“If you’re having traffic problems I feel bad for your son/I’m a traffic engineer and I made you a guide.”  That’s the lead in to the post How To Traffic about how a traffic engineer built a SimCity that has no congestion.  He did it by applying generally accepted transportation planning practices.
I helped teach the civil engineering capstone class at the University of Minnesota for about five years. Â We took pride in having the students work on current design projects that practicing engineers brought in. Â The students got to apply the theory they learned in the program to fix a real world issue.
By their nature, it’s hard to develop a transportation planning project where the students can apply theory.  Building a SimCity to certain specifications and measuring the congestion levels could be a great way to teach traffic engineering/transportation planning students the basics of how a transportation network operates.
That game is actually “Cities: Skylines.” By coincidence, I’ve been playing it for a couple of days: seems pretty sweet so far.