right of way and intersections

[Seaman]

Hi friends

I have question regarding the right of way for intersections. In the last years I had sometimes traffic jams in my cities caused by a strange right of way for street/road intersections. The street seems to have an equal right of way when crossing a road resulting in automatas roaring down the road and braking with squeaking wheels for some empty(!) backroads/streets. I got somehow used to that and tried to avoid those situations but I still wonder:

a) is the right of way only a visual thing for automatas without a real impact on the traffic simulator?
b) is there a way to avoid this problem? Sometimes I use the RHW-2 to substitute the road. The RHW-2 seems to have a "proper" right of way.
c) what are the red crosses in the pathing supposed to mean. So far I guessed they have something to do with stopping and right oy way, but I am not sure.

I haven't found a thread explaining this, but keeping in mind the years of traffic/road-related discussions in this forum I am afraid it's out there and my search wasn't just not good enough?

[APSMS]

Hi Seaman,

Automata animations have no effect on the simulation. At the best of times they reflect the current traffic situation (busy, congested intersections will have more accidents than unused ones), but often times they are simply visual stimuli meant to make the game look good.

RHW-2 lacks stoplights, and doesn't have zone access--zones placed next to RHW-2 will be unable to access the road, and will abandon shortly after development (usually).

Automata lack collision behavior unless you are in UDI mode, and even then they continue to display the annoying random disappearing act. They do try to avoid running into each other (looks bad visually) but if they do its often of no consequence (trains on STR do this often). Since the game is a statistical simulation, everything you see can be assumed to be (at best) an approximation of what's happening under the hood. The only exceptions are abandonment (dilapidated textures) and disasters, but even then you could think of these as visual representations of a very indiscriminate use of the bulldozer tool.

[mgb204]

The red crosses on paths are indeed stop points. It just tells the automata where to wait when the lights are red.

When you say RHW seems to have a right of way, do you mean in terms of the stop lines? In-short as APSMS says, most of this is just a visual thing. So whilst some textures have been made with stop lines, others may not have been. Regardless of the lines though, it requires stop points for sims to actually stop. Even so, that doesn't mean that any of this is factored in, with regards to commute times and selections.

[Seaman]

Thank you APSMS and mgb204 for your infos.
I infer from your posts:

-> a) as asumed: yes, it's just a visual thing, no impact on traffic sim
-> b) I created two .gifs to demonstrate what I mean
-> c) red crosses are stop points for automatas

normal road/street setup with automatas stoping on major road


RHW-2/street setup; cars from street yield, while cars on road don't

[Tarkus]

It's something weird that Maxis decided to do with the pathing.  littlewhitebutterfly released a mod on the STEX a number of years ago that fixes it, which can be found here.  It's an easy enough fix that we could probably stick something like that in the NAM.

-Alex

[Seaman]

thank you soooo much Tarkus!! littlewhitebutterfly's work was exactly what I was hoping for. Bullseye!