Commute Times are killing me

[MrFingers 0]

I'm actually quite fed up with this BS now. 

Let's take my most recent example.  I have two cities, both small, one industrial, one commercial and residential.  I have NAM, I use extensive public transportation and ALL my roads are congestion free - oh that includes my subways/rails too.  Yet STILL I get dilapidated and abandoned buildings due to "commute time".  I think I'm about to go nuts.  It's totally ridiculous, these freakin sims are travelling such painfully short distances, but still screwing about with supposedly long commute times!!!  Is there a way to speed up commute times or something?!  I'm dying to build a functional region, but if the little bastards can't handle a trip across one small city, then how on earth am I going to get a whole region to work properly?!!!  I absolutely know that this is not an issue of my city's network being inadequate, so please no responses in that vein as they are just pointless.

Please help me!

- One fustrated SC player.

P.S.

I should mention that I'm using a mac and that on the commute graph the y axis is very low numbers, from 0 to no more than 5.  I think that was a result of installing NAM without having the update available for mac, but I'm not sure.  This may be relevant info.

[DOXXP29 5]

Sims are complete morons and will drive across the street to work and still the simulator will call that a long commute. You may want to change the pathfinding in the NAM to see if that helps. For the abandonment, I'm a great fan of Bones1's abandonment mod, which has done wonders for my cities' dilapidation and abandonment issues. I find it helps keep the wealth levels balanced with the jobs available, making the commutes shorter by somehow making the residential development more realistic as far as the available jobs for the wealth levels. Sometimes there's not much one can do regarding the simulator's calculations of commute times and it's a major pain we sometimes have to live with. But if you can provide adequate transportation, with an emphasis on mass transit, as well as keeping the wealth levels of the residents closely matched to the nearby jobs, it will make the commuting issues a little bit better.

[mikemac 0]

In my honest opinion I am thinking about modding my Simcity1.bat file. There it has all the "master" coding for traffic noise(my second most hated info from the query) and yes everyones favorite "commute time". I have had all commerce and industrial in the negatives and still had lots of NJZs. LOL how can this be? From the demand graph I am interpreting as saying there is to many open jobs yet somehow the sims can't get to a job??!! Give me a break. The funny thing about Simcity 4(I do love this game)is it tries to be "lifelike" and in some ways it is, in respect to some of the biggest problems, noise pollution and commute time, they got it completely wrong.

I have actually figured out the size of a large map based on the information we know about how size and distance work in the game. As far as I know and what I feel everyone else thinks is one tile is 16 meters x 16 meters. So lets do some math. A large city has 256 tiles, at 16 meters that is 256 x 16= 4096 meters. Reduce that down to kilometers 4096 meters= 4.096 kilometers and for the US people that is 2.5 MILES!!!!!! THAT IS NOT FAR AT ALL.(sorry for caps this angers me deeply). I would say that if u only have to travel a whole large city tile to get to work thats not bad. I also would have to say that in RL if u live 2.5 miles from work commute time will be the last thing on ur mind.

Now (sorry long post) noise pollution I do understand but it is WAY to sensitive. As far as I am concerned I can't figure out rhyme or reason of how noise pollution really works. I have queried a house with high noise pollution and the street in front of it with know other streets or roads around had a whooping 12 cars and like 15 pedestrians. Cars do make noise but pedestians in small or even medium groups come on, I don't think if they r just walking that they are that loud to even make anyone notice in there own home. I could understand that if u live in a small neighbor hood with just houses and u have lots of cars and BUSSES(grrrr lol) noise pollution can be a problem. As far for the larger buildings, apartment building, and especially large residential skyscraper types, noise pollution is ALOT less. I mean most building are made largely of concrete and steel. Concrete is an excellent insulator and noise blocker and does not let most sound get through so easily, wood on the other hand does.(duh we use it to make lots of instruments lol) I think that the bigger the building the less of an effect noise pollution should be, especially tall ones.

So as I said earlier in the post I am going to reset some of the parameters for these conditions. There is ALOT of properties related to the problems and a lot of hexadecimal coding to try and figure out, how much for what to change and where. If I am successful and can get help I think an new "more life like" modd is in order.

