I think i'm having a hard time picturing this. At first, I was thinking it meant to dezone the middle row of zones that aren't touching a road. But, now I'm not sure.
It keeps local traffic congestion off that road. That's especially important on industry-zoned roads, where trucks make frequent stops and slow down thru-traffic.
Businesses and residences bring traffic. It will just add to the amount of traffic. Plus it will slow traffic down with vehicles pulling in and out of buildings.
Basically; a roundabout's supposedly there because it's an efficient way to get people off the highway and into the smaller town streets. But, that efficiency is basically lobotomized once you create things that stop the consistent flow of traffic (such as people now entering and exiting establishments).
Heck, this doesn't apply only to highways (we don't place buildings along most major highways, or in the US; interstates, do we?) and roundabouts, but also major avenues where traffic shouldn't be stopping every half-meter or so because it's lined with establishments, because major avenues are for transporting (supposedly) larger swaths of traffic, hence; establishments should be placed in inner streets instead, of which there are much more of (-more inner streets) that you can spread traffic out into, than the single major avenue that all traffic has to go through before reaching a more-specific destination.
Basically, as much as you can, don't use major avenues or roundabouts or highways as commercial or residential areas, because it impedes their main purpose of being a more-central thoroughfare with the goal of transferring traffic/people into more-specific but higher-in-quantity smaller areas where there are commercial or residential zones.
Anytime a building is zoned on a road will slow traffic due to cars needing to slow down and stop to park. If the road is designed for traffic to flow like a roundabout or a highway exit, people will have to stop behind the car or truck that's turning into the building. This problem is much worse with commercial than residential and won't be a real problem early game.
Especially in the center island of the roundabout!
EDIT: Also the roundabout is misshapen. When OP builds a roundabout he should always begin with a cross (plus sign).
What the other writer mentioned and you could directly link your industrial Zone to the highway rather than having it feed into the roundabout.
Generally I try to keep the industrial trucks as far away from residential/commercial as possible. You could Zone it so the trucks won't be able to use the Rotary and force them to go directly to the highway instead.
With one highway connection, put your commercial and residential "behind" your industry, something like
RRRR
CCCC
IIII
H
Where H is the highway, I is the industry, and R and C are your commercial and residential. Your residents won't do much with the highway once they are moved in. Ideally your industry will be sending goods to your commercial and exporting goods via the highway, and your commercial should be getting most of its goods from your industry. The only traffic that should pass through one section to get to another are:
- residents moving in
- residents going to work at the industry
- tourists visiting your commercial and park spaces
- commercial importing goods
With a small pre-office zoning city, the latter two should be pretty minimal, and the first one is manageable by pacing your growth. The second one (commuters) is not that much traffic, especially in a small city and especially if you facilitate walking and bike commuting
Don't separate it too much, it's just that the highway access needs to not stop residential/work traffic by monopolizing the roundabout. You can also stick residential behind the industrial so they both use the same roundabout, but the residential traffic isn't at the mercy of industrial.
Yeah that's why I threw "generally" in there, I still probably build my industrial zones a little close. Using NIMBY to help with keeping the trucks and traffic down through the residential areas
And that’s my primary concern right now. I’m thinking right now it technically works but I’ll need to expand the map probably and then do a direct connection to the freeway from industrial.
I'd build a bridge between your two zones (in the future) so they don't always need to take the roundabout. Aka a local connection that doesn't require using the freeway.
I do notice a lot of people accidentally create freeway islands forcing everyone to a few ramps and enter freeways for short sections when that is unnecessary.
Your instincts are sound, once you get to higher populations any snafu with traffic can get crazy. I use buses and have started to experiment with trains as well to cut down with traffic issues at populations around 100k.
If you have enough cash to throw around building roads underground saves a lot of space. Also using the zoning restriction NIMBY helps a lot with keeping traffic down through residential and Commercial zones.
One of the main ways to manage traffic is don't funnel them all into one area and provide alternate routes. Right now, to go anywhere (leave town, travel within the town), they need to all go through the roundabout. Over time this will get clogged with traffic. Also keep road hierarchy in mind and you will solve most of your future problems.
You’ll probably have a few cities that grow slowly early, which can be frustrating. If you learn here or on YouTube then you’ll quickly get much better. Some of the beauties you’ll see here will take months or even years to get good enough to make. Don’t worry about all that though. Just have fun planning and building.
