Priority roads in Cities Skylines

Today I have a tip for you that can optimize your traffic in Cities Skylines. You may know from my previous articles on traffic and roads that you should toggle traffic lights or stop signs. What you may not know is that if you remove traffic lights and select priority road, stop signs will be automatically added to your roads.

An intersection with no traffic lights and no priority roads looks like this…

… but if you select “priority road” on main road, a stop sign should be added to the left junction. In this case, you don’t have to change all stops signs. All you need to do is to remove traffic lights.

If you use TM:PE mod for traffic, then you should set up main & stop or main & side street. Stop signs slow down traffic more because the car has to stop before it regardless of whether something is driving on the main road or not. And from the side street, the car doesn’t have to slow down.

Which roads should be set as priority roads?

It is important to set up your “big” and “important” roads that must gather traffic. Traffic must flow smoothly on the main roads you have in town, so don’t use traffic lights. Setting up priority roads properly helps you optimize traffic in your city. According to that, all important roads should be set up as priority roads.

I do not recommend setting up highways as priority roads. You can’t have stop signs on highways because they would slow down traffic on the on-ramps to the motorways. If you need to optimize your highway, you should use the best traffic mods.