Players of Cities: Skylines will spend a lot of their time building and altering roads. Traffic is a very important part of running a city, and if people can't get to where they need to go then services will grind to a halt.
Players can control traffic by adding roundabouts, converting two-way roads into one-way roads, adding extra lanes, and so on. However, removing and replacing roads can cause issues, especially since the construction zones are based on road locations. That's why it's important to understand how the road upgrade tool works in Cities: Skylines and how players can use it to customize their city roads without having to start over from the beginning.
The Upgrade Road Function
When players select the road icon along the bottom, some road selections show up in the center of the interface. Several more buttons appear to the left of these, and they allow players to create straight roads, roads with a single curve, and freeform roads with as many curves as players like. The last button is an exclamation mark, and this one activates upgrade mode.
While upgrade mode is active, players can place their cursor over existing road segments and replace them with the road type they've currently selected. This new road can be wider or narrower than the current road and the upgrade will still go through. If the new road would cost more than the existing road, then upgrading will come with a cost based on the difference between the road types. If the new road costs the same or less than the existing road, then the upgrade is free.
Upgrade Issues
There are a few issues with road upgrades that can keep players from widening all their city's roads at once.
- Just like with building new roads, players can't upgrade to road types they don't have access to.
- Zoned buildings will demolish themselves when players widen or narrow roads, but the streets will need re-zoning to account for the new width.
- Civic buildings don't automatically move and can prevent players from widening the road. Fortunately, every civic building has a "Relocate Building" option that appears when highlighted, and players can use this to move structures out of the way during road upgrades. Each relocation costs money, but this cost is much lower than the price of destroying it and rebuilding.
- Roundabouts can't be upgraded. If players try, the roundabout instead becomes a circular road full of stoplights, and the point of a roundabout is to avoid full stops.
- Players can replace highways with something other than highway lanes, but doing so will cause traffic to slow down significantly.
Cities: Skylines is available now on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One, and it's coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on February 15.