Five Ways Mass Transit Improves Traffic & Transport In Cities: Skylines

Colossal Order are going back to their roots with the latest expansion to Cities: Skylines. Having started out making the Cities in Motion public transportation management games, they know a thing or two about building a city infrastructure, so while they had other things higher up on the priority list, they were always going to add some more transport options and improve traffic control in their game.

Here’s five ways that Mass Transit and the free update planned alongside it will improve traffic and transport in Cities: Skylines.

Monorails, Blimps, Ferries and Cable Cars

It might sound like more of a Shelbyville idea, but a monorail can be a boon to your city as well. Not only are they damned cool, they’re able to run above the road network or diverge from that path as necessary.

In fact, that’s a bit of a running theme here. Blimps effectively run along their own sky roads that you map out, bobbling from one stop to another just like any other transport system, the cable cars run through the air, and the ferry system can make use of the canals that you were able to add to the landscape as of a recent update.

All of this is pretty neat, but it also makes me think of the future. Perhaps a deep dive into tourism might be on Colossal Order’s to do list? Cable cars would be pretty ideal for ski resorts, and I can imagine creating real tourist trap destinations with scenic tour routes on blimps and ferries. Tourism isn’t touched by the Mass Transit update, but it definitely opens the door for it in future.

Transport Hubs

We already saw the first of this kind of thinking a little while ago with the combined shipping and railway hub, they’re getting serious about blending transport systems in Mass Transit. You can now build certain specific transport hubs that combine, for example, a monorail station with a bus station, meaning you no longer need to build two separate structures alongside one another and commuters can better use the interconnected transport options.

Stop Signs and Traffic Lights

Part of the free update that’s coming out alongside Mass Transit, this is an excellent change, as Colossal Order are finally addressing the day to day carnage on the streets of your city.

A new traffic management section in the info panels lets you get up close and personal with the challenges of traffic flow. You can now bring up a “traffic routes” view that shows all the traffic that’s flowing through a particular section of road, or pick an individual vehicle and see the particular route it’s taking. It really lets you see why a particular junction is always a congested mess and plan accordingly.

At the same time, you can now zoom in and modify each and every junction with traffic lights and/or stop signs, shaping the flow of traffic. If you want to prioritise a particular route, this is ideal for managing how traffic gets onto a roundabout or whether cars have to give way to those pulling out. As someone that’s often left scratching their head at what on earth is going on with my traffic, this one’s a great addition.

Faster Emergency Services

All too often, your ambulances and fire engines can get stuck in transit while a citizen perishes or a fire blazes. Now their AI has been updated to be much better at finding a path through the traffic, making use of multiple lanes on major roads and weaving from one gap in the traffic to another.

It’s not a perfect recreation of reality, because the other traffic just gets on with its own thing and doesn’t actively get out of the way, and the emergency vehicles won’t cut into oncoming traffic or race through an intersection when it isn’t its turn. In other words, they can still get trapped in a traffic jam – keeping the onus on you to create a working road network – but once that traffic’s moving, they’ll be much faster.

Renaming Roads

You could already give your city a pretty personal touch by creating districts and naming them suitably obvious things like Green Hill Zone or Industrial Zone. Now you can go even further and rename individual roads. This is really one for the kind of player who might want to recreate their home town… and maybe use the Natural Disasters expansion to drop a meteor or two on the houses of people they don’t like.

Alternatively, give all your roads the same name and chuckle to yourself at the living nightmare you’re creating for the postal service.

Mass Transit’s release is a little way away – it’s just “coming soon” – but Cities: Skylines has something else that’s exciting to look forward to in the form of the Xbox One version of the game. We went hands on with that at Rezzed, and you can see all about it here.