{"id":285,"date":"2026-10-19T18:53:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T18:53:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/?page_id=285"},"modified":"2026-10-19T19:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T19:38:12","slug":"a-fork-in-the-road","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/a-fork-in-the-road\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fork in the Road"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Everyone\u2019s favorite topic is traffic management. This is an undeniable fact, and if you say it\u2019s not your favorite thing, let\u2019s be honest: it\u2019s because you\u2019re defective. I\u2019m sorry, that\u2019s just how it is. It\u2019s such an exciting subject that they only way I could think of to immediately grab your attention with it was to attack you directly, making this a personal assault on you, and now you have to follow the whole rest of the article to see if I say anything else mean about you, or if I leave myself open to a counterattack of some sort. Just so you know, I won\u2019t, this article will be immaculate, and you\u2019ll just have to go along with the whole thing to prove otherwise. Because you\u2019re an idiot! Keep going with me, don\u2019t go away!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason I\u2019m writing this article is because recently, we held a City Skylines competition on our Discord server, and the rules were, \u201cDo whatever you want that you think is interesting, then we vote on who was the most interesting, but you also have to reach a population of 70,000 and share your traffic numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early on, there was a good amount of excitement! Which then dropped off over time. A month later, we received one submission, which was merely a statement of what could have been<\/em> if that person\u2019s city hadn\u2019t been whacked by multiple tsunamis. Which, in fairness, doesn\u2019t say anything about that person\u2019s traffic management skills. In fact, their traffic was pretty good after everyone had drowned, because there was no one on the roads. Wiping the slate clean with the blood of the innocents does, in fact, solve all traffic issues. It solves a lot of population-related problems, at that, but it had the drawback of preventing the target goal of 70k citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It does look like it was going<\/em> to be cool. Before Poseidon developed a personal grudge with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoy strategy games and management games. The main thing they have in common is that, frankly, they\u2019re all won pretty much before you started. There\u2019s an old saying: \u201cKnow your enemy, know yourself, never know defeat,\u201d and effectively it just means that if you know what you\u2019re doing and prepare adequately, you really can\u2019t lose. Whether it\u2019s Stellaris, Supreme Commander, City Skylines, or Transport Tycoon, it holds true as a consistent fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For my part, my city goal was simply \u201cMAKE BIG CITY\u201d because I often hear that City Skylines is fairly difficult without traffic management mods. Now I\u2019ll grant you, traffic mods make the game easier because almost the entire game is about managing traffic, but I assure you it\u2019s not necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Initially my thought was that I\u2019d fill up as much map space as I could, and based on the way people were talking, if anyone had a city as large as mine, I could insist mine was still better because it was built using nothing but the game\u2019s unmodded traffic systems. My city is BIG, and your city is dumb, and whatever happened, these things would be true. I don\u2019t know if that gets you a vote as \u201cbest\u201d or \u201cmost interesting\u201d city, but I think it was also clear to everyone that it was meant to be a fun, creative challenge and nothing serious. As I began to see people talking about having major issues, however, I began to realize that many competitors weren\u2019t even going to make it to 70k population, and me having twice that was totally overkill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how\u2019s it done? Well, Skylines is a traffic simulator, so the fun thing about it is that it models real-life traffic behaviors and that\u2019s kind of the long and short of it. If you guys care enough to research that stuff, than you\u2019ll have no problem reaching 70k population, and the game becomes more about whatever weird objectives you set for yourself aside. In this case, it was about absolutely ruining the bays with human waste, and growing to a massive size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traffic problems exist before<\/em> they appear. Basically, if you design your roads badly, they\u2019ll seem fine at first. When the only person on the road is grandma taking her twenty cats down to the taxidermy store to preserve the latest casualties, it honestly doesn\u2019t matter how you built your roads. Grandma alone isn\u2019t enough to cause any backups or gridlock, because she\u2019s only one woman. However, when the city is populated by hundreds of grandmas, eventually they all die and then you need just as many hearses driving to every neighborhood, and soon you have a massive parade of hearses trying to reach these old women before their cats eat the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the simplest level, you can avoid this by arranging your roads into arteries and capillaries. That is, big roads feed into small roads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In this example, the highway feeds into a main road, and those main roads can reach anywhere in the city. Those main roads are the city\u2019s \u201carterial\u201d roads and are where all of your traffic is forced to travel. See, you plan out the arterial roads so that you know all the traffic has to either be there, or on the highway. The capillary roads then branch off from the arterial roads, but don\u2019t connect to anywhere else. You see how they\u2019re just sort of isolated pockets. Having them isolated like that prevents there from being any through-traffic on your smaller roads, because you can\u2019t get to anywhere else through the capillaries. That means traffic will always be flowing along the arteries to whichever capillary it needs to be at, and if you\u2019ve done this much, then you\u2019ve eliminated most of the traffic issues that will snag new players.