RH Commute Testing...

[the7trumpets 10]

pitch-

 

It would help me out A LOT if you could simply take a screenshot, close up, of the specific intersection which is not allowing proper travel, and post it here.

 

thanks.

[the7trumpets 10]

Pitch - I have not been able to recreate your situation.  If it is still occuring, please take a screenshot and show me the specific situation.  I tried drawing a system like what your drawings looked like, and the sim found the path fine for me.

[Skippydam73 0]

T7T, Does the engine actually take in effect the return home? I did a little experiment actually looking at the ramps of avenue to hiway and the time only increased when they had to drive further to work, not from work. Here are the pics.

 

 

 

Here I extended the avenue longer for the trip home, no change in time.

 

I made the trip to work longer and the time did increase to 40 minutes.

 

Last I increased the avenue for the trip home, no change.

 

Well for one, I dont know if the pathfinding is going over the median on the way home.  I need to put the job on the other side.  Another thing is use one way roads to see if the case above with the medians is really true or not.

[the7trumpets 10]

yes, qbert2 has already proven that the commute time shown (and possibly the 'commute time' attribute in the lot, but I'm not sure if this has been verified yet) is not dependant in any way on the return trip, it's the time for the trip there doubled.

 

This was partialy excusable pre-RH since it appeared that the return trip was not calculated in the interest of saving processing power, but now that we know it's calculated, what's the deal?  Why not add it in to the commute time data?

 

I just don't get it

[Skippydam73 0]

Ok, I did three more. 

 

This one is having the industry on the other side.  This did double the commute, which is from having to drive further to get to work.

 

I used one way roads for the next two, extending the trip home in the second one. No change again for commute when the drive home is extended.

 

[Skippydam73 0]

----------------

On 9/29/2003 12:10:20 PM the7trumpets wrote:

yes, qbert2 has already proven that the commute time shown (and possibly the 'commute time' attribute in the lot, but I'm not sure if this has been verified yet) is not dependant in any way on the return trip, it's the time for the trip there doubled.

 

This was partialy excusable pre-

RH

since it appeared that the return trip was not calculated in the interest of saving processing power, but now that we know it's calculated, what's the deal?  Why not add it in to the commute time data?

 

I just don't get it

----------------

A day late and a dollar short. Anyway I orginally was seeing if the sims crossed the median of the ramps.  Well they dont, figured that out

[mikeyb66 30]

Hi 7 saw you wanted to know if sims still went out the backyard. Here's some proof for you.

Sims can walk out of their backyards:

In the car:

Or both:

Hope this is helpful.

[the7trumpets 10]

Thanks mikeyb,  that helps.

 

Lately, I've become interested in figuring out the 'long' 'medium' and 'short' designations, as some on the official site's BBS have indicated that there may be a bug.  I'm pretty sure there is a bug somehow, but if someone could help me narrow down where it is, I'd really appreciate it.  Here's what I did:

 

 

Upon starting a new city, driving road route commute times increased to medium from short at a distance of 10 tiles, which is 9 steps, or 6 minutes. However, as soon as I used roads, every driving commute time I could generate was classified as long. When I switched back to roads, every commute time I could generate was still listed as 'long'. And yes, I waited a long time between every step to ensure the simulator had time to update.

THEN, to be sure about my findings, I tried the test again. (I like to be thorough). This time, it behaved exactly the same way with roads. This time, when I buldozed the road to form a street, I waited a very long time (about 2 years sim time) after buldozing the road before laying the street down, to make sure the simulator wasn't getting confused with what network was placed there. However, the exact same thing happened.

Then, I tested a third time This time, I waited a long time after building the street before laying down the residential lot. Now, the street behaved like the road did, switching to a medium commute time at 6 minutes (7 street tiles). HOWEVER, when I zoned additional residential lots, they all went to 'long', even when they were zoned closer to the job lot than the lot which displayed a 'medium' commute time.

But, in all these tests, the actual commute time appeared to be what it should be, as discovered in tests over on simtropolis, so these short, medium, and long designations are not correctly representing the underlying commute time.

