Imagine on this road, where we now have a limit of 110 kilometres an hour- would be quite dangerous!" "Before this plan," Luna says, "you basically had collisions everywhere… and you could drive 150 kilometres an hour in any vehicle.
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These kinds of crashes are also why, in July 2019, the mod team introduced a development road map, 'Road to Simulation'. "In the base game, you wouldn't see a traffic light here… everyone was just driving wherever they want and whenever they want, so we added this traffic light which kind of works." Seconds later, a truck storms through the red light right in front of me, colliding with a car and careening off into the shoulder. Late in our drive, Luna points out one of these alterations, a traffic light they've added to a T intersection on the outskirts of Duisburg. They've banned trucks with triple trailers from using the road, they've added signs and barriers to prevent lawless overtaking, and they've stopped people from driving in convoys so that they don't clog up the road. The TruckersMP team has implemented a number of measures in order to ease the pressure.
This tension is part of what's made the congestion so difficult to address.
"Mainly because the area in and around Calais and Duisburg is contaminated with incompetent, rude and ignorant players whos main goal seems to be to become the next main actor in one of the "idiots on the road" videos."
"Why to avoid this road,this road is a legendary road,this road gives the feeling of a real trucking simulation because of the crowd,other parts of the map is empty so that's doesnt feel good.You are not a real trucker if you dont drive on calais duisburg road" You can see this tension play out on the mod's very active forums, where threads are routinely started with names like 'How do you feel about the situation in Duisburg' and 'What if Calais-Duisburg road, Suddenly got removed?' One of the forum's longest and longest-lasting threads is a pinned guide titled 'Calais>Duisburg Road: Information and Alternative Routes', and the comments that follow are polarised at best: This popularity has, however, created a tension between two major segments of the TruckersMP community: the people who love 'joyriding' and the pandemonium that can entail, and the people who play for the simulation. It's the point of an MMO, to see loads of people in one place." It helps that the road is part of the base game, making it immediately accessible to new TruckersMP players who may not have invested in the growing bank of new maps. "Word of mouth and streams and videos of this place have definitely made it ten times more popular, one hundred percent," Matt adds. It wasn't long before the congestion and the chaos became self-perpetuating. Here you can still drive," she says as we pass the road's first petrol station. "It was really just a 200 metre road, and it wasn't as interesting because it was just a bunch of traffic. "We believe that the Europort was always so full," she explains.
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It's not clear exactly why drivers stopped gathering at Europort and made the move to this nondescript stretch of country road, says Luna, but she has her suspicions. It wasn't long before the congestion and the chaos became self-perpetuating "Then we saw a slow transition from the Europort, where there was a lot of backed-up traffic, to this place here, Calais-Duisburg." "One of the most popular places in TruckersMP used to be the Europort, the Amsterdam port going into Felixstowe in the UK," he explains. Matt estimates that the road from Calais to Duisburg started gaining in popularity around early 2016.