Commuters vs. Jobs

[Brasdf 0]

Keiran Halcyon said: Brasdf, yes, that forms a loop, but a sim would have to traverse the entire width of the medium cities...quote>

True, good point.

[BlackJackal 0]

I use Goldvia's eletronic toll booths. They don't clog traffic at all, but you still get the cash.

[Imcafin 1]

For the purposes of lessening the chance of "orbiting" commuters, the normal toll booths should work better. You can make ridiculous amounts of money from the braindead drivers/bus riders with the Goldiva's booths, though.

[BlackJackal 0]

That's because those booths have double the toll of the default ones, I think. Like $0.20 per sim. They do have a transit switch cost though, so that SHOULD replicate the same effect as the standard booths. I had issues with 500% capacity on the stock booths, so I was looking for something with a slightly higher capacity.

[DOXXP29 5]

There's a download (don't know if it's Goldiva's) called "Toll Booth Boost". It uses the stock toll booths, but you can set the capacity and the toll amount independent of each other. If U want higher capacity but the same toll amount, this will work. I think the factors are normal, 2x and 5x increase for each. If U want to set a "commuter tax" for the drivers that wanna work in another city, this is a good way to do it. If they wanna go elsewhere to work after all the nice jobs and services I've set up for them, why not make 'em pay? Lotta times the toll booths alone slow the commute just enough to keep 'em in town to work.

[BlackJackal 0]

I don't think they take the commute time into consideration when finding jobs, only the actual distance in tiles. This was one of the problems with pathfinding, because in reality if one route is congested, people will find clear routes. The sims do not.

[DOXXP29 5]

You're right about that being the case cuz that's how it was working for me until I switched up pathfinding mods in the NAM last week. (I went to "better pathfinding, commute oriented") It now seems like they do take time/congestion into account somewhat. It was after I switched up that I noticed the toll booths having more of an effect when I tried to force them into other routes or onto mass transit. Doesn't work for all of 'em, but it does have a more pronounced impact on the routes they take...or at least it seems that way. If there was only a way to get the lazy *#@%!!s to WALK the block and a half to work instead of driving! To me, that's one of the most unrealistic aspects of the game. I've got some of them driving 8 or 10 tiles around the block to work. Got so p.o.'d I put toll booths on each side street just to see what would happen, and some started walking, some kept driving and others changed jobs to ones a lot farther away.

[ProudElm 0]

indeed sims are crazy..

still find my region attampt of playin not worth it. i got 3 cities, A, B and C

.

A is the largest, 60k R (40k $$ 15k $$  and 5k $) and some 45K C (most C$$$).

in B there are about 5k R, no C or I.

in city C, there are about 24k I jobs.

No sims from city A are commuting into city C.. all the sims are going from A to B, well there are no jobs there..:S even the 700 sims i have in city C go working in city A..:S so, in this case, i hate regional play..

there are 2 highways connecting city a with c and 1 highway connecting a with b. also a and b are connected with a monorail, wich is the most used, over 7k commuters are taking it..

here is a img of it:

[Bones1 96]

Originally posted by: DOXXP29 If there was only a way to get the lazy *#@%!!s to WALK the block and a half to work instead of driving! To me, that's one of the most unrealistic aspects of the game. I've got some of them driving 8 or 10 tiles around the block to work.quote>

 

If you crunch the numbers in the data files, it turns out that sims only walk at a speed of 0.1344 km/h. They drive (on regular roads) at a speed of only 1.19 km/h. Turtles walk at a speed of about 0.3 km/h, or twice as fast a sims!

It's little wonder why they won't walk a block and a half. It might take them a couple of hours!

[DOXXP29 5]

Thanx, Bones1. I knew it was slow, but I didn't realize it was that bad! I've heard from others that driving speed is the same on all roads types (roads, freeways, etc.) and it's only the capacity that changes and affects the commute times. So, if I shake the dust out of my metric conversion synapses, that means they drive at less than one mph.

[spa 970]

This topic has been incredibly enlightening. I generally have built my region as one interconnected web so lots of avenue connections. I noticed the blob of commuters going coming in one corner and immediately exiting on the other. I just chalked it up as a quirk of the game without any real consequence. I didn't realize how bad a problem it was though. It's a little late to change things in my current region given that I have 8 million people, but in my next one, I'll definitely limit connections around corners of the map. It could be interesting to have mass transit say going North/South and roads going East/West. However, the danger there is commuters will hop on a North/South train and then get off and hop on a bus to start the loop! It's a pity that I'll have to do deal with this. I really like making an urban area and not having roads linking up is a rather strange way to have things.

[Bones1 96]

Originally posted by: DOXXP29 Thanx, Bones1. I knew it was slow, but I didn't realize it was that bad! I've heard from others that driving speed is the same on all roads types (roads, freeways, etc.) and it's only the capacity that changes and affects the commute times.quote>

 

No, sims drive different speeds on different road types. Here are the speeds:

Street   0.8064 km/h
Road     1.1904 km/h
Avenue   1.5360 km/h
Highway  3.1488 km/h

You can see that highways are almost 3 times as fast as roads. That is why sims will travel much further to work if they can take a highway, rather than a road. (One-way roads are the same speed as regular roads.)

