Cities: Skylines Saves Polish City From Flawed Ring Road
Cities: Skylines served a road fan as a mockup showing the problems of a planned road junction. The Polish General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways (GDDKiA) admitted that the highlighted problems were real and ordered the project to be redesigned.
Video games can be used in many ways - not only for entertainment. One Polish fan of road construction used Cities: Skylines to point out errors in the design of the ring road interchange near Krakow, one of the biggest Polish cities. As it turned out, he was right and the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways (GDDKiA) decided to change the design.
Cities: Skylines as a model
An 11-minute video appeared on YouTube on the Autostrada Polska channel (see below) discussing the problems of the aforementioned junction project. He used the popular city-builder Cities: Skylines was used as a model to illustrate his point.
The exact shape of the junction was recreated in the game and then the traffic load on the individual fragments was shown. This made it possible to simulate which sections would generate problems. Cities: Skylines contains tools for determining traffic density and indicating which areas generate congestions.. In addition, the author of the video pointed out sections that force many lane changes and generate a higher risk of accidents. This was shown on the example of car behavior in the game.
It was not stated, however, whether his demonstration was based on the basic version of the game, in which we do not have much influence on the routes of vehicles, or whether mods such as Traffic Manager: President Edition were used. Such tools enable us to increase the realism of the game and accurately set speed limits or correct lane changes.
Of course the simulation in Cities: Skylines was not the only argument The author of the video also referred to analysis of traffic volume on Krakow's ring roads, indicating that in reality it is higher than assumed in the original plans for the interchange.
GDDKiA orders redesign
GDDKiA decided to refer to the video and published a comment under it. It shows that in November last year the authority received data from General Traffic Measurement, but as an additional verification it also commissioned an analysis from Cracow University of Technology. As reported by a major Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza [in Polish], the conclusions obtained as a result of the measurements are consistent with the claims published by Autostrady Polska channel.
Ultimately, a decision was made to redesign the problematic junction. Thus, it is an unusual case when a video game has influenced a national investment.
