According to Lead Gameplay Scripter Guillaume Pierre a new traffic fix is just around the corner for SimCity. Continuing on from what Stone Librande wrote about the other day, he mentioned that the traffic congestion algorithm is being tweaked, and that (to much of the players’ delight) service vehicles like Emergency and Trade Port Trucks will be given priority in coming out of their respective garages. This is awesome for my own personal game, as in my region I’ve got an oil city and a university city, both of which have their share of issues as I’m not the best player 🙂

Hello, Mayors! We’ve been busy collecting your feedback since the game launched, and I wanted to show you some of the changes we’re currently testing.

One thing that you’ve made clear was that traffic has been a frustrating issue in many cases. That’s why we’re making it better. In his blog post earlier this week, Stone Librande, our Lead Designer, mentioned how our congestion avoidance system works, with roads being weighed based on 25%, 50% and 75% congestion rates. Although this system was in the game at release, it was tuned a little too low.

Here, you can see an example of the new tuning, where vehicles pile up on a dirt road on their way to the stadium, until I build avenues around it, relieving traffic coming from the regional highway:

Finally, emergency & service vehicles such as fire trucks, ambulances, coal trucks, buses, etc… will now have priority when they leave their garages, so traffic in front of their building will stop to let them on the street.

Keep checking back here for more updates.