So, in conclusion, this may be an extremely big issue. If the simulator uses these 'short' 'medium' and 'long' designations as the real desirability factors, we have a major logic bug on our hands. If it uses the underlying commute time as the desirability factor, what we have is purely a visual bug, which should still be corrected. In any case, I feel fairly certain saying that this is a bug.

[Codex 0]

Bye the way: I'm just trying to rebuild a real city including all streets and roads, residential, commercial and industry areas. I also use realstic sizes and distances. However some further out residential areas wont develope because commute times are too long.
Is it possible to change, how far the Sims will commute to a job within the dat files? Like changing it from 120 (or whatever it is now) to 200 minutes e.g.?

Any help would be appreciated, so I can get my city running.
Are there any tests that I could help with?

Thanx
Codex

[redlotus 16]

It is fairly easy to change the max commute time.  0xA92356BA is the property you need to change.  If you are using DM's new pathfinding mod, you can just change it there.  Otherwise, use the exemplar analyzer to locate the Max Commute Time property.

 

Its normal value is 6.  So 6*10(for the x10 scaler)*2(for morning and evening commutes)=120 for the standard setting.  Just take whatever time you want the max to be and divide by 20.

 

Hope this helps.

[joerg 278]

Well i dont know if this should be discussed her but has anyone noticed that changing commute speeds and max commute times doesnt really effect the sims but only the graph? In my city even setting commute speeds in the 1000s i cant egt sims to go very far at all. Its like the distance they can travel without getting NJZs never changes. But my commute graph shows a com time under 10 mins. I can post some pics if you can tell me which ones i need. But basically i think there is a huge bug that isnt letting sims go further no matter what the settings are at. So i ask you guys this. Can you see sims acctually travel as far as they could with the7trumpes realistic pathfinding mod when you set speeds to be the same? I sure cant get my sims to go anywhere that far. And the even more puzzeling thing is that some of my lots that get NJZs have high commute times and and the drive looks very short. But some of them have low commute times and they might travel twice as far according to the transportation query. Oh and this only seems to happen in larger cities but there is no real congestion in these cities becuase i have modified the capacity settings. Any help with this would be great. And again just tell me the pics you need and i will post them.

[Skippydam73 0]

----------------

On 9/30/2003 7:38:00 PM joerg wrote:

Well i dont know if this should be discussed her but has anyone noticed that changing commute speeds and max commute times doesnt really effect the sims but only the graph? In my city even setting commute speeds in the 1000s i cant egt sims to go very far at all. Its like the distance they can travel without getting NJZs never changes. But my commute graph shows a com time under 10 mins. I can post some pics if you can tell me which ones i need. But basically i think there is a huge bug that isnt letting sims go further no matter what the settings are at. So i ask you guys this. Can you see sims acctually travel as far as they could with the7trumpes realistic pathfinding mod when you set speeds to be the same? I sure cant get my sims to go anywhere that far. And the even more puzzeling thing is that some of my lots that get NJZs have high commute times and and the drive looks very short. But some of them have low commute times and they might travel twice as far according to the transportation query. Oh and this only seems to happen in larger cities but there is no real congestion in these cities becuase i have modified the capacity settings. Any help with this would be great. And again just tell me the pics you need and i will post them.

----------------

Joerg,
If you can, post your info and Pics of your city to the thread City and InterCity Job Testing here in the experiments section. Working right along side of the this thread, we can keep the info separate but close enough to compare. Is it a stand alone city?

T7T, just out of curiousity, have you changed the multiplier to 10 to see if it changes the commute at all? I wonder if that got accidently changed and is causing alot of the problems. (I reread the thread to make sure this wasnt done already )

[the7trumpets 10]

The property in the dat file containing the multiplier (if it ever existed) has never been found, so we have never been able to change this multiplier, much less see whether it got changed to 12

[toroca 160]

I've made an interesting discovery regarding busses and commuting. I consider it a bug, but not a negative one.

It seems neighbor connections have the ability to transform busses into cars. *LOL*

I've got three cities currently. Two of them are connected directly to an industry-only city, and the third is connected to the Industry city THROUGH the largest of the three residential cities.