[DOXXP29 5]

More power to you, Mikemac, and good luck with the project. I agree with your points and have been frustrated to the point of blood boiling anger myself at these issues. The commute times and the way they travel to work, both the methods AND the routes, can bring one to the point of psychosis when trying to make sense of it all. Your numbers are interesting. We all know rush hour in RL can be horrible, but 90 minutes to go 2.5 miles or less is definitely not realistic, and that's what kinds of numbers I get on occasion, even with mass transit, for large cities. Make that mod, and I'll be your first customer!

[Constantina 5]

Troublesome... those Sims. They do insist in using cars. Even if you tried hard investment in public transport.

Spped limits in game may be the culprit. I've changed the parameters so the residents travel at 70mph on motorways, and allow faster speeds for buses.

[MrFingers 0]

Here is a couple graphs to give you the idea.  The first is my Traffic Volume, you can see that cars are WAY down.

This one is my commute time, the scale was cut off, but each horizontal line is 1 unit, god knows what unit that is, but it's just one.

This one shows how my education suffers as buildings constantly deppreciate:

I'm interested in these "mods" you talk about... is there one to modifiy the commute times? It would be great if maxis was more transparent about how it is making these calculations...

[mikemac 0]

A small update on my research about these aorta blowing problems that seem imposiible to fix. I found a max commute time property in the Simcity_1 dat file. Get this it was in hexidecimal but it read 0x0000006. Which with the description said this property was for minutes. So max commute time is six minutes for a round trip from residential to work and back! LMAO I cannot not believe someone actually made this game and those properties and some how pick 6 minutes as a max round trip commute! I was blown away by this.

If you go to this thread https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=41&threadid=80237&enterthread=y I wrote about some other stuff I found out and changed and now will be testing to see if what I did make a difference and it works correctly. I unfortunately don't know exactly how to make modds but if I can get some help either sending my second copy of Simcity_1.dat file or be walked through how to make those change into a plugin .bat I will try, but the test must come first and maybe some more tweaks and changes.

[MrFingers 0]

Great find man! That would definitely explain the 0-5 scale on the commute times too! Are you a mac user?

[Sindai 0]

This has to be a mac problem. THe max commute time is supposed to be 60 minutes or more. I have a city that averages 17 minutes with zero no job zots.

[Michael1980 0]

I am switching from Mike's other thread, because this is more appropriate to the discussion.

This is my DAT file:

Which value represents speed and time sims take for each journey?

Thanks

[mikemac 0]

No I am a PC user. I think but I am not positive that this 6 minute max commute is what picky sims need to be happy at the maxis standard setting. I do not believe it has anything to do with the graphs at all.

There is modds like the NAM that do change these but they only change them by exponential amounts. I am tryin to make the overall game more realistic without having to go crazy and make some of the properties at levels that are unrealistic but at the same time make the game function much better or more like real life. I believe u could make a near perfect city even with out cheating if the parameters where more life like.

[Michael1980 0]

Never mind, I found the properties file. I have also changed the max. commute time to 45 minutes, will see what happens.

[quert 10]

Do you have the latest NAM edition?

[Michael1980 0]

Speaking of making the game realistic, can someone please explain what this value does?

[MrFingers 0]

I believe that means how far from the road a sim will travel, since it is one that means adjacent...

[Michael1980 0]

So, to be realistic, that must be increased. I mean, a person will walk down to the shop even if it is more than 16 metres away from the road. Will try that.

Another thing which puzzled me, is that buses were set to be quicker than cars! (100kmph vs 80-something on a highway).

[black_coat 1]

I remember someone speculating that the increased bus speed was done to encourage residents to use buses instead of cars, particularly $$ residents since they use the mode of transportation that is fastest.  I'm not sure if that is true, but it's plausible to believe that this may have been done during development.  Has this theory been verified by experimentation?

Not to steer the topic in a different direction, but is there anything in 'Simcity1.bat' related to pedestrian traffic?  Is it too much to ask my sims to walk a whole block to get to work?