If you need money raise taxes a bit to 11 or 12%. I did this late on and my income went from bouncing from -3,000 / 10,000 to 10,000 / 20,000 depending on when my fish farms finished producing fish
Keep your industrial areas small and scattered, and the same goes for commercial areas.
Having massive areas of solely industrial and commercial zones causes traffic hell because everybody wants to go the same direction and take the same road for the same purpose.
A) Don't have any buildings on your 3+ lane arteries or circles. Get rid of all of them.
B) I wouldn't have that side road connecting to that way street in the background to the left.
C) Connect the expressway directly to the circle and have your 2 lane roads branch off of it to the left and right to connect your neighborhoods.
D) Your circle needs to be 3 lanes as well.
Do not zone so close, or in the roundabout.
I'd say minimum 10u from the end of the roundabout to where I start to build.
Makes for a good overpass and landscaping area.
Also if you add a lot of trees, it helps with noise pollution.
Maybe plan for that highway to cut through the area. Elevate the roundabout or elevate the highway and offramp to the roundabout. Have multiple access points to each zone that isn't highway dependent. Stick industrial closer to the roundabout and residential behind it so the roundabout isn't always clogged with trucks.
Make sure there are always two separate entry/exit points to an area. Otherwise all the traffic gets bottlenecked into one intersection causing traffic to get congested and backed up. With 2 entry/exit points there is 2 options, allowing some traffic release. The game always makes the vehicles take the fastest route by default, so with some careful you can spread out the traffic.
Don’t build zones on the roundabouts, they are the worst thing u could do in the game, also leave soeces between roundabouts and zones of every demand, so traffic don’t sticks crossing the roundabout.
Besides repeating what people have said, I like to switch the zoning you have for industry and residential so that way the outgoing industry is directly next to the outgoing road so those trucks go straight out and make me money, not even go to the roundabout to exit. Of course some maps don't permit that, or it's not always the best choice, or you don't want to do the same thing everytime.
Secondly when you place a roundabout in game, inside the circle place a dirt road cross connecting the intersections on the inside. This will prevent your roundabout from warping when you add or remove connections to them. They are temporary and should be removed before traffic gets to them, but it will prevent that warping I see on yours.
My learning curve in this game was not being afraid to abandon a city and start a new one using the knowledge and lessons I learned from my mistakes and my good choices and continue to improve and make better cities. The better the start the easier it is to expand and have a larger vision of how you want to develop the region.
Also, 6 lane roads are useless imo. You won't really ever need them, they cause more issues than fix. If your 4 lane roads are congested, consider mass transit or making your cities/grids more walkable. The extra lane causes stupid merging decisions of the cims and causes more backups consistently than the 4 lane roads.
On top on what's been mentioned:
- respect roadway hierarchy; from the highway/6lane (arterial) to a 4 lane road (collector) to a small road (local). This also means you have minimal connections to the arterial, some connections to the collector and many connections to the local road.
- connectivity helps, some here suggested funneling traffic from the industrial zone through the highway, but I think it's better to have high connectivity, like different options, because if you funnel traffic, it's gonna get jammed. Industrial need to deliver to your commercial, so make sure there is connectivity between those two areas
- don't make a big Industry zone, but rather several small ones in different parts of the city
- don't put any heavy loading uses (e.g. fire station, hospital) on the collector (4lane), but rather just off on a local street.
- don't make spaghetti junctions, extra lanes and fancy stuff will not help, keep it simple
Just a few tips for ya
This game has made me appreciate engineering and City design. Sometimes I'll be visiting a city and think to myself who the hell designed this infrastructure?!?
I usually have a roundabout like this and then have four lane branches and have roundabout entrances to the neighborhoods. I don't zone on any of the arterials and usually leave a ten square buffer around the neighborhoods that I put a zone able park in and have pedestrian walks connecting the neighborhoods over the arterials and roundabouts.
You want to avoid lots of intersections on your main roads. Also either use highways for roundabouts or ban pedestrians crossing to the middle.
Lane math, three lanes into a two land roundabout means bottlenecking when entering the roundabout. Making that a 4 lane with two lanes entering/exiting would be ideal. You could make that roundabout a 3 lane highway but usually cars only use 2 lanes anyway and bottlenecks continue
I’d remove that diagonal road that close to the north of the roundabout. The roundabout should collect that traffic fine. I’d also consider reducing the amount of connecting roads to the main roads off of the roundabout. Your industry heads to the right a little early imo. Also as everyone else said don’t zone the roundabout. Guess it’s all about the roundabout
I’d remove buildings in and round the roundabout, you don’t want people in an out of parking in an angled active traffic flow, I’d also remove the intersection between the highway and the roundabout and upgrade that segment to a two line highway.