I've got bus systems in two of the three residential cities, but not in the industrial city.

Now, here's how I found this: I was expanding the larges of the three residential cities when it occurred to me that I hadn't built any bus stops in the industrial city. So, I thought this would mean that the sims could use the busses to travel to my small commercial areas, but not to the neighboring industrial city where most of the region's jobs were. Using the Route Query tool, I did notice that there were busses heading into the industrial city, so I guessed that the game was assuming I would build bus stops the next time I went into the industry city. Out of curiosity, I looked at the highway tile where it connected to the industrial city. Route Query indicated there were 608 people traveling to the industrial city by bus, and 337 by car.

I saved and exited to the region, and jumped into the Industrial city. Again out of curiosity, I checked the tile that served as the industrial city's connection to the residential neighbor. To my surprise, 945 cars were reported entering on that highway tile! I immediately realized that 945 was the exact total you'd get if you combined the bus and car totals from the tile just across the border!

Since I noted that, I've done some more testing, and it does indeed appear that you don't need bus stops in destination cities; the game simply converts busses into cars if there are no bus stops in the destination city. I saved the industry city, without adding any bus stops, and went back to the residential city. Bus trips didn't drop at all, so the game apparently doesn't care whether the neighbor has bus stops or not, it will send busses to the connection point regardless.

If there ARE bus stops in the destination city, it appears that the game will still convert some bus trips into car trips, but my results weren't conclusive on that testing.

It's certainly an interesting discovery, and a somewhat surprising one at that. I wasn't expecting it, at least.

[MaxisKevin 0]

----------------

On 9/29/2003 3:38:47 PM the7trumpets wrote:

Thanks mikeyb, that helps.

Lately, I've become interested in figuring out the 'long' 'medium' and 'short' designations, as some on the official site's BBS have indicated that there may be a bug. I'm pretty sure there is a bug somehow, but if someone could help me narrow down where it is, I'd really appreciate it. Here's what I did:

Upon starting a new city, driving road route commute times increased to medium from short at a distance of 10 tiles, which is 9 steps, or 6 minutes. However, as soon as I used roads, every driving commute time I could generate was classified as long. When I switched back to roads, every commute time I could generate was still listed as 'long'. And yes, I waited a long time between every step to ensure the simulator had time to update.

THEN, to be sure about my findings, I tried the test again. (I like to be thorough). This time, it behaved exactly the same way with roads. This time, when I buldozed the road to form a street, I waited a very long time (about 2 years sim time) after buldozing the road before laying the street down, to make sure the simulator wasn't getting confused with what network was placed there. However, the exact same thing happened.

Then, I tested a third time

This time, I waited a long time after building the street before laying down the residential lot. Now, the street behaved like the road did, switching to a medium commute time at 6 minutes (7 street tiles). HOWEVER, when I zoned additional residential lots, they all went to 'long', even when they were zoned closer to the job lot than the lot which displayed a 'medium' commute time.

But, in all these tests, the actual commute time appeared to be what it should be, as discovered in tests over on simtropolis, so these short, medium, and long designations are not correctly representing the underlying commute time.

So, in conclusion, this may be an extremely big issue. If the simulator uses these 'short' 'medium' and 'long' designations as the real desirability factors, we have a major logic bug on our hands. If it uses the underlying commute time as the desirability factor, what we have is purely a visual bug, which should still be corrected. In any case, I feel fairly certain saying that this is a bug.

----------------

Thanks everyone for all the hard work that's clearly evident from this thread. I'm trying to reproduce this issue and I may be misunderstanding it. I assume the commute length you're talking about is the one displayed in the regular query? Based on that assumption I drew a nine tile street and put a residence on one side and an industry on the other. For a street the commute length reported medium. When I put in a road, the commute length would either be short (if the trip type was car) or medium (if the trip type was walk). Under that scenario it would be possible to have a closer house have a longer commute if the closer house chose to walk while the farther house drove. I've attempted to post a screenshot to show my test.

Is this an accurate recreation of your test? If not, can you help me understand where I went wrong? Thanks again for your help!
-Kevin

[the7trumpets 10]

Good to hear from you Kevin!!!