[MrFingers 0]

This game is made by americans, in america people don't know what walking is outside of the major cities.  Don't mean to rub any of you up, and if it makes you feel better, know that I'm half american too... but let's face it, americans drive EVERYWHERE outside of the major cities... and people wonder why a third of the country is obese.

[MrFingers 0]

For anyone who has the same problem as me, I believe I have found the solution.

When you download NAM you have to chuck away a whole bunch of files. In this case there is a folder called "Traffic_Plugin_Files" which contains a whole bunch of files which modify key parameters affecting this problem. You only need one of these files, their names are fairly self explanatory and you should just chose the one you want to keep and throw away the rest. If you leave all these files together you give the program conflicting instructions and I believe this is why I was having such problems with commute times.

[Sindai 0]

Originally posted by: black_coat I remember someone speculating that the increased bus speed was done to encourage residents to use buses instead of cars, particularly $$ residents since they use the mode of transportation that is fastest.  I'm not sure if that is true, but it's plausible to believe that this may have been done during development.  Has this theory been verified by experimentation?quote>

Yes that's pretty much it.

Not to steer the topic in a different direction, but is there anything in 'Simcity1.bat' related to pedestrian traffic?  Is it too much to ask my sims to walk a whole block to get to work?quote>

This is just part of the larger issue that all commute times are vastly slower than they should be. I find that NAM's 10x commute speed gives realistic pedestrian distances.

[Keln 0]

Commute time is killing me as well. I didn't have a whole lot of traffic issues before with the standard NAM settings. I have built an extensive mass transit system (bus, rail, subway) as well as double roads, avenues, and highways. It was all green, with a little yellow and a red spot or two on the map. Well, commute times were causing alot of the bigger residential buildings to be abandoned "due to long commute". Sometimes across the street, another smaller residential building have a "short" commute time. It's wild. I have tried everything to no avail. I even re-installed NAM with different settings, even the radical one. The commute times actually went UP drastically with the radical mod. All it did was erase traffic congestion completely. I'm totally at a loss, my city has stalled in growth because of this. I'm at 225K population and about 1/3 of a large city map used, so there isn't even that far to travel. The buildings with the longest commute are the ones closest to the jobs! I even built an industrial sector in the middle of my city (it's all Hi Tech) and this didn't help. They could spit on their office window standing in their front yard, but still a "long" commute.

[cdcweb 0]

Sims have always had a 'commute-time' problem. I remember being frustrated in The Sims, cause my character would always take about 5 game-time mins to walk from the computer in his living room to the bathroom. Or he'd brush his teeth for 15 game minutes, and miss the guy who he was carpooling with, and miss work. Again, like Sim City 4, the time scale was way off. Perhaps this is where the problem lies, the coding for the passing of time is not realistic, or was adjusted originally for other events in the simulation to run properly...

[Keln 0]

Well, being that there are folks that have built multi-million sim cities, there has to be a way around this. The residential buildings being abandoned are now affecting my commercial interests which have not enough customers.

[MrFingers 0]

i always delete abandoned buildings asap ... the non abandonment mod is useless as all it does is prevent the building turning black, but they still get abandoned, so then u have to query buildings instead.

[DioAngel 1]

Commute time is always a living nightmare for all of us...especially the education meter. Which drives me nuts!!

[SC4BOY 21]

I believe that MOST of the speculation posted in this thread is inaccurate... I'm no expert, and I know commute times are an issue that force you as a successful player to make TRANSIT a very important (if not perhaps the MOST important issue) in SC4. There were investigations in the early days (about 2003) on many of these issues. The commute times may be up to 2 hours (to work.. return trip is not counted as long as they get home before they have to go back to work). And the only MAC issue of which I am aware is the building capacity problem on BAT's and there is a thread explaining how to fix tha in the MAC USER section. I'd suggest folks go back to the experimeents and omnibus sections and do a bit of exploring. There are also sections on "File structure" which explain many of the questions being asked here. And BTW commutes are not "intuitive" to put it mildly.. Oh and PC or MAC doesn't matter in terms of the scale.. a GOOD city with good traffic will typically show COMMUTE TIME under 2.0.. And no I don't know what the units are..

