Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust

Post by jeffbarr » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #21

BelleOfTheBall wrote: post #15

While I'm not overly optimistic about his goal of getting solutions from the game to be enacted in real life Seattle, it's a really admirable idea and an impressive execution to boot. I'm wondering if, with a big enough budget and a team of skilled devs like Dustin here, the local government could create more refined simulations to tackle these planning issues. Or would that inevitably run into the problem mentioned…

> Project Mission: 'People are local experts on the small slice of the city they interact with daily -- the one left turn lane that always backs up or a certain set of poorly timed walk signals' 100% of the intersections I see that get backed up are backed up because someone blocks the box. Can we get more enforcement for that? They don't even need a patrol car. Just have an officer stand at the corner of Mercer and…

Post by wizzwizz4 » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #36

ken wrote: post #20

This is pretty cool! One thing that bothers me about every traffic simulation I've ever seen, though: all of the vehicles and pedestrians here seem to be obeying the law. That's just not realistic -- especially on Mercer, which is blocked (both directions) every few minutes in rush hour by some jerk trying to make an illegal turn onto a packed street. I'd say the main causes of traffic blockages that I encounter duri…

I've had a lot of fun tweaking this setting in Cities:Skylines. There's a user-written mod called Traffic Manager Presidential Edition which lets you enable some (but not all) bad behaviors. The principle one is entering an intersection that they don't have room to leave, so they're still there when the signal changes and block the cross direction. (Is this AKA blocking the box? That sounds like a regional term.) Thi…

Post by ibrault » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #52

brandonscott wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are studies that show merging late actually reduces congestion: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/why-last-second-lane-m...

An Exit lane is probably a different situation from the one described though, and so different behavior is better.

Post by dabreegster » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

natestemen wrote: post #13

farhanhubble wrote: post #8

I swear I was discussing exactly this sort of simulation with my brother as both of us wondered how many city planners model the changes they are making to the road networks before pumping millions into projects that dump traffic from one point to another. Additionally, it'd be interesting to simulate the cascading effect of traffic violations like bad parkings, straddling lanes. Kudos to Dustin for working on this.

in nyc it's quite common (maybe even required) to run simulations of changes of infrastructure before making them to see how they will effect traffic. source: my partner helps run these simulations as part of their job/their company gets contract work from the city all the time to check changes of bus routes/etc.

Post by dabreegster » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #2

The next step would be writing a program to modify intersections, monitor how long cars take to get a journey done and optimize the streets for total transit time, or emissions, or whatever. That's probably faster than letting people discover optima along their usual routes.