Sims driving in circles through diff cities for jobs

[sparkin50 0]

I start off with all large cities (NAM is the only plugin), and I build in a rather realistic fashion (sparsely populated at first, with a basic, central area of population ; farmland and dirty industrial along with rural type environments the further you get from downtown). The problem is when I start getting cities built in the edges of the map (especially the corners), they start travelling to the neighboring city to find jobs. No problem with that - however if jobs arent available in that city, they end up traveling to the next city (which is usually also adjacent to the original city of the commuters), and so forth, usually continuing in a never ending loop of traffic. 

The big problem with this is that if I loop this traffic around and save it from city to city, an avenue which originally had 250 cars going outbound into another city, by the time I get back around to the originating city, the same avenue connecting to the other city then has 500 cars. This is a non stopping loop of traffic which doesnt seem to break if you destroy the connection to the neighboring city, save it, and even loop back around to amend it. Instead  - destroying the connection will either force the sims to route to the next available road comming into the originating city, or if I DO reconnect the road, the traffic goes back to 250 ... thus continuing the loop.

I can't be the only person in the world with this problem - its driving me crazy and its a serious gamebreaker to me - as these sims ultimately do not have a job, their existence isnt making demand for jobs raise, and thus its destroying growth in my cities. Does someone feel my pain? Is there a possible solution to this? PLEASE help!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Yes, I do recall that phenomenon.  It is a bug, if you ask me, but I don't remember how I fixed my game.  Maybe you should break the loop by putting jobs on it somewhere in one of the external cities.

[old.log 0]

I have the same problem and don't know how to fix it. At least it doesn't seem to be preventing sims from getting to their jobs...

[RippleJet 36]

It is a rather annoying bug and in order to avoid this, you should try not to have border crossings too close to the corners of your cities in the first place.

Sims are looking for work as close as possible to where they live. If they live close to the edges of a city, the game unfortunately only calcuates the distance to the border as the length of the trip to work (without knowing how far from the other side of the border the work place is).

If the border crossing is close to the corner, the Sims will again in the second city find the shortest route to work to be the one crossing perpendicularly into the next neighbouring city, and so on. Thus creating an infinite loop.

My experience is that the intercity commuters never reduce in numbers, they can only increase. Thus, if you break the loop and develop work places closer to the remaining crossings between your cities, you might eventually get rid of the "loopers", but the commuters will always remain.

[DOXXP29 5]

Check this link out, Sparkin. It may help clear things up a bit. There are few more over there as well that go further in depth about the problem. http://www.simphoni.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=13412&b=1&st=0&p=entry

And Welcome to Simtropolis!