[mikemac 0]

Hey everyone,

I did not know this thread was still going. Otherwise I would have been replying to some of the things said here. Well now that I have been looking into the core of the game I have found alot of interesting properties with the awesome program Ilive reader.(Ilive u rock thanks!) There is not just one or 2 properties that effect commute time. It is more like 6 to 8 properties that effect it. I will list the ones that I think contribute to this problem.

#1.Vehicle Speed- you probably knew this but for a clear indication of speed: cars travel at 31 KPH on roads, that is 19 MPH for US. Seems a little slow especially since streets are slower than that.

#2. Travelway capacities- most road types even avenue have incredibly low capacities at best. 1 or 2 high density residential building can fill there capacities easily, and that is not including any other cars driving on it.(from other connected road ways)Which is added to that amount. Even rail type capacities are ridiculous. So the immediate problem becomes conjestion. The more over capacities the slower everything goes. This is not just for the station but the whole route!

Before I start listing other things affecting commute time, these first 2 are a HUGE cause for long commute times. However the next one that I will list is going to possibly shock some people and I am not exactly sure how it works.

#3. Nearest Destination Attractiveness!!!!!!- Now I am not exactly sure how this works from the explanation it gives for its value representation, but just a guess this has a huge effect on HOW FAR the stupid sims travel. I am no program writer or even decent modder, but what I get from this is why sims are willing to drive to another map then work across the street. This is still a mystery to me though. The description of this property says:"lower score means more side exploration but also more CPU time"???? The standard value for this is 0.09.(non hexadecimal) So with that description and that value its hard to make a decent calculation as what would be "more life like" without possible mega lag in ur city.

#4. Wealth Travel Strategy- I assume we are all mostly aware of this. Low wealth only want to use mass transit(especially buses and regular ground trains)possibly cause maybe they don't own cars?? I don't know. Medium wealth seem to prefer mass transit but but not completely. High wealth of course mainly only want to walk short distances or drive. They are more attracted to subways, el tran, GLR and monorail(now HSRP hehe!!)than any other kinds of mass transit. These do not by anyway guarrantee they will actually use it.

There are a few more that I will list but I am not sure that they have a necassary order. I just feel they are contributers to the problem.

-Mass transit usage chance- now this one is confusing cause I am guessing it is added on top of the above one???

-Max mass transit strategy trip length- Ummm does this seem a little redundant to anyone else??? Yet another property describing who, what, where, how long for mass transit. Oh and last and definitely my least favorite one,

-MAX COMMUTE TIME- this value is in minutes. It says this in the properties description. The Maxis standard value for this is 6. You can put it in hexadecimal or non hexadecimal because it is still 6!! ROFL the recommended default value is 90 which it isn't set at!!!!

So there you have it in a ummm....? large nutshell??(that kinda sounds wrong???) If you have Ilive reader u can easily change these values, but DO NOT attempt this if you don't back up your game or don't understand Ilive reader.

I have a dream. I dream there will be a time when the sim world will make sense to us SC4 fanatics and actually run life like. I also dreamt that there is still a possibly to modd this out if the right values can be found and made into a downloadable mod. Maybe this w

[toxicpiano 125]

I agree mrFingers, many Americans have never heard of walking...

[SC4BOY 21]

Once again, I think you have some misconceptions about these. Though I admire your "venturous spirit" this data is known and documented.. this is why I gave some references.

[mikemac 0]

SC4BOY I did a search in the omnibus for "file structure" and the only thing I got was 1 thread about the plugins manager. Is there perhaps a thread you might point me to? I would love to have some more info than the basic property description from the Ilive reader. I would like to try and help figure out how to change this commute time problem cause I am at minimum a very dedicate avid Simcity player. It would be nice to not to have to deal so much with this problem and concentrate more on "regional play" instead worrying about how sims are gonna travel block to block cause the game has been written unrealistically.