Or if you’re going from two groups of houses to a shop and you have no roundabout or traffic light, have the two roads meet at the shop driveway, and not at an intersection. So if you’re connecting a neighbourhood to two or more shops (which I recommend you always avoid if feasible), if you don’t have a traffic light for an efficient junction, then don’t create a junction at all and instead just connect from one shop driveway to the other. Shop entrances and house entrances are both driveways.The practical result of this is that assuming you have no roundabouts or traffic lights to spare, when hooking up houses to a shop you should path the road so that all of the houses connect directly to the road with their driveway to avoid creating junctions
I’ll correct those values if anyone in the comments has quantified the difference in speed by counting frames for a full speed car (5 uninterrupted blocks of space to speed up), driveway slowdown, and junction slowdown.
Taking visible estimations I’d estimate the ratios as: max speed: 1, driveway slowdown: 0.9, junction speed 0.25. Yes driveways do slow down your cars compared to max speed, however they don’t slow your car down anywhere near as much a junction. Re-arranging major roads or motorways at this point in the game is a death sentance unless you have a spare motorway you can use to maintain traffic while you rebuild. Now it’s all about keeping throughput as high as possible and blocking for the purpose of ensuring predictable future house spawns are able to access destinations.
Now you want to know how to start pushing for higher scores to get into the top 200.
Now with a bit of practice you’re easily getting 2.5k+ every game as you’re able to smash through the early and mid game. So you figured out the basics, segregate your roads, don’t let traffic cross wherever you can and use diagonals roads as much as you can. Lesser Known Advanced Mechanics Introduction Traffic Lights, Roundabouts, and Junctions.