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by bluGill 1626 days ago
That means you didn't add enough lanes. You need to get ahead of induced demand, otherwise you city isn't meeting the needs of the people who live there. If you don't want to have many places you can reach in a reasonable amount of time can you can move to a rural area. The point of cities is to give people options to reach lots of places quickly. Get busying being a good city.

Note, it can be better to add transit other than lanes of road. Even though I said add lanes, adding lanes is but one possible solution. Good transit may well be better. Figure out how to make your city serve the people who want to get around.

2 comments

> You need to get ahead of induced demand, otherwise you city isn't meeting the needs of the people who live there.

Well, there's an annoying edge case that must be considered as well. In some cases, "induced demand" is "stealing demand from somewhere else".

Lets say you have Town Foo and Town Bar. If you build a highway to Foo, all the additional traffic might be "stealing" traffic from Town Bar and benefiting Town Foo. Especially if people emigrate out of Town Bar for closer housing to Town Foo, you didn't really improve the lives of anyone. You just caused everyone to migrate over.

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Ideally, you want to build highways / roads / transportation in ways that benefits people, and causes the least inconvenience to other towns.

Only if town bar isn't a place people want to be. I call it a good thing is bad towns die.
Well sadly, roads have a bad habit of being confined by physical time and space and cannot just be arbitrarily widened.
You can go up and down though.

Again, I'm not making a value judgement here. Transit is a valid option that could be better

Up is expensive and rather unpleasant for those walking nearby on the surface. Down is even more expensive.

Don't forget that no matter how many lanes you add to a highway heading into a city, eventually that highway ends up... in the city. Too many cars in a city makes for a loud and dangerous-to-navigate environment for those who live there.