SimCity patch to address traffic issues - again

Maxis has prepared a slew of new SimCity fixes, once more hoping to correct the sandbox game's transport woes.

Update 3.0, which is due later this week, has several traffic-centric features:

• Traffic: Updated routing system to improve traffic. Routing system now understands more information about u-turns, required vehicle stops, and vehicle behavior on certain road types. This should make traffic smarter.
• Traffic: Commercial and industrial buildings stagger their work shifts to start throughout commute hours instead of at the top of the hour. This should reduce traffic.
• Traffic: Fixes one issue where a car won't move causing traffic to back up behind it.
• Traffic: Vehicles can now make right turns on Red. This should improve some cases of traffic.
• Traffic: Trading polish that will improve regional traffic when one city has a lot of jobs and its neighboring city has a lot of workers.
• Service Vehicles: Fix for disappearing service vehicles on cities that whose vehicles had disappeared before update 2.
• School Buses: Fix for issue where school buses were getting stuck at neighbor's city or arcology.
• Transit: Changed thought bubble suggestion to add more trains to deal with crowded passenger trains to suggest that you add more train stations.
• Transit: Improvements to lights to make rail look better at night.
• Transit: Streetcar stops can now be placed directly on standalone streetcar tracks, and passengers can walk along the tracks to them.
• Transit: Tuned the chance buses or streetcars will go to high-traffic stops first as a minor traffic improvement.
• Ferry Terminal: Ferry Terminal can now send its sewage to the output pipe and treatment plant.
• Roads: University pedestrian paths can now cross streets.
• Manufacturing Trucks: Fixed issue some users experienced where manufacturing trucks left the city and were lost permanently.
• Delivery Trucks: Fixed issue where some users would experience a loss of resources is their delivery trucks returned to garages without proper storage.

Many of these updates address ongoing criticisms of the game, which seems to have shucked most of its sever woes while remaining a pretty broken experience.

There are plenty of other features not related to getting your transport networks working, including fixes for air pollution issues, more hotels, changes to how tress work, better trading, and more. Full patch notes are available on EA's forums.

Thanks, Shack News.