Building for Bicycles
Hello mayors! We are excited to bring bicycles to Cities: Skylines II, and to ensure you get the most out of the feature, we have prepared this dev diary all about bikes! We’ll cover which citizens have access to bicycles, what makes them choose cycling as a means of transportation, and how you can influence this using the new bicycle infrastructure and policies.
Bicycles are an important part of creating sustainable cities, and we want the game to reflect their role. Just like in real life, cycling offers a pollution-free transport option that is faster than walking. And through the Urban Cycling Initiative policy, your citizens can even gain a health benefit, too!
Real-world bicycle infrastructure comes in many sizes and shapes, from lane color to separation from vehicle lanes, so we knew we wouldn’t be able to cover every customization option right away. Instead of trying to do a little bit of everything, we focused on building a solid foundation for bicycles that can be expanded and integrated seamlessly into future content. For now, we chose a single style of painted on-road bicycle lanes and standalone bicycle paths, and we chose green as their color to make them easy to distinguish from pedestrian paths, sidewalks, and vehicle and bus lanes. They’re accompanied by bicycle parking and a new Info View to keep track of your cyclists.
Let’s start with a look at who can cycle and how they decide to take the bicycle instead of another means of transportation. Thanks to the ability to share animations between character models, teens, adults, and seniors can all use bicycles, while children are not currently supported. This means that almost all your citizens can cycle, but whether they will do so depends on several factors: household vehicle availability, bicycle parking in the city, and pathfinding cost, which still consists of Time, Comfort, Behavior, and Money, and is influenced by the bicycle lanes available in the city.
Adding bicycles as a new means of transportation offered a challenge on the performance side. The game already compares walking, driving, or taking public transportation when choosing the best pathfinding option, and adding another option into the mix would have a noticeable impact on performance. So instead of adding a fourth option, we added a new check to see if the household has a car and whether it’s available, allowing us to keep the pathfinding comparison to three options. If the household has a car and it isn’t currently reserved or used by another household member, citizens will compare walking, driving, and using public transportation, just like before adding bicycles. If they choose driving, they will then reserve the car so no other household member can use it. When a car isn’t available, either because it’s been reserved or because the household doesn’t own one, citizens will compare walking, cycling, and using public transportation - or a combination of all three if that’s the best option.
Unlike cars, all households have enough bicycles available for all their members. When a citizen decides to travel using a bike, they bring it out of storage, and the bike is then theirs for the remainder of their trip. Since citizens cannot put bicycles in their pockets, they need somewhere to park them, whether they are visiting the park, continuing on public transportation, getting through their workday, or finishing their shopping. Once they finish their errands and return home, the bicycle is stored either in a bike rack or inside the home, and they may use any bicycle available next time they travel.
Bicycle parking is key to getting citizens to cycle in your city. While some buildings are already equipped with bicycle racks that can be used, your city will need more bicycle parking if you want many citizens to cycle. Placing them in key locations, such as near public transportation stops and stations, near commercial areas, and, if you hope to see citizens cycle to work, near offices and industrial areas, will encourage more citizens to pick the bicycle.
Thankfully, bicycle parking doesn’t take up much space, and we have several options to choose from, all found alongside vehicle parking in the Parking Spaces Menu under Roads. The first three, the Bicycle Stand, the Bicycle Stands, and the Bicycle Shelter, are all placed on networks in the same way you place bus stops or mailboxes, making them easy to add in areas where space is limited. They can be added to roads and the divided pedestrian-bicycle path (more on that later), and just take up a bit of the sidewalk space. However, they can only store 2, 8, and 10 bicycles, respectively.
Add Bicycle Stands in front of schools, shops, public transportation - anywhere on the sidewalk or pedestrian-bicycle path.
If you have the available space, one of the 9 bicycle parking buildings may be a better option, as they can store significantly more bicycles. The smallest option, the Small Bicycle Storage, takes up just one zoning tile and can store up to 16 bicycles, while the Underground Bicycle Hall starts at a whopping 452 bicycle parking spots, with a subbuilding that adds 50 spots per upgrade. And yes, you can add multiple upgrades to it as long as you have the space.
Bicycle parking is a great way to fill in tiny empty spaces while encouraging people to cycle.
