Am I the only one who struggles with the idea of building highways?
I'm a hardcore fan of Cities Skylines 1 and have been playing it for several years now. One issue I have though is how I go about making a highway system. It seems so complex, I don't understand how I can connect place to place in a reasonable way and I feel like the only proper way to do it is to ravage through regions of my city to make massive interchanges and efficient routes. My strategy as a result is just using 6 lane roads as my "highways" and kinda just avoiding the idea of highways altogether. I'm so bad at it that my idea of creating an on/offramp is retrofitting roundabouts.
I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this and also how to get my mind thinking of the right ways to make good highways.
Tons of public transport to ensure that local commute doesn't have to rely on cars. In general, if I start to get the feeling that I need to place a highway in the city to solve the congestion problem, then I look what route is under served by public transport.
Buses or trams (if I want to be fancy) for shorter routes, metro for longer distances.
Passenger trains for inter-city and longest local transport.
Cargo trains in industrial hubs, but careful with those, as they tend to generate a lot of traffic when trucks come and go. I usually do some sort of a traffic sponge (one-way road that leads only to the cargo train station) for trucks to wait without blocking other traffic.
I use highways sparingly and only for longer distances, like connections between cities. I try to build them outside of the city, so it would also act as a bypass - the cars which are not going into my city but through it won't generate traffic in the city itself this way.