Service Quality effects

[SC4BOY 20]

I am one who pays attention to station congestion and usage as I consider it ijmportant to SC4 from several perspectives

One, it gives a good idea of whether you have designed and routed traffic efficiently.

Two, it lets you know when you need to modify your Mass Transit (MT) layout.

Three .. it shows when you may need "bypass" routes or "station sidings"

But to the point.. I am wondering if anyone has quantified what happens to "transport delay" or "throughput" or "desirability decline" or whatever effect results from levels of congestion. I am pretty sure it "ramps" from 100% to 500% of capacity but am unsure of exactly what occurs. I'd appreciate if anyone has knowledge of this or if they can refer me to an existing thread.

Where is our new Grater!!??

[DOXXP29 5]

While I've never done any number crunching or serious quantitative analysis, I can share this with you. I have a city around 750k with a massive transportation network with a heavy focus on subways. At one point in th city's development, I had many stations that were over capacity, some by 300 - 500%. I was worried, since traffic had become the biggest problem in this city, so I started dropping extra subway stations...some right next to existing ones, some a tile or three away. What I found was this: When I placed stations next to the existing ones, the subway station capacity would fall to within acceptable parameters, but the effect on commute time and assumed throughput was nothing. When I put stations one to three tiles away, capacity would also fall into the acceptable range, but the commute time difference was so miniscule, it may as well have been nothing. (Note that I plopped enough stations at one time so that an effect should've been noticable had there been one in both scenarios). However, when I started plopping stations along the lines in more strategic positions and sometimes adding some line connections (as opposed to entire new lines), this had a noticable effect on commute times. After this was done, I started removing the adjacent stations and the ones a tile or three away that I had previously plopped. The STATION capacity would go back up, sometimes not as drastically as it had been before the third group of stations, but the commute time did NOT increase at all. My conclusions: put in new stations as the existing ones get overused, but put them along the lines somewhat spread out and this will have more of a desirable impact on your subway/transportation network flow. I have done this also in other cities with the same results, so it wasn't just something that was unique to the first city. Like you, I pay attention to the numbers and try to incorporate them into my planning strategies, but often, the numbers aren't really as effective a guideline as they could be. Consider them and work with them, but don't worry about them too much. Intuitive placement seems to work a lot better. Sorry if this isn't as definitive as you would have liked, SCBOY, but it was enough for me to make some conclusions from my own experiences based upon what you were asking. Hope it helps some.

[SC4BOY 20]

I agree with your "experimental results" on the overall traffic success. I use a similar method of analyzing where the traffic is comming from and where it wants to go and try to improve travel to that point. I have had similar experiences of yours, but am looking for someone who has a direct relationship for station congestion to travel time/throughput... It could be that no one has this info, though I can't believe some of the old timers don't know this... or have a good idea about it... Perhaps I will be reduced to an experiment of my own under controlled conditions.. my problem is that I never build megacities so I don't readily have available an experimental stage. I know also that subways are supposedly immune to "congestion" (along with water, monorail) .. the lines, not the stations, even thought they will turn red... but I'd love to have some quantitive info.. I am not totally sure of how I'd design this.. I suppose you'd have to isolate a single line between two points seperated by a certain distance and play with it until you had some idea of the issue's mechanics.

[DOXXP29 5]

SCBOY, if you could figure out how to run the experiment, let me know and I'd be glad to try it in some of my larger cities. I'm not sure exactly how to set something like that up to get real numbers, but if you come up with a plan, I'll run it. I'm curious myself about how all this works. My cities right now range mostly from 150k to 750k. All have subways and a pretty decent mass transit system, though I don't know if they'd be considered "conventional" in all cases. I have about 15 cities up and running right now, so there are enough to get samples from.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I think you guys are getting up to conducting a game experiment.  Moving you over.