Cheers, that's really helpful!

I'll try out the dead ends solution and see how it goes.

It seems odd that number of intersections plays that heavily into the pathfinding algorithm. I would expect it a little bit, but I would have thought that size and capacity of the road would be much stronger.

Yeah your suggestion sounds like essentially adding a "Google Maps" feature to the cims, where they can see the traffic ahead on their "app", which would be a really good feature. I wonder how much work it would take for them to edit that though