Mini Motorways Tips and Tricks
Each entry below is one mechanic, what it costs you, and the update it was last checked against. Filter by category or difficulty to narrow the list, and use the anchor beside any heading to link straight to a single tip.
Deleting
#Deleting a congested intersection does not flush the jam
Cars already routed over the road finish their trips, but no new car will enter it, so what you have done is cut the destination off from everything upstream. That is the opposite of a free clearing trick. Ghost in this community means the leftover road, not the cars.
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Junctions
#Cars do slow at a three-way junction, and have since 2021
They did not at launch, which is where the T-junction trick came from, and the developers called that a bug and fixed it on 24 August 2021 while raising base intersection speed slightly to compensate. Merging at 45 degrees rather than 90 does not buy it back.
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#The penalty attaches to the junction, not to the turn
Nothing shows the approach angle changing the cost, only whether the tile is a junction at all. That means the way to keep traffic moving is to have fewer junctions rather than gentler ones, and two roads that never meet cost you nothing whatsoever.
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#A house on an adjacent road makes a driveway, which is free
Cars do not slow down passing one, so feed houses directly onto the road you want them using. The mistake is putting a spur of road between the house and the main street, because that spur turns a free driveway into a real junction that taxes every car going by.
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Obstacles
#Trains and boats are moving traffic, not terrain
Terrain means trees, mountains, and water. Train stations arrived with the Miniversary update in July 2023 on London, Mumbai, and New York City, the Copenhagen Metro brought lines back in March 2025, and ferry terminals debuted with Hong Kong in December 2025.
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Routing
#Cars take the shortest route and never look at how busy it is
Build a bypass longer than the jammed road it parallels and every car keeps using the jam. A bypass only pulls traffic when it is genuinely shorter. The routing cost is unpublished and is not a plain tile count, since a diagonal covers about 40 percent more ground.
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Blocking
#One road tile does not reserve a 6x6 area around itself
A destination needs a clear lot of three tiles by two, or three by four for a double, so a single tile only denies the placements that would actually overlap it. Paired or staggered diagonal tiles are what close ground off, plus a two-tile border around destinations you rely on.
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#A tree blocks spawns exactly the way a road tile does
That makes standing trees free blocking you already own. It also means running a road through one destroys it and opens that square up for a house or destination, so clear trees deliberately rather than incidentally while routing.
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Deleting
#A deleted road stays on the map until its cars are finished with it
It lingers as a faded temporary segment, and only once the cars routed over it are done does the asset return to your inventory. How long tracks trip length and network complexity rather than a fixed number of days, and building a bypass first shortens it.
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Roundabouts
#A roundabout draws 3x3 but only checks five tiles to place
It looks at the center and its four orthogonal neighbours, so a building sitting on a diagonal corner does not block you. Existing road does not block you either, since only buildings do. That is why dropping dummy road tiles early reliably holds a junction open.
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Upgrades
#Tunnels and bridges consume road tiles equal to their length
Motorways do not, which is why the two feel interchangeable until you are suddenly out of road. Check you have enough regular tiles left to actually finish the connection before you place the bridge, or you will have spent the upgrade on a gap you cannot close.
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Achievements
#Infrastructure placed in a Challenge never counts toward totals
The developers have confirmed that Daily and Weekly Challenge placements are excluded from cumulative achievements, and so is anything built in a challenge that hands you unlimited upgrades. The Steam client also caches the displayed number, so restarting Steam often unfreezes a counter.
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#The trip target for a city achievement is not the same everywhere
Los Angeles, Beijing, and Tokyo want 200. Dar es Salaam, Moscow, Munich, Zurich, and London want 300. The other 18 cities want 400. Chasing a single number across the whole map list is why some of them feel arbitrarily harder than others.
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#The 10-tile bridge achievement is called Troll Town
There is no achievement named Bridge Builder, whatever the guide you are following says. Its tunnel equivalent is The Dark Side of the Road at the same 10 tiles, Go The Extra Mile wants a motorway over 25, and Mom's Spaghetti wants all nine motorways in use at once.
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Weekly Challenge
#The Weekly Challenge stops offering upgrades after week eight
You get the full library at the end of the first eight weeks, with the one restriction that you cannot pick the same upgrade type two weeks running. From week nine onward the game hands you standard road tiles and nothing else, so bank what you need before then.
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Modes
#Game Over now offers Creative Mode instead of Endless
The Lokum Lanes update of June 2026 added a Continue in Creative Mode button to that screen, which before then dropped you into Endless Mode. Creative arrived on 26 August 2025 and lets you place, rotate, flip, delete, and recolor with almost unlimited upgrades.
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Networks
#No trip count tells you when to split your networks
The 1,200 to 1,500 figure is documented nowhere. The game's own markers are 1,000 trips for Commuter and 2,000 for Driver. Shared grids do get worse as a city grows, so break yours into disjointed color-coded networks where red cars only share roads with red cars.
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Pins
#A car claims its pin the moment it leaves the driveway
Destinations generate pins representing demand, and a car only sets off when one is waiting, which it then holds for the whole trip. A distant house feeding a busy destination therefore keeps the queue looking full longer than a near one. This is community reverse-engineering.
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#Pin caps are six and eight, which the quoted house counts ignore
Start with one or two houses for a square and three or four for a circle, then tune by watching the pin queue. The late-game figures often repeated, 6 to 7 for a square and 12 to 15 for a circle, are documented nowhere and sit badly against those caps.
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Spawning
#New houses cluster near houses of their color, not their destination
So blocking around a destination is worth doing, just not for the reason usually given. Houses do not normally spawn tight against an entrance anyway. What you are really preventing is another destination landing a tile or two away, and keeping room to route later.
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What to Read Next
- Road Networks and Segregation. Junctions, driveways, routing, and how the pin system works.
- Advanced Strategies. Spawn blocking, deleting under load, and splitting your networks.
- Tools and Upgrades. Roundabout placement rules and what a bridge actually costs.
- Alternative Game Modes. Challenges, Endless, and the Creative sandbox.
- Achievements. Per-city trip targets and the counters that challenges do not feed.
- Getting Started. The core loop, if this is your first city.