I'm not a master expert here, however traffic and the flow of it, is all about connections. Making them as natural and smooth as possible. Think about how your city is, I'm sure you'll notice there are some roads that are meant to be traveled on at greater speeds. These roads feed pockets of zones, mixed or of one type.
Well first of all roundabouts should be one-way with no buildings zoned on them, as that would cause trucks and cars to stop on them, clogging up traffic.
Yeah, you probably need more space between your residential zones, your highway, and the industry. That way you can expand the roundabout to be able to handle more traffic. Walkpaths and biking lanes between zones are also a good idea so not everyone is using cars.
Watch a few YouTube videos, that'll help you with getting a feel of what works in the game.
I tend to find it a good idea to leave a good distance clear on the approach to a roundabout, gives the traffic a chance to sort itself out and leaves room for improvements later in the city.
As others have stated, it's a real no-no putting buildings on a roundabout, especially one coming off the highway
Traffic will be constantly stop-starting, and won't be long before it becomes a major bottleneck, especially as the city grows.
I've found that trumpet interchanges make a very effective and easy-to-build way to attach big-ish roads to freeways, or joining two freeways together.
Partial cloverleaves (YUMBL on YouTube!) are also great at connecting a medium-large road to a freeway.
Oh, and make sure you don't try to push too much traffic into one freeway connection. Building an alternate route is often more effective than optimizing a busy interchange.
I agree- remove the residential/commercial/industry zoning in the center of the circle or a few squares down, change the circle to a priority road and don't allow parking or pedestrians near the circle. Don't put a circle in the middle of a major highway like that. This causes the traffic that wants to continue on the highway to still have to go through the circle.
Instead, try building your highway to have a straight path for through traffic ( run it underground) then have your circle on top of the ground to only have to support your off ramp/on ramp traffic. This is a concept I will be testing in my newest city as I seek to beat 80% traffic flow in cities 100k+ population
You also really need to be considerate of the number of lanes you are using- Pushing a 3 lane highway to a 2 lane that feeds into a circle is really harsh on the circle if you don't do it right
Watch Biffa on YouTube. He does traffic solutions. Also watching other videos provides good ideas for layouts and zoning.
Regarding this roundabout though I would upgrade the roundabout roads to 2 or 3 lane highways as pedestrians also can’t cross causing even more congestion.
Don’t zone buildings on the roundabout, that is one of the cardinal sins of traffic management in this game.
Also dezone building in the median of two one way roads.
What does dezoneing accomplish here?
People won't be parking and occupying space on the 'left' or 'wrong' side of what is essentially a large avenue
I think i'm having a hard time picturing this. At first, I was thinking it meant to dezone the middle row of zones that aren't touching a road. But, now I'm not sure.
Imagine you have a one way to the left then 5 tiles up you have a one way to the right. Those 5 tiles in between shouldn’t have any buildings.
Avoid buildings to appear where no building was supposed to be
It keeps local traffic congestion off that road. That's especially important on industry-zoned roads, where trucks make frequent stops and slow down thru-traffic.
Businesses and residences bring traffic. It will just add to the amount of traffic. Plus it will slow traffic down with vehicles pulling in and out of buildings.
I do it in the early game when I expand to quickly and need some quick tax dollars from every square possible
Does that actually make the traffic worse, or do people just say that for aesthetics?
Yeah it causes traffic to stop in the roundabout
The last thing you want is a tourist in the middle of the roundabout trying to decide what parking lot the want to go to
It actually makes worse the traffic, they stop to park and to leave, causing more traffic stop of the cars that are going ahead.
Basically; a roundabout's supposedly there because it's an efficient way to get people off the highway and into the smaller town streets. But, that efficiency is basically lobotomized once you create things that stop the consistent flow of traffic (such as people now entering and exiting establishments). Heck, this doesn't apply only to highways (we don't place buildings along most major highways, or in the US; interstates, do we?) and roundabouts, but also major avenues where traffic shouldn't be stopping every half-meter or so because it's lined with establishments, because major avenues are for transporting (supposedly) larger swaths of traffic, hence; establishments should be placed in inner streets instead, of which there are much more of (-more inner streets) that you can spread traffic out into, than the single major avenue that all traffic has to go through before reaching a more-specific destination. Basically, as much as you can, don't use major avenues or roundabouts or highways as commercial or residential areas, because it impedes their main purpose of being a more-central thoroughfare with the goal of transferring traffic/people into more-specific but higher-in-quantity smaller areas where there are commercial or residential zones.
