NAM giving me problems

[dussin23 1]

Hi,

I'm going to quote from a post I made in another forum.  I think this forum may be more appropriate, but I don't know.

I use SC as more of a creative outlet than a game, so I've got a bunch of mods to help me do what I want to do.  I've been doing this a while, but recently I've started having residential abandonment/dilapidation preceeded by no-job zots.  When the houses abandon, they say ti's because of commute time.

That's pretty ridiculous to me.  The graph says commute time is like four minutes!  Occasionally I'll get a random house with a long commute time, and it will begin repeating a cycle of no-job zot, abandonment, and repopuloation over and over.

This is a new region with only two cities.  I typically try to build realistically, so I started with having a proporttional jobs to resident relationship.  However, when I started getting the zots I starting zoning for more commercial and industrial jobs so I have a big surplus in both cities.  It's definitely not that there's no jobs for these people, because there are.  Believe me.  And they're not far away, either.

Right now the two cities are connected only by an avenue, but it's operating at nowhere near capacity.  Most of the people from the smaller city are commuting to the medium city, and most of them aren't having a problem with it.   I built a sizeable industrial area in the small city in order to give the no-job-zot people a place to work, but they will not work there.  Only a few of the commuters got a new job in the industrial area...a grand total of 58 people work in it.

Before this started happening, I reinstalled the NAM with perfect pathfinding.  Could it be that?

Another person responded and said it could be one of my other mods, to which I said:

Well, it was all running fine until I reinstalled the NAM with perfect pathfinding.  I'll try to use another option and maybe it'll stop it.

As of right now, my SC4 is unplayable.  Whole areas dilapidate.  While ago, in a city of only 15k, I tried putting  a subway line directly from the dilapidated neighborhood to a new industrial area.  The problem residentials were medium wealth, and the industrial sector developed as high tech.  There should've been more than enough jobs for them but they would not go.  I tried other infrastructure improvements and nothing would work.  I tear down the houses and they rebuild and IMMEDIATELY do the same thing, even with the subway line in place.

It makes no sense whatsoever.

Thank you very much for you expertise.

[prince_of_sims 0]

the thing that most people forget is that you have to provide the right jobs for your citizens. low wealth sims will only work certain jobs, same with medium and high wealth sims. if there's no job available for them, they'll try for neighboring cities, or get NJZ's. Low wealth sims populate the easiest and can often swamp entire neighborhoods. so first thing to do is to look at your graphs and check out the Sim-to-Job ratio for each wealth

[dussin23 1]

There should be more than enough jobs for medium weath sims. In fact, if I bulldoze a dilapidated R$$, one will come back almost immediately before a NJZ appears and the building dilapidates.

There's a surplus of ALL kinds of jobs in this city and region. They just don't want to commute even a short distance.

[Andreas Roth 604]

Most likely, you have some conflicting traffic mods installed. A commute time of four minutes is way out of place, it should be more like 40 or even a lot more, depending on your current development. Please make sure to remove every other traffic-related mods before installing the NAM, and start with the "better pathfinding" plugin that doesn't touch the capacities and/or speeds of the roads. Let the game run for a few months and see if the values come back to normal figures.

[dussin23 1]

It's weird that I never had any trouble with this until I reinstalled the NAM. I don't think I have any other traffic mods, but I'll look. Thanks for your reply.

edit:  I did have an old traffic cop dat file.  I removed it and nothing changed.  I then reinstalled the NAM like you said, and commute times got up to 35 minutes.  NJZ and dilapidation got worse or stayed the same...it's hard to tell.  Again, this has been confined to certain blocks, in general.  It's weird to me because I'll zone medium density residential and within five years it will develop a high wealth or medium wealth apartment building, get NJZs, and dilapidate.  Then they'll repopulate as normal before starting the cycle again, occassionally abandoning.  There's no desireablity problems and commutes from neighboring buildings are most often "short".  If I tear the buildings down, they'll quickly develop into the same types of structures and do the same thing over and over.

I used to have this problem when the game was unmodded, but I've played for a long time without any problems of this nature.  It's ruined the game for me because I'm trying to get better at creating realistic and aesthetically pleasing cities.

I'd post screen shots, but I just wiped out the city in question in order to begin again.  For the fourth time.  When it happens again, I'll show you guys what I'm talking about.

[snowski55 0]

I'm having the same problem. I started thread at www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=124&threadid=93490