Traffic. Traffic. Traffic. Traffic is sometimes the worst part of building a city. One minor hiccup in your traffic system can result in catastrophic failure of your whole city. I have seen the effect of traffic jams resulting in the locking of a whole city. Traffic can be a challenge, but also can be incredibly easy.

One of the biggest things I can tell you about traffic is that space matters. Space for larger intersections that are dispersed will help more than you'd think with traffic. Larger intersections give vehicles more space to change lanes, fill the road, and make road change decisions. Small intersections, especially on highways do save space, but they usually can't handle large amounts of traffic. I kept creating compacted cities, I kept having the issue that I HAVE to save as much space as possible. Another traffic problem is that bigger roads don't necessarily mean less traffic. For example, if you have a one-way six-lane road, that doesn't mean traffic will fill in all lanes. If only a few vehicles are going left, and all others are going right, you need to move high traffic areas/add more connections to that area.

Another issue with traffic is that while we are told to use roundabouts to help with extremely busy intersections, they don't always work. The issue with roundabouts is that vehicles cannot enter and exit correctly. If you are turning right at the next intersection but have to go past another intersection, you'd stay in the outer lane, causing the vehicles that are turning on not able to move. Although roundabouts aren't all bad, roundabouts stop traffic lights and keep traffic flowing, which will help keep traffic jams from occurring.

Public Transport is a strong attribute to any city, but it can also be a mess. One of the biggest problems I'd have with public transport is I would forget to build it, putting an extreme amount of stress on my traffic system. Another problem I'd face is I wouldn't create a good public transport system. I'd create a system that didn't work well and couldn't function correctly.
The first thing is DO NOT place Cargo Train Stations, they are the worst. Cargo Train Stations have many things wrong with them. Part of it is they have way too much traffic and are almost relied on by your industry. Once I stopped placing Cargo Train Stations, there were less industry traffic jams, but more strain on my highways. Cargo has another issue, Cargo Planes don't exist in the vanilla game, which does in real life. Having Cargo Planes would help traffic in CS as industry vehicles would have more options to move around/leave the city. The last issue with Public Transport is that there are not enough options. No ferries, monorails, etc. Although Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order have noticed this and will be releasing the Mass Transit expansion.

Water/Sewage in CS is easy-ish. The problem I kept having was the fact that I thought I couldn't put all water intake in one area and all sewage in another. I'd dry out the river/water with too many water intakes, and overflow the river with too many sewage disposals. I figured out that waterworks is just like traffic, the more space and dispersity there is, the better.
I moved about half of my water intakes to another area and the same with the sewage buildings. After some time the water leveled out and became a river again. The best pipe coverage is $440 between two parallel pipes, haveing the least amount of overlap possible.

Police, Ambulances, Firefighters, etc. all rely on traffic. Your citizens may be sick because ambulances cannot get to them. You can add more hospitals all you'd like, but eliminating traffic may be your answer. Also, services, especially hospitals usually need larger roads to accompany their large fleet size.


Dead person transport is the hardest for me, no matter how many I place, there's always dead people everywhere. Parks/Services raise the land value, but also make your citizens happy. Different services have different ranges and capacity also. Sometimes having dispersed services helps with traffic and the overall flow of your city.

Planning is almost essential to the flow of your city. Make use of district policies, such as low water use and no highrise. This helps you to decrease certain services and cause happiness among citizens. Encouraging citizens to bike and take public transportation will help tremendously in the flow of your city especially traffic. Zoning plays a huge role in traffic, too many apartments in one area causes traffic issues.

The best way to zone is to place the commercial in the middle and place residential or industry on the outside. Offices cause little traffic, so they could be barriers between residential and heavy industry, etc.

Agriculture and Forestry Industries cause no pollution, besides noise pollution. They can be used just like offices and offer buffers between zoning changes. Other industry causes pollution, so it is best to have trees around the area to help limit ground and noise pollution from spreading.

Mods and Assets completely change the game, you can have new and different train stations and have 2 lane highways, change speed limits, connect lanes exactly how you want, etc. The possibilities with mods are endless.


They can also help to simulate the real life issues of running a city. There are thousands of mods and assets in the Workshop, many of which help your city in numerous ways. A workshop is an essential tool to anyone playing CS.

Some of my recommended mods are:
1. Traffic President/Traffic Manager/Traffic++ V2
2. Percision Engineering
3. Road Anarchy
4. Move It!


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