Capacities don't affect commute time, unless the road or highway is past the congestion level. Then, the congestion slows down the traffic in those congested stretches. (Up to 3x slower, I believe.) So, the effect is rather indirect.

[Rayden 7]

Very interesting thread, I've learned a lot about it, never thought about this problem in that peticular way and I always wonder why there was so much demand for comercial work and still get my buildings abandoned a few years after they got builded, specially the biggest ones. That trick to make them go to the center before they can get to the edges of the map is very good, I have to trry that out. Thx a lot to everyone that helped to clear out this matter. Well done.

[DOXXP29 5]

Thanx again, Bones1. I kinda thought that the same speed on all types of roads was b.s. and didn't make much sense, but I'd seen it mentioned so many times I figured maybe there was something to it. I appreciate you taking the time to break it down. The responses to my original question has shed so much light on what was really an exasperating issue about commuting that I've been able to implement a lot of changes in the past few days and notice some great results and seriously improved traffic flow. Many thanx to all! I'm finally starting to make sense of what seemed to be a senseless situation. : )

[Lord Kronos 0]

And when you need to have neighbour connections for industry, either force them to use Rail, or use the no car lots that are available on the STEX (traffic control) then Industry still has short frieght trips, but you won't have sims going through the industry area to get to a job out of town.

LK

[schm0 27]

There has to be a better way to figure out pathfinding and calculate these values in real time. With modern computers coming with a minimum of 1GB of RAM, how can this not be done? It would only need to be calculated on a game-time "monthly" basis or so, not every single second of game time. So who cares if every month the game needs to take 20 seconds or so to recalculate values? I just can't see this algorithm taking too much time or RAM, and I don't see why SC5 shouldn't make this a LOGICAL and REALISTIC addition to the game.

Does anyone know if the Maxis developers read this stuff? If SimCity5 is truly in development, then they should take note of the, oh say, 250 stupid things wrong with SimCity4 that the generous and devoted MODders have tried to fix. Knowing this makes me smarter when building my cities, but this is truly the most counter-intuitive aspect of gameplay that I have read about to date.

And lastly, has anyone made a list of the bugs and other gameplay aspects that don't make sense?

[stopbugginme 0]

hi,

this is amazing information, now i understand how everything seemed to fall apart whenever i started another city in a region connected to the old one

i guess the easiest solution is to simply have one city regions, as in the old sim city games

re the original question, i have quite a few farms where sims won't work

the farms have short travel times for freight and no pollution nearby, they are fairly far away from residential zones but i have modded the game so sims can travel at x10 speed

what's really odd, is that at a certain time sims suddenly would work at many of the farms but after a while that also suddenly stopped again

so maybe there just aren't enough sims to work at the farms? wrong, or it would seem so, because i regularly get messages there aren't enough jobs available

it doesn't make sense

[Sketchley 0]

stopbugginme, I think you posted this same post in another thread... anyhow, my answer:

Are you educating your sims with schools? If yes, then your sims are becoming too smart to work at the farms. They then complain that they don't have any jobs that fit their education/wealth level.

In other words - you now have a mature city on your hands. I suggest laying down more I, with some C along the major routes to the I, to stimulate growth. Of course, if you don't want to, it only really leaves one option: destroy the schools, and keep the sims uneducated, and only able to work on the farms.

[Speedx07 0]

Ok on the fact of the amount of jobs offered, what if it says Due to low demand? Does that mean the job type? Or does this mean the conditions?

[sebastin 1]

Hmm. About commuting and toll booths, does the bus travelers have to pay a toll too?

[schm0 27]

Yes, buses pay tolls.

[sebastin 1]

we'll that's not good

sims already pay to use the bus..

i

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Originally posted by: sebastin we'll that's not good

sims already pay to use the bus..

i´d like to see toll booths charging only car traffic.

how much is the toll anyway and how would sims rather take the tolled road/avenue/highway in a bus than in a car?quote>

You mustn't confuse the income of the bus company with the payments that are made by it.  You collect fares on the bus, and out of that you pay the tolls.

[sebastin 1]

ah, so there is no extra cost for the sim? and that toll payment is included in the bus ticket?

so a tolled 'bus path' doesn't come unfavored because of the extra cost to use the path?

[thisisbrilliant 0]

this has to be one of the most important things i've found on this whole site, and that is really saying something. massive congrats to everyone who figured out what causes all those annoying glitches. finally i understand why sims commute out of one neighbour connection and don't reappear on the other side. i can't believe EA put out a game wth such a fundamental flaw... the whole point was to builg interconnected cities, and yet those connections don't really even work... it all makes sense - or not! oh well, all those expensive mass transit systems look good, even if they don't work, and never will.

i don't know whether to laugh or cry...!