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now those with a keen eye might notice there\u2019s something funny about my highway! It\u2019s what\u2019s called a diverging diamond, but actually this one is especially odd because it\u2019s a \u201cfantasy diamond\u201d. That is, in real life, bridges are expensive as all hell. If there\u2019s one thing a city or a state does not want to do, it\u2019s building more bridges than are necessary. You can make arguments about future traffic flow until someone at the city council pulls a gun on you, but in real life a bridge will cost a fortune up front, and then you gotta maintain that bitch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, video games know that transit enthusiasts like bridges in the same way that sci-fi enthusiasts like it when spaceships explode into glorious fireballs. It doesn\u2019t matter how realistic it is, or if there\u2019s any oxygen in space to create the exciting fireball that spaceship bursts into. Fans of these genres just don\u2019t have as good of a time unless you cater to the spectacle. City builder nerds want to build bridges<\/em>, which means game developers don\u2019t make them into a once every ten years project, and their maintenance won\u2019t bankrupt you. As a result, you can make some truly fantastical highway interchanges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The \u201cfantasy diamond\u201d is something I\u2019m proud of, partly because I arrived at its genius, innovative design on my own out of necessity, and partly because I\u2019m some kind of disgusting nerd, and fantasy worlds with these sorts of inane efficiency tests make me happy. A fictional traffic backup makes me actually, genuinely mad, and these things are almost supernaturally effective at making those highway backups non-existent. But what\u2019s funny is that I didn\u2019t start building these things in City Skylines. Rather, I developed them while playing competitive Transport Tycoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, yes, in my personal hours of entertainment, I get up to hobbies so nerdy that polite society probably shouldn\u2019t condone them. You can argue it\u2019s harmless, but I don\u2019t know if anyone has done any real studies on the psychological impact of hyper-optimizing transit games. It\u2019s just too nerdy of a subject to examine, even for paid psychologists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here\u2019s kind of what I was dealing with:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In competitive Transport Tycoon \u2013 which is a delightful game as much as I joke \u2013 your goal is to grow a single city to some forsaken size, and you do this by delivering larger and larger amounts of cargo to it. The city wants a broad variety of different cargoes, and each form of cargo may need to be produced by delivering yet another<\/em> form of unique cargo to some factory somewhere. If the game setup only demands a few types of cargo, you can be safe to set up a specific line for each kind of cargo, and that\u2019s pretty manageable. You can get one for water, one for food, one for passengers, and it works out because even though the various cargo tankers travel at different speeds, each form of cargo is on their own line and they all travel at the same limit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that\u2019s for babies. In the Dawn Somewhere server, we play transit management games for men<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I can\u2019t even show you all the cargo types we\u2019re dealing with! And you\u2019ve got to move this stuff back and forth all over the map, gradually building up massive infrastructure networks. These weren\u2019t games where you play for an hour and find a winner. We\u2019d play over the span of several days and really separate the carefree children from the adults who we should probably be concerned<\/em> about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the problem was \u2013 other than whatever sick psychology makes me think this is a great leisure activity \u2013 the problem was: trains are frickin\u2019 long, man! Like, damn. If it\u2019s long enough to carry all this trash across the game map, the last thing you\u2019d want to do is set up a railroad junction where another train has to wait on all that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you check out what the other deranged lunatics online are saying about how to handle this problem, there\u2019s a number of different approaches. One of which is modifying the game to set up more complex signaling, which incidentally is also what I see people saying about traffic management in City Skylines. It\u2019s also one of the ways that we handle this in real life, to be fair, and most states have a traffic light department whose sole job it is to optimize traffic signals. Or they try to, anyway, with variable success. But I thought there\u2019s got to be a better way, there\u2019s got to be a means to make junctions that just don\u2019t suck<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where the \u201cfantasy diamond\u201d was born. I needed those trains to merge without almost ever stopping, and there was a way!