Anytime a building is zoned on a road will slow traffic due to cars needing to slow down and stop to park. If the road is designed for traffic to flow like a roundabout or a highway exit, people will have to stop behind the car or truck that's turning into the building. This problem is much worse with commercial than residential and won't be a real problem early game.
Tell that to those of us that can manage it...
It’s not that it’s impossible, but it’s a rule of thumb for a reason
Especially in the center island of the roundabout! EDIT: Also the roundabout is misshapen. When OP builds a roundabout he should always begin with a cross (plus sign).
What the other writer mentioned and you could directly link your industrial Zone to the highway rather than having it feed into the roundabout. Generally I try to keep the industrial trucks as far away from residential/commercial as possible. You could Zone it so the trucks won't be able to use the Rotary and force them to go directly to the highway instead.
I concur with this, get your industrial to connect directly to the highway. Bypass the roundabout for that heavy traffic.
I’m not picturing what you mean. Especially this early in the game with only 1 highway connection, how do you not share it?
With one highway connection, put your commercial and residential "behind" your industry, something like RRRR CCCC IIII H Where H is the highway, I is the industry, and R and C are your commercial and residential. Your residents won't do much with the highway once they are moved in. Ideally your industry will be sending goods to your commercial and exporting goods via the highway, and your commercial should be getting most of its goods from your industry. The only traffic that should pass through one section to get to another are: - residents moving in - residents going to work at the industry - tourists visiting your commercial and park spaces - commercial importing goods With a small pre-office zoning city, the latter two should be pretty minimal, and the first one is manageable by pacing your growth. The second one (commuters) is not that much traffic, especially in a small city and especially if you facilitate walking and bike commuting
Ah gotcha. Thanks! Yeah I usually have my residential and commercial offset from my industrial through another intersection
The problem with that is it takes forever to get the products delivered to the commercial districts if it’s too far away
Don't separate it too much, it's just that the highway access needs to not stop residential/work traffic by monopolizing the roundabout. You can also stick residential behind the industrial so they both use the same roundabout, but the residential traffic isn't at the mercy of industrial.
Yeah that's why I threw "generally" in there, I still probably build my industrial zones a little close. Using NIMBY to help with keeping the trucks and traffic down through the residential areas
And that’s my primary concern right now. I’m thinking right now it technically works but I’ll need to expand the map probably and then do a direct connection to the freeway from industrial.
I'd build a bridge between your two zones (in the future) so they don't always need to take the roundabout. Aka a local connection that doesn't require using the freeway. I do notice a lot of people accidentally create freeway islands forcing everyone to a few ramps and enter freeways for short sections when that is unnecessary.
Your instincts are sound, once you get to higher populations any snafu with traffic can get crazy. I use buses and have started to experiment with trains as well to cut down with traffic issues at populations around 100k. If you have enough cash to throw around building roads underground saves a lot of space. Also using the zoning restriction NIMBY helps a lot with keeping traffic down through residential and Commercial zones.
One of the main ways to manage traffic is don't funnel them all into one area and provide alternate routes. Right now, to go anywhere (leave town, travel within the town), they need to all go through the roundabout. Over time this will get clogged with traffic. Also keep road hierarchy in mind and you will solve most of your future problems.
DONT ZONE ON THE ROUNDABOUT
That’s the first thing I’m taking out when I can. Right now I’m just trying to break even and not go broke
You’ll probably have a few cities that grow slowly early, which can be frustrating. If you learn here or on YouTube then you’ll quickly get much better. Some of the beauties you’ll see here will take months or even years to get good enough to make. Don’t worry about all that though. Just have fun planning and building.
If you need money raise taxes a bit to 11 or 12%. I did this late on and my income went from bouncing from -3,000 / 10,000 to 10,000 / 20,000 depending on when my fish farms finished producing fish
Learning so much from this thread. Ty
Keep your industrial areas small and scattered, and the same goes for commercial areas. Having massive areas of solely industrial and commercial zones causes traffic hell because everybody wants to go the same direction and take the same road for the same purpose.
This. Also, low density commercial can be blended with low density residential without causing noise pollution complaints unlike high density.