While bicycle parking is required for cycling to be a viable transportation option, the availability of bicycle lanes impacts the paths cyclists choose. Bicycles can ride on the carriageway alongside vehicles, but this isn’t the preferred option for many cyclists, and your citizens are no different. They much prefer to have dedicated lanes, which is reflected in a higher Comfort score. Standalone bicycle paths have the highest Comfort score, followed by on-road bicycle lanes. This means that while travel time might be shorter when cycling on the carriageway, cyclists will often prefer dedicated lanes as they are more comfortable.
Bicycle lanes are found in the Road Services Menu, and are used to upgrade roads with either one or two bicycle lanes. Use the single bicycle lane option when you want a lane on just one side of the road, and use the double option to add bicycle lanes to both sides of the road in one upgrade. Almost all non-highway roads can be upgraded with bicycle lanes as they replace the parallel roadside parking, which also means that they can be added alongside road-based public transport like bus lanes and tram tracks.
In the Landscaping Menu, we have a brand new tab named Bicycle Paths & Quays, which, you guessed it, is where you find the standalone bicycle paths. These include one-way and two-way bike paths, ideal for creating shortcuts or connecting roads with bicycle lanes. They can, of course, be elevated to cross busy roads or tunnel underground if you prefer. Three bridge designs are available for the two-way bicycle path for more stylish options that require fewer pillars, making them great for crossing those wide highways.
If you’re looking to combine pedestrian foot traffic and bicycles, the Divided Wide Pedestrian-Bicycle Path is a great option. This network has dedicated lanes for both pedestrians and cyclists, so you don’t need to build two parallel paths when you want to support both. Perfect for a city aiming to reduce car traffic. Two wide quays with the same configuration of lanes are included, so your seaside cities can support cycling too.
Both on-road bicycle lanes and standalone bicycle paths can be connected in the same way you would connect a pedestrian path to the sidewalk of a road. Cyclists slow down when crossing the sidewalk, but otherwise transition between the two network types, so you can use any combination that makes sense for your city.
Bicycle paths connect to roads just like pedestrian paths.
With bicycle parking and dedicated lanes in the city, more and more citizens will hop on their bikes for at least part of their journey. With the Urban Cycling Initiative policy applied to a district, you can encourage even more people to cycle instead of driving. The policy reduces the probability that citizens reserve the household car and instead include their bicycle when considering the best transport option. While this means the car is still available to other household members, they are also affected by the policy and might skip the car as a means of transportation. On top of that, the policy provides citizens with a small bonus to their health!
With so many cyclists in the city, you might have areas or even districts where bicycles sharing lanes with motorized vehicles slow down traffic too much, causing traffic jams. Or maybe you just want to ensure they use your newly added bicycle lanes and paths, instead of taking a shortcut on roads without them. For those situations, we have two ways to restrict bicycles: The Bicycle Restriction tool, found in the Road Services Menu, can be applied to individual road segments, while the Bicycle Traffic Restriction policy can be applied to an entire district. Both work the same way, restricting bicycles from using the carriageway, keeping them in the bicycle lanes, or encouraging them to find alternative routes. If you add these restrictions, make sure your bicycle parking is on roads with bicycle lanes, so cyclists can still access them.
Restricting bicycles from using the carriageway can help keep your traffic flowing smoothly.
Before we end this dev diary, we want to show you the new Bicycles Info View. Here you can track your bike parking availability to see how many bicycles are currently parked in your city and how many available spots you have. You can also easily spot the parking buildings to see if any areas of your city are lacking bike parking spots, and even switch to other Info Views, such as Education or Public Transportation, to find ideal spots to add more parking.
By default, the Info View shows your bicycle network, highlighting areas accessible by cyclists, the dedicated bicycle lanes and paths, as well as roads where bicycles are disallowed on the carriageways. If you switch to the Bicycle Traffic Volume overlay, you can see which roads and paths get the most traffic, so you can evaluate the success of your bicycle network or add new lanes or shortcuts to encourage cyclists to take alternative routes.
Use the new Bicycle Info Views to track the success of your bicycle infrastructure.
We hope you enjoyed this look at bicycles in Cities: Skylines II and that the information in this dev diary helps you create the bicycle network that’s just right for your city - whether that’s buzzing with bikes or not. As always, we would love to see how you use this feature in the game, so don’t hesitate to share your screenshots on social media or any of the community hubs.