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pictured is one of the less complicated examples of how to build one of these, and it\u2019s still a little complicated if you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re looking at, but don\u2019t worry because I will simplify it. At an overview, a \u201cdiverging diamond\u201d is called that because the traffic lanes cross over each other and form a diamond shape in the process. That means that eastbound and westbound traffic switch places, for example. If you normally drive on the right side of the road, you wind up driving on the left side for a bit, and you can choose to head north or south while you\u2019re on the \u201cwrong\u201d side of the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem with the trains, though, is that normally when these are roadways for cars, they\u2019re managed by traffic lights. It was possible<\/em> to also manage a railroad junction with signals, but once hundreds of trains were competing to move down the tracks, if any one train was parked at a light waiting for a train to pass, that meant hundreds of other trains were also going to wind up behind schedule due to the waiting. It\u2019s fine for road traffic, because cars are short, but completely bonkers for trains. Or\u2026 it was<\/em>, except you may notice the two bridges on either side of the junction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solution was to use our fancifully cheap bridges to make it so that traffic never has to intersect! And this design completely revolutionized competitive Transport Tycoon for me, because now I have all these trains operating on a single line, without hardly any slowdown at any junction, and the only thing I have to do to incorporate more supplies into my network is simply branch off of the main artery with more \u201cfantasy diamonds\u201d. It works not only as a four-way intersection, but can also be used for equally efficient T-junctions!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yes, that\u2019s right! Behold! A T-junction with the incredible traffic-flow potential of the \u201cfantasy diamond\u201d, and most glorious of all, it\u2019s simply waiting for me to add a southbound junction if I ever feel the need for one. Do trains wind up needing to go north and<\/em> south? Well I\u2019ll just build a bridge joining the two pathways and we\u2019re in business! These things were amazing, because they made the whole process of building the rail networks feel modular and easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is simpler to visualize in City Skylines, thanks to the arrows showing you the direction of the traffic flow. Here\u2019s a \u201cfantasy diamond\u201d T-junction that I built on the edge of my city. I wasn\u2019t sure if I was going to buy land on the other side of this highway, so I figured I\u2019d do the same thing I do in Transport Tycoon and set up the highway like this, with the potential<\/em> to expand if necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is actually a bit defiant of how they do a diverging diamond in real life. Normally, because they have to have a crossing managed by traffic lights, the crossings occur on the arterial road, not on the highway, but because I\u2019m using bridges to simply leap over the lane people are merging onto, it works just as well to have the highway itself be where the crossings are. This is also incredibly efficient for space \u2013 I mean look at this. The default T-junction is a great, big monster with bridges looping all around, struggling to find space to hook into the highway. This is so much better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In truth, this road is practically empty, and I\u2019ve wisely built a water tower directly in the way of the road so that I can\u2019t actually expand that way if I wanted to, so this optimization is totally unnecessary and made worse by my own lack of foresight. But installed properly<\/em> there\u2019d be all kinds of potential to expand out, and the road could handle even dense, industrial traffic!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So there\u2019s a lot of tricks to make City Skylines and its traffic management a little easier. For example, it turns out that you don\u2019t need to build commercial zones, because nobody actually needs to go shopping. You can build nothing but offices, and I suppose the people forage for live rats for dinner each night. That\u2019s a kind of technocratic future that\u2019s possible<\/em> if you understand the deep weirdness of the game and ignore it begging you to play in any other way. With the right know-how, you can eliminate traffic via magic and cruelty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But that\u2019s not what the city of Super-Duper Poopwater Bay is about. The city doesn\u2019t use any mods. I\u2019ve got commercial buildings placed near enough to the residential buildings, and then have horrible, pollution-ridden industrial districts providing goods to the nearby commercial buildings. I\u2019ve got<\/em> trucks and traffic on the roads, and all the buildings that cause those traffic problems, but between building the city with arterials and capillaries, and the use of \u201cfantasy diamonds\u201d, there\u2019s room to expand even further than the 140k population the city already has. The waterways won\u2019t appreciate it, and it\u2019s a miracle the dockworkers don\u2019t perish from the stench alone, but nobody said that the perfect intersection made the entire city perfect, now did we?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone\u2019s favorite topic is traffic management. This is an undeniable fact, and if you say it\u2019s not your favorite thing, let\u2019s be honest: it\u2019s because you\u2019re defective. I\u2019m sorry, that\u2019s just how it is. It\u2019s such an exciting subject that they only way I could think of to immediately grab your attention with it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-285","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/285\/revisions\/310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}