 

Yes, we're talking about the general querry (not route querry) commute time length.  I don't completely understand what's going on yet, because I've been sidetracked fixing bugs I know I can fix, having to do with faulty or non-existant sc4path files.  There are also some bugs with intersection creation between different network types, but the RUL data has been moved out of the INI file it was in before Rush Hour.  Any clue where it is now?  Hint hint?  please please? (PM me if you don't want to post it)

 

But, since you're showing interest I'll get back on this.  Just give me a coupple of days

[DarkMatter 21]

Yikes!! This thread took off fast. This time around, seems we have half the site helping out. I'm sorry I havn't been around helping test and stuff, but I've gotten sidetracked working on improving DatGen so 7th can make his bug fixes.

I'll try to get involved soon.

MaxisKevin...glad to see you onboard. Nothing better than having someone on the inside to help us out.

[Skippydam73 0]

MaxisKevin,,
I posted this at the official bbs but here it is again. Is it possible to change the hover query to show the actual commute time instead of the short, medium, long? It is sometimes impossible to figure out the commute times. Right now I have a city of 35k, commute time of 45 minutes but I get abandonment in places due to commute time being long. There are plenty of jobs so thats not it. Traffic is good so it can't be because it takes 2.5 hours in the game to go across 80 tiles or so. If you would like more info I can get it to you tomorrow or the next day.

[toroca 160]

Kevin,

I gotta agree, it would be nice to see the actual commute time listed instead of short, medium, and long.

Also, I think the bug that has been described is that once a commute time (long, medium, short) has been applied to a residence, it will not change, even if the place of employment and chosen route change dramatically... am I right on that, 7?

Furthermore, I would like to request that you incorporate the7's fixes to the path files so that all forms of transit work correctly, as well as fix any he doesn't get to. There are a lot of people who refuse to use unofficial patches even when they fix what are clearly bugs, not intentional features, so unless you guys at Maxis incorporate these fixes, people like that will be out of luck.

[the7trumpets 10]

MaxisKevin - Good news!!!

 

Here is what I have observed:

 

Any lot which is once classified as having a long commute time stays as classified as long, regaurdless of whether thier commute time lowers, even to 0 minutes.

 

In general, the long,short,medium designation does not seem to be consistant, and is almost random.  I set up the test shere there is a long road with Residential on one side and ID on the other.  The only pattern I can discern so far is that the problem seems to be either 'correct calculation' of this property, or it is set at 'long'.  The cases I noticed were as all over the map, seemingly every combination possible.

 

Then I exited without saving and ran the same test again, only this time I zoned small areas at a time and played relatively slowly, careful to make sure there were enough jobs available.  To my surprise, there were no problems whatsoever.

 

 

So, I had one of my hypothesis, and though...hmm... perhaps it's houses who have been unable to find a job in the past who get classified as having a 'long' commute regaurdless of what thier actual commute time is.  And it was right!  I tested no job zots by dezoning all but one workplace, and all the R lots which had no job zots went to 'long' commutes after I re-zoned more Industry.  The R lots which were working at the one remaining workplace (a fire station) did not change to 'long', they kept showing the right designation.  Then I tested no car zots by de-zoning all the R lots which had long commute times, and dezoning all the jobs.  This caused no car zots over the remaining two R lots.  When I put jobs back in, thier querry showed 'long' instead of medium and short like before.

 

 

 

So, a summary, and the 'semi' official bug report:

 

1. Once R lots are classified as having 'long' commute times in the general query, they cannot get assigned medium or short designations, regaurdless of how the commute changes.
2. Once R lots cannot find a job, thier commute time designation in the query window is stuck at 'long' for life, regaurdless of how near you zone a job for them to work at.

 

I'm guessing that the first problem is related to the second.  In order to get a sim to change jobs (other than using mysims) you have to buldoze the old job, which although it doesn't show a no job zot, probably raises the flag in the simulator, which is why it looks for another job.  Aparently by the time it finds the new closer job, the damage is already done and the commute designation is already stuck at 'long'.

