Trouble with traffic - help me, please?
Posted: 29 Dec 2022, 20:23
Hi, Theo peeps! (What do we call ourselves, anyway? Cause I dunno... sorry!)
I prefer an easy game. It's just the way I am. No judging me allowed!
So anyways...
I've been playing TheoTown <3 for many years now, and I love it! I've seen a lot of games come and go with age, but not TheoTown! Excellent work keeping players coming back for more fun! I have been having to spend a lot of time, effort and Theons trying to lower traffic in my cities, and I was hoping someone out there might be able to help me to know how to optimize traffic in my current/future cities.
I prefer an easy game. It's just the way I am. No judging me allowed!

I've been playing TheoTown <3 for many years now, and I love it! I've seen a lot of games come and go with age, but not TheoTown! Excellent work keeping players coming back for more fun! I have been having to spend a lot of time, effort and Theons trying to lower traffic in my cities, and I was hoping someone out there might be able to help me to know how to optimize traffic in my current/future cities.
- Here's what I already know about dealing with traffic in TheoTown:
- Faster roads mean lower traffic.
- When upgrading roads, some roads need to be deleted manually before new roads can go in their places. Something to do with a 1-5 number in the code, I don't code so I don't know any more about this than any other Noob Like Me.
- I don't know really anything about making a decent train system, metro system, or road interchange. I've made a smallish airport once, a few cities ago, but I've no idea whether I did it correctly or poorly, because it didn't seem very useful to my city.
- I know the amount of traffic density in cities is easily configurable in the game settings, but I usually just keep it set to the lowest option (25%). I feel like I'm cheating at times, and I occasionally try setting it higher (50-100%) but I get horrible traffic jams and can't continue playing without lowering the setting to the bottom again. I'm getting tired of feeling like I'm cheating by always having to use the easiest setting available. And no, I have never played with "rush hour" enabled in settings. So I don't know what that's like at all.
- Having a lot of high-speed road types is helpful, and there are apparently a lot of them available in the plugin store, or here on the forums. The more types of speedy roads you have to choose from, the more leeway you'll have in affording more of them. Each square of road (just like with zones, etc.) increases the cost of future additions of the same road type. So having a lot of roads installed keeps placement costs relatively low.
- Bridges (over water) tend to get a lot of traffic sooner than roads on land, since there aren't a lot of ways to bypass the main road over a river, lake, etc. At least, not many ways that I know of.
- I don't use tunnels, either, but... Well, should I? Do tunnels usually help with traffic? I tried it once, but it only made more traffic than before, so I stopped using them, although I hadn't made very many of them. But I'm willing to go back to it and try again, if someone here says I should.