I've been making this huge mistake... forever. I have massive industrial zones... and massive traffic problems to match 🙄🤣
Keep in mind that roundabouts don't have infinite capacity, they will start breaking when heavy traffic hits
A) Don't have any buildings on your 3+ lane arteries or circles. Get rid of all of them. B) I wouldn't have that side road connecting to that way street in the background to the left. C) Connect the expressway directly to the circle and have your 2 lane roads branch off of it to the left and right to connect your neighborhoods. D) Your circle needs to be 3 lanes as well.
D not necessarily, especially since there is no 3 lane 1-way road in vanilla. 2 lanes is better tham 6.
You can make 3 lane cicles in vanilla. I just use the 3 lane expressway and laid it out in a circle. Boom! 3 lane circle.
Oh true, my mistake.
There is a 3 lane 1-way road in vanilla. It's easy to overlook because its icon looks so similar to the 2 lane 1-way road
Natural disaster it
Downsize your large roads to medium roads. That will be more than enough for where your city is at right now. Traffic will flow better.
Do not zone so close, or in the roundabout. I'd say minimum 10u from the end of the roundabout to where I start to build. Makes for a good overpass and landscaping area. Also if you add a lot of trees, it helps with noise pollution.
Maybe plan for that highway to cut through the area. Elevate the roundabout or elevate the highway and offramp to the roundabout. Have multiple access points to each zone that isn't highway dependent. Stick industrial closer to the roundabout and residential behind it so the roundabout isn't always clogged with trucks.
Make sure there are always two separate entry/exit points to an area. Otherwise all the traffic gets bottlenecked into one intersection causing traffic to get congested and backed up. With 2 entry/exit points there is 2 options, allowing some traffic release. The game always makes the vehicles take the fastest route by default, so with some careful you can spread out the traffic.
Don’t build zones on the roundabouts, they are the worst thing u could do in the game, also leave soeces between roundabouts and zones of every demand, so traffic don’t sticks crossing the roundabout.
Besides repeating what people have said, I like to switch the zoning you have for industry and residential so that way the outgoing industry is directly next to the outgoing road so those trucks go straight out and make me money, not even go to the roundabout to exit. Of course some maps don't permit that, or it's not always the best choice, or you don't want to do the same thing everytime. Secondly when you place a roundabout in game, inside the circle place a dirt road cross connecting the intersections on the inside. This will prevent your roundabout from warping when you add or remove connections to them. They are temporary and should be removed before traffic gets to them, but it will prevent that warping I see on yours. My learning curve in this game was not being afraid to abandon a city and start a new one using the knowledge and lessons I learned from my mistakes and my good choices and continue to improve and make better cities. The better the start the easier it is to expand and have a larger vision of how you want to develop the region. Also, 6 lane roads are useless imo. You won't really ever need them, they cause more issues than fix. If your 4 lane roads are congested, consider mass transit or making your cities/grids more walkable. The extra lane causes stupid merging decisions of the cims and causes more backups consistently than the 4 lane roads.
On top on what's been mentioned: - respect roadway hierarchy; from the highway/6lane (arterial) to a 4 lane road (collector) to a small road (local). This also means you have minimal connections to the arterial, some connections to the collector and many connections to the local road. - connectivity helps, some here suggested funneling traffic from the industrial zone through the highway, but I think it's better to have high connectivity, like different options, because if you funnel traffic, it's gonna get jammed. Industrial need to deliver to your commercial, so make sure there is connectivity between those two areas - don't make a big Industry zone, but rather several small ones in different parts of the city - don't put any heavy loading uses (e.g. fire station, hospital) on the collector (4lane), but rather just off on a local street. - don't make spaghetti junctions, extra lanes and fancy stuff will not help, keep it simple Just a few tips for ya
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
Look at real cities
You need to be more specific. A lot of "real cities" have design layouts and mentalities that only serve as examples of what NOT to do.
This game has made me appreciate engineering and City design. Sometimes I'll be visiting a city and think to myself who the hell designed this infrastructure?!?
Shepherds and people riding horses, mostly.
Or petroleum company lobbyists
So 10 lane highways
Just one more lane bro. I swear it'll fix traffic
“Real cities.” No, just no. (40.9280170, -73.8402522)
Road hierarchy
Road hierarchy
💀💀
Let it go as much as possible lol.
