Road Properties

The Road Properties section focuses on defining the specific behaviors of the roads themselves and their individual lanes. Parameters in this section include lane width (see the Lanes section), which determines how many lanes can fit on a given road segment, and speed limits (see sections Speed, Speed Variance and Lane Speed Variance), which restrict the maximum allowed speed on that road.

Additionally, road properties handle more advanced behaviors, such as intersection priorities, traffic rules, and flow direction settings, which may vary depending on the selected country’s driving standards.

These rules ensure that vehicles follow realistic traffic patterns, whether driving on the right-hand side (common in most countries) or the left-hand side (as seen in the UK, Japan, and others).

This parameter defines the pavement quality of the road, which can be:

• Good Condition (Paved)
• Fair Condition (Unpaved)
• Poor Condition (Gravel)

Depending on the option selected, the vehicles will experience different levels of vibration and bumpiness, especially on the wheels. The differences are subtle, but may help add an extra layer or realism in some situations.

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This value defines the priority of the vehicles on each road when they reach an intersection that is not managed with traffic lights. By default, a vehicle on a multilane road will have priority over a vehicle on a single-lane road.

To simplify the setup, the number of lanes will not be considered, which means that all roads with more than one lane will have the same priority.

The options for road Priority are:

• Primary
• Secondary
• Project’s default (applies the settings deffined in the Traffic settings defaults)

This value defines the priority of vehicles in an intersection when the roads have the same priority level.

The options for road Traffic rules are:

• Right-hand
• Left-hand
• Project’s default (applies the settings deffined in the Traffic settings defaults)

Both parameters (Priority and Traffic rules) are defined by default at a project level (Menu File > Settings) because they mainly depend on the country standards that are applied where the project is located.

In most cases the default values will be enough to generate the desired traffic flow. However, in some situations it may be required to manually change the priority and/or the traffic rules to adapt the traffic flow to the requirements of a particular street design.