Hi, author here. Previously posted to HN (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763636" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763636</a>). I just released alpha -- check out this cheesy trailer (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxPD4n_1-LU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxPD4n_1-LU</a>).<p>Happy to answer questions! And if you're serious about running this in your city, the importing process has improved greatly since December, so get in touch.
If you like this game consider checking out Cities Skylines. Traffic is a major part of the game. With the vanilla edition you can already do a lot, but if you want to route lanes you need the traffic manager mod <a href="https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1637663252" rel="nofollow">https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=16376...</a>
If you're interested in this kind of planning problems, check out the NeurIPS Flatland challenge, in which we try to optimize traffic on railway networks, in association with the Swiss and German railway companies!<p><a href="https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/neurips-2020-flatland-challenge/" rel="nofollow">https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/neurips-2020-flatland-cha...</a><p>(disclaimer: I'm an organizer)
I've been really hoping for the Maps team at Google/Waze to release a similar "traffic congestion" view to highlight consistent hot spots. A simulation is also pretty good, but the real data from Maps/Waze users will be even better!<p>Ideally, a government dashboard to see traffic congestion changes per year, month, day of week, but also hour. If we can create metrics for cities like p99 door-door trip time (i.e. latency) policy makers can better measure changes, bottlenecks, etc and plan better.
The problem is there's only so much room for automobiles in a city. The more you decrease traffic, the more you'll induce demand to fill those improved traffic flow patterns.<p>The more infrastructure that is built downtown, the more people want to be downtown.
This is awesome, although part of the traffic problem is the horrible condition of the roads around Seattle, and a failure to enforce basic traffic laws - specifically - the left lane is for passing, and probably more importantly, do <i>not</i> stop in an intersection. Just because the light is yellow, doesn't mean we need to stack more cars into the middle of the road.<p>I walked to work (when I lived in Seattle recently) but the amount of traffic jams I saw caused by both regular people in their cars, and the mass transit bus drivers, driving right into an intersection as the light turned red is crazy. I don't know how you can plan traffic flow around it, because as green as the light might be, no one is moving with a bus sitting in the middle of the intersection.
Rad! It's a bummer that Amazon employees will have a hard time contributing to this (as Amazon prevents collaborating with anyone on any side projects that are 'games'.) Their offices surround some of the worst traffic in the city, and it'd be interesting to have some of their engineers contributing.
This is completely awesome. I've considered doing something similar (mostly while sitting around in Austin looking at traffic lights backing up 100+ cars to allow 2-3 to enter from a side street) or looking at a pair of lights (accidentally?) acting like a metering device. Particularly city wide as I'm 100% convinced that the actual traffic engineers here are doing something wrong. They reworked a bike lane a few years back on a street I was driving on daily and then I could see them out there for months trying to work around the fact that they backed up a couple major intersections a couple blocks away as a result.<p>So the question is, given a bit of ML/etc driving it, and some actual commute time data, what are the changes something like this actually can be used to improve traffic?
The trailer looks amazing. I was actually just imagining a video game like this a few days ago, so it is something of a wish fulfillment plus baader meinhoff syndrome to see this.<p>I can't wait till tonight when I'll have enough time to get it installed and try it out!
This idea was supposed to be my master's thesis project. However I found something different and never did the original idea but's it's always been in my mind.<p>Big kudos to the author for this nice project ! I hope it gives further ideas to people playing it
This project is wicked cool, and I almost missed that they built it using Rust. I like the language a lot, and I think something like this is a sign of it moving towards real maturity, where the utility of the programs starts outshining the method of its construction. I'll be really curious to see if any project proposals end up citing this over the next couple years as an impetus for starting to experiment with different approaches to their traffic infrastructure, or at least inspiring people to become more engaged with it.
Woah, the data comes from OpenStreetMap!<p>Is it possible to create a map with one click for a new city?<p>I read through <a href="https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/articles/map/article.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/art...</a> but I can't tell if this must be manually followed.
I would love to see a simulation system like this that also involved other "graph" components of city infrastructure -- like power, water, food, rail, air traffic, internet, mobile service etc. The ripple effects could be very hard to guess at, but could make for really interesting scenarios. Imagine trying to increase power when the only "lever" you can change is food prices!
In the real world, how is traffic routed? I often wonder what controls obviously inefficient intersections and how easy or hard it is to fix that.<p>I assume that there are software systems that take in schedules and various inputs (cameras, magnets, crosswalk buttons) but I'm curious if anyone works in the field and would talk about their experience.
So cool! I'm sure there's a reason this hasn't been done, but I'm curious if there would be value in doing using this for some type of folding at home distributed optimization problem solving. Converging on actual suggest improvements that might not seem obvious
Adding a options for rethinking current systems would be nice.<p>For example, autonomous vehicles would be interesting. You potentially don't need intersection control with all autonomous traffic. Or what is the benefit of certain streets or lanes being designated autonomous only?<p>And what is the impact of education? Is there a way to change behavior that's cheaper than changing a street for example? You can change the street, but you can also change how people use the street.
Fixing the traffic lights would go a long way towards improving traffic flow in Seattle. How much time do you spend sitting at a red light when there's no cross traffic? How often are you and the 5 cars behind you abruptly stopped to let one cross traffic car through?<p>Lots of traffic lights already have cameras on them. Hook 'em up to an AI and a goal of maximizing throughput.