[digt 0]

Thanks mayormot for the great explanation, even if it was years ago!

[lucis29 0]

Great topic. It should be put as a sticky somewhere, or included in a MUST HAVE tutorial. It seems so unreal, that increasing the no. of connections and no. of MT systems only disadvantage sims. I would love having more than 2 MT in my real city. Brasdf - can you please explain the graph you've made? What is with red and what with black? Where are the boundary of the city?

[Unassigned 23]

...came across the term "Eternal Commuters" in the CAM manual (don't think CAM is for me), had to know more, searched and found Mayormot's discussion of "commute circles" in this thread. Thanks Mayormot & I think this info ought to be somewhere in the Omnibus.

It is quite limiting that closed loop intercity connections must be avoided. Is there really no workaround? As far as I can tell some folks get away with it, viz. for example the Three Rivers CJ...then OTOH that CJ is perhaps focused on visual aesthethics rather than on making cities grow?

If there is no sensible workaround I guess I just have to forget about modeling areas such as the Randstad in the Netherlands

[RippleJet 36]

Reposting mayormot's long post from the first page of this thread, which was truncated in the crash May 2008:

---

Originally posted by: mayormot

DPK: It's very possible that your Sims are commuting off-map instead of working at the local industry. It's more likely than them staying in town, in fact.

There's the way the game intuitively should work, there's the way the manuals say it should work, then there's what really happens. True regional commute path computations and logical pathfinding algorithms bogged down the CPU too much and made the game lag, so Maxis/EA dumbed-down the algorithms before SC4 Vanilla was released. They had to for SC4 to run on even the best 2003-vintage computer (and it was still too much - the first official patch dumbed them down further). Even now, computers aren't even close to fast enough to do what this game really needs to do. So they faked it. The NAM managed to fix the pathfinding within a city to something reasonable (at the cost of major CPU time), but the regional stuff is hard-coded in the EXE. And wow, is it hackish.

The game tries to assign a Sim the nearest available (education/wealth-appropriate) job. The definition of "nearest" is the issue: If there's a job available in a neighbor city, then the distance to that job is considered to be the distance from the Sim's home to the map edge (where the neighbor connection is) - it doesn't consider the additional distance in the next city. This is why neighbor connections tend to "suck" traffic out of your city so strongly, and why it's easier to find Sims jobs in the next town over than it is to get them to work where they live; about 75% of the land in any city is closer to the map edge than it is to the city center. On a small map it's hard to get residents to stay in town at all.

Then there are "commute circles." The game won't let a Sim double-back and re-enter a city that he just came from, but it has no way of knowing that he's doubled back via a third city. Maybe you've heard of the "garbage circle" cheat - A exports to B, exports to C, exports back to A, and the garbage goes around in a circle forever without landing anywhere. This can happen to Sims, too. Sims will commute off-map if the neighbor connection is "closer" than the jobs in-town (and a majority of the time it will be). So, suppose your Sims commute from A to B. When you open city B, if there's a neighbor connection to city C that is closer to where these Sims enter than the jobs are, the Sims will continue on to city C. If C connects back to A, and that connection is closer than the jobs (if any) in C, the Sims will commute right back to A where they started. And then they commute back to B, and the cycle repeats. These Sims never find jobs, your commute time grows to silly levels, and you start getting no-job zots and abandonment (even no-car zots if it gets so bogged down tracing these circles that it doesn't have time to keep its zone and network maps in sync internally). This happens even though you have way more jobs than people. The neighbor connections keep sucking Sims away from the jobs. It's kinda like the Sims are in a kind of orbit.

Meanwhile, the Sims in question have already been assigned a job, but they can't seem to ever reach it because the path algorithms keep pulling them into neighbor connections instead. Eventually they usually give up and abandon due to "commute time" - you might get the "Bermuda Triangle" message from a MySim if this is happening. [MySims are handy that way, they'll at least tell you what job they were assigned, and whether they can get to it. Not good for much else though, except clogging up your news ticker. Unless "hmm" and a picture of a pencil means something to you?] If new residents move in, they're likely to get caught in the same trap. This is yet another way to encounter a false-commut

[Marty22 0]

Without trying to create a new thread, I have a related question that i think EXPANDS on the issues described above.

Started a new region with the intent to get the traffic infrastructure right (a blend between realistic and functional). The problem is as follows:

I have a central city on a large map with dense R and C zones in the centre. It's now about 100K big and i have around 17K catching a train (after travelling past all the jobs in the city) to an adjacent medium sized map (60k, not many jobs). I could live with that, if the 17,000 sims actually APPEARED in the smaller city (i could send them further or build jobs for them in that city, but according to the query tool there is NO ONE coming in on the train.

I'm using the 2008 nam and radical demand ordinance mod in this region. 

Grateful for any ideas how to fix the bug?