OpenGeofiction
Any tips for making a good/realistic network of roads?
Posted by dryerlint on 27 May 2017 in English.As per the Making Realistic Countries guide, I decided to finally add in a network of primary/secondary roads (not motorways, those were done earlier) to my country.
A few days later and I realize I’m kind of disappointed. The big intercity motorways seem alright, but I really didn’t know what to do with the supporting highways, and as a result they look rather unrealistic and sloppy, like they were just randomly drawn onto the map.
The Guide mentions prioritizing connections to rural areas and smaller towns, but since those two things are more or less just spread over a wide area, I’m not sure what to do other than “randomly draw roads sprawling over a wide area” - and that just comes out, again, unrealistic and sloppy.
So does anyone have any tips or examples of how to do supporting highways/roads properly?
Any general criticism on the large-scale features of my country would be appreciated as well, of course :)
Discussion
Comment from ilikemaps on 28 May 2017 at 02:39
I would draw more towns, and maybe put some detail in them
Comment from stjur on 28 May 2017 at 06:12
Your motorway network is ok, it only needs more detail. Your primary and secondary road network seems a little strange. Of course those streets connect rural areas, but they’re mainly connecting big cities and they’re even entering them. Your secondary roads seem to avoid cities. Check out some real life images: *https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/48.7567/11.3299 *https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/47.882/1.269
Comment from Gubble on 28 May 2017 at 07:25
I wouldn’t worry about the primary and secondary roads yet. They should come much more naturally when there is more detail of other aspects (particularly rivers). I would recommend either adding lots of rivers or just start (or continue) building a city. One thing I would note is that you should detail the coastline/ riverbank before drawing the city. I’ve seen lots of well detailed cities with a single, straight line for the coast and they always look a bit stupid.
Comment from dryerlint on 28 May 2017 at 14:52
Thanks for the feedback guys! So it looks like the general idea is to build towns and cities before going for the roads to connect them? I’ll give it a try.
Also, yeah, I guess I gave too much priority to passing through the rural areas, and not enough focus on directly connecting the big towns and cities. I thought that that was the purpose of the motorways, though?
@MrOobling, my only issue is: how do I know where to put the smaller towns if there is no primary/secondary road network? Bigger cities and medium-size towns go on rivers/coasts, of course, but don’t the smaller towns usually just dot the landscape, or occur at junctions/crossroads of big primary roads? I’ll give it a try though, maybe add more rivers. Thanks!
Comment from stjur on 28 May 2017 at 16:01
Motorways, as far as I know, are built quite recently, while primary and secondary roads can be centuries old, so in the past big cities were connected only through these kinds of roads, which most of the time still exist today.
Comment from Ūdilugbulgidħū on 29 May 2017 at 16:12
So, think of the terrain first. The rivers follow the terrain. You could think of using some land cover types to broadly sketch this, or do it on another drawing progam or paper. You’re roughly at the latitude of Sweden, so you might have something similar. Think back into history and develop the oldest towns along the rivers - roads might have not been important in transport terms until recently. The roads themselves may not look very realistic because although they curve they don’t follow the scale of real world landforms. Real curves are generally shorter but tighter with straight sections between them.
Comment from dryerlint on 29 May 2017 at 19:08
I think this might be my issue… making the curves far too wide. Figured it would be more realistic, but now I realize it actually looks sort of bad. So the roads should generally be straight if possible, with occasional tight curves? I’ll give that a try.
Thinking about the history of the nation and its transport is also a good idea - I did make most of the towns along rivers and such, but probably didn’t think about the history enough. I’ll try that next. Thanks again guys!
Comment from No Way on 7 June 2017 at 16:17
It is a little odd that the surface routes avoid the towns and the motorways go through town. There must be some major payoffs going on there. In the real world this would not make much sense and would be costly.
Comment from dryerlint on 7 June 2017 at 18:47
Good point, @No Way.
In reality, the reason for that is that I drew the towns first, then the motorways, then the supporting roads… as a result, the motorways went straight into/through the cities while the supporting roads had to be put elsewhere.
I guess I could “rationalize” this by saying that old, inner-city roads were later upgraded into motorways, so as a result, motorways go through the cities… but yeah, that doesn’t make too much sense either. I’ll look into fixing the issue.