why traffic congestion in England, even in big cities, is so much lower than in the US: the roundabouts, and the relative lack of traffic lights. The drivers in England also tend, in my opinion, to be better. You can spot US and Canadian drivers in England very easily, as they're the ones who timidly stop before a roundabout, aren't sure when to merge, etc. In England, I've seen major roads in rush hour change from 2 lanes, to one, back to 2 again, and traffic never slow below 20mph as cars dance in and out. In Vancouver, if there's a car parked in the right lane during rush hour, traffic stops.

SC4's traffic model..

[Xzzy]

Due to an unwillingness to shell out more cash for what I feel should have been part of the original product, I never bought the rush hour expansion. I did buy SC4 though, the promise of all the new transportation methos drew me in like a moth to flame.

Unfortuneatley, the traffic model blew ass. There were a multitude of problems when trying to ferry people between different regions, sims were too stupid to take a highway unless it fell on their shortest path algorhythm (they would prefer to take narrow local streets even if the highway would have been faster), and don't even get me started on the braindead decision for the only way to have "busy" commercial zones was to have red traffic right next to them (duh?!). Some of the simulator variables were odd too, wasn't traffic modelled as if all cars were moving at 30mph or somesuch?

Did rush hour really fix this at all? Reading the feature list, it just seemed like a stop gap measure bolted on to try and cover some of the flaws.

I know traffic is hard and Maxis did a decent job with the game, but the flaws made it damn near impossible to build a "real" city.. invariably the game turned into a micromanagement nightmare as you bulldozed roads to try and convince the sims to take more intelligent paths. Almost all my cities wound up being groups of individual "pods" that used limited routes to funnel sims into more desireable travel modes.

I'm not a city planner, but this approach mimics no real world city I've ever witnessed.