right and wrong:

right in saying that the ai doesn't differentiate between lanes at an intersection and may not be able to allow turn on red but that isn't wholly necessary to my idea, just a nice side concept.



wrong when you say "the game has traffic merging from on-ramps into the far lane, turning into what ever lane it wants - across multiple lanes." this is only true when you have a smaller amount of lanes from the ramp going onto the highway/road. basically the game takes the outgoing lanes and splits them logically to amount of available exits. ie if you have a 1lane ramp going to a 3 way highway then yes traffic can merge onto any of the 3 lanes. if you have 3 lane highway going to 3 lane highway however, the lanes line up with their counterparts. and the vehicles choose the correct lane to begin with. if they need to be in the right most lane on the next segment, then they will make sure they're in the right most lane in the segment attached to the intersection. this rule can be broken by agents when user intervention requires. ie when you place a bus stop on a segment closest to the intersection, the lane t is on only turns right and the bus needs to turn left, then it will make the turn from that right lane to the left. but even then if the game can manage it, it usually likes to follow the rules and send the bus the long way by forcing it to take a right. i only notice the rule break when you've place the stop, but the upgraded the segment to have more lanes and the lane configuration changes.



i've tested this idea out a lot, and it's actually very similar to the road in cim2 where the turning lane was automatically create instead of parking. this would just mean plopping them. it might seem more time consuming and micro managing but not every intersection needs to have a turning lane, so you'd edit what you want