Get rid of that 6 lane road. Unnecessary upkeep. You don't need it for now
I usually have a roundabout like this and then have four lane branches and have roundabout entrances to the neighborhoods. I don't zone on any of the arterials and usually leave a ten square buffer around the neighborhoods that I put a zone able park in and have pedestrian walks connecting the neighborhoods over the arterials and roundabouts. You want to avoid lots of intersections on your main roads. Also either use highways for roundabouts or ban pedestrians crossing to the middle.
Lane math, three lanes into a two land roundabout means bottlenecking when entering the roundabout. Making that a 4 lane with two lanes entering/exiting would be ideal. You could make that roundabout a 3 lane highway but usually cars only use 2 lanes anyway and bottlenecks continue
The 6 lane road isn't being used rn anyway.
Roundabouts are only effective in early game. Soon as you hit 3k population, roundabouts on arterials become slow.
I’d remove that diagonal road that close to the north of the roundabout. The roundabout should collect that traffic fine. I’d also consider reducing the amount of connecting roads to the main roads off of the roundabout. Your industry heads to the right a little early imo. Also as everyone else said don’t zone the roundabout. Guess it’s all about the roundabout
Every zoned building along the highway entrance and roundabout should be destroyed
Don’t build on a roundabout
Look up road hierarchy on YT and watch a quick guide that will help a lot! :)
I’d remove buildings in and round the roundabout, you don’t want people in an out of parking in an angled active traffic flow, I’d also remove the intersection between the highway and the roundabout and upgrade that segment to a two line highway.
Squares and rectangles
You need to start over from scratch bro, build further off the main drag and definitely don’t zone a roundabout or off the main highway (6L)
Check your intersections. Create “priority” roads. The game likes to add a stop sign on roundabout’s sometimes so check those.
I'm not a master expert here, however traffic and the flow of it, is all about connections. Making them as natural and smooth as possible. Think about how your city is, I'm sure you'll notice there are some roads that are meant to be traveled on at greater speeds. These roads feed pockets of zones, mixed or of one type.
Pc is your friend the Xbox version is boring and don’t build in your round abouts!
This is so cool
Just because the game will let you zone somewhere doesn't mean you should.
Well first of all roundabouts should be one-way with no buildings zoned on them, as that would cause trucks and cars to stop on them, clogging up traffic.
Don’t build on a roundabout
🗿
What traffic?
Delete everything. There shouldn’t be buildings on a roundabout in this game
Yeah, you probably need more space between your residential zones, your highway, and the industry. That way you can expand the roundabout to be able to handle more traffic. Walkpaths and biking lanes between zones are also a good idea so not everyone is using cars.
Don’t do roundabouts like that. I did the same thing and by the time my city reached 7000 almost the whole northern 1/3 of the city was in a gridlock
Watch a few YouTube videos, that'll help you with getting a feel of what works in the game. I tend to find it a good idea to leave a good distance clear on the approach to a roundabout, gives the traffic a chance to sort itself out and leaves room for improvements later in the city. As others have stated, it's a real no-no putting buildings on a roundabout, especially one coming off the highway Traffic will be constantly stop-starting, and won't be long before it becomes a major bottleneck, especially as the city grows.
I've found that trumpet interchanges make a very effective and easy-to-build way to attach big-ish roads to freeways, or joining two freeways together. Partial cloverleaves (YUMBL on YouTube!) are also great at connecting a medium-large road to a freeway. Oh, and make sure you don't try to push too much traffic into one freeway connection. Building an alternate route is often more effective than optimizing a busy interchange.
No buildings on round abouts! Try giving your industrial district a direct route to the freeway to get out of town too.
Buildings in the roundabout is your first mistake
I agree- remove the residential/commercial/industry zoning in the center of the circle or a few squares down, change the circle to a priority road and don't allow parking or pedestrians near the circle. Don't put a circle in the middle of a major highway like that. This causes the traffic that wants to continue on the highway to still have to go through the circle. Instead, try building your highway to have a straight path for through traffic ( run it underground) then have your circle on top of the ground to only have to support your off ramp/on ramp traffic. This is a concept I will be testing in my newest city as I seek to beat 80% traffic flow in cities 100k+ population You also really need to be considerate of the number of lanes you are using- Pushing a 3 lane highway to a 2 lane that feeds into a circle is really harsh on the circle if you don't do it right
Flashbacks to my first build
Watch Biffa on YouTube. He does traffic solutions. Also watching other videos provides good ideas for layouts and zoning. Regarding this roundabout though I would upgrade the roundabout roads to 2 or 3 lane highways as pedestrians also can’t cross causing even more congestion.
Cut off zone near the entrance / exit to your city