There still seem to be some instances when even though you have enough jobs, a newly zoned R lot will show a 'long' commute time in the general query.  My only hypothesis on this is that the way the simulator works, there are some cases where a R lot gets tagged having no job before it has a chance to search for one and devlop, and other times it searches for a job and finds one before it's tagged as having no job.

I don't know whether this is related, or a potential cause, but R lots when dezoned and rezoned within the same pathfinding cycle always retain the same route and job placement.  Hope this helps!!!

 

 

By the way, why was the commute x10 multiplier changed to x12?  Or is that a bug too?

[Sabretooth78 808]

 

----------------

On 9/29/2003 12:32:16 AM the7trumpets wrote:

 

Inter-city commuting is beginning to boggle my mind.

----------------

I couldn't agree with you more.  Here's little thing I finally just caught onto today:

I've highlighted City Limits in yellow, the particular route in question is in blue.

Basically, traffic is originating from various locations in Hamilton (Pop. 17000) and heading out towards Kensington (Pop. 18000) via the avenue/bypass.  About 600 cars at the border. After reaching Kensington (largest city in the region thus far), traffic immediately ducks out to Oshawa (Pop. +/-80), with negligible loss of volume, and heads right back into Hamilton via another connection.  Traffic then turns left at the first street, with a few cars stopping at farms (you'd think it'd be faster not to drive through 2 different towns to get to work in your town!), but essentially all there are still 500 cars now jamming a country street.  They then get to the same road they took to get out of town, head into town, but take the first left towards Bakersfield (Pop. 1500).  None seem to follow the bypass back up thankfully.  Anyways when reaching Baskersfield, about 100 go downtown (straight) while the rest "bypass" along another country street. The rest then go to Drake (Pop. 57), and the stream appears to end in the so-called "downtown" there.

This seems pretty ridiculous if you think about it and it kind of bothers me since I can't effectively "control" where the cars are going to/coming from.  How do I know if I build a highway out of town, they won't get off 2 towns later, loop back on a street/road right back into the origin town and head the other way?  Not that I mind some so-called ambient or background traffic (as it essentially becomes), but this is bazaar!

The pathfinding was taking over a year to fully update in Kensington, (I had modified an intersection along the route there), so I didn't see this happening until just now. (Hence why I have 500+ cars on a STREET)  Is it normal to sometimes have updates take that long?  It only seems to be bad in that city.

Another issue I have is with passenger trains.  I just implemented a passenger rail system in Hamilton and a few other cities, and the first station placed in Hamilton is now running at 80%.  I followed that traffic through it's course, and it heads towards a yet-to-be-developed city about 6 towns to the southeast.  But notraffic is shown in the last developed town on the route.  Also funny is that the volume dies down somewhat on the route, all in areas with no stations.  Jumping the train????  It sure seems to be helping jack up some transportation income though.

I will restate that this is only the first such loop like this I have noticed.  There could be 50 other ones for all I know.

If this interests anybody and they want to check this further, I'll be more than happy to dig a little deeper into the specifics that I'm personally experiencing here.

I apologize for the excessively long post, but I wanted to get it all out!

Thanks
Chris

[MaxisKevin 0]

----------------

On 10/7/2003 1:21:03 PM the7trumpets wrote:

MaxisKevin -

Good news!!!

Here is what I have observed:

Any lot which is once classified as having a long commute time stays as classified as long, regaurdless of whether thier commute time lowers, even to 0 minutes.

In general, the long,short,medium designation does not seem to be consistant, and is almost random. I set up the test shere there is a long road with Residential on one side and ID on the other. The only pattern I can discern so far is that the problem seems to be either 'correct calculation' of this property, or it is set at 'long'. The cases I noticed were as all over the map, seemingly every combination possible.

Then I exited without saving and ran the same test again, only this time I zoned small areas at a time and played relatively slowly, careful to make sure there were enough jobs available. To my surprise, there were no problems whatsoever.

So, I had one of my hypothesis, and though...hmm... perhaps it's houses who have been unable to find a job in the past who get classified as having a 'long' commute regaurdless of what thier actual commute time is. And it was right! I tested no job zots by dezoning all but one workplace, and all the R lots which had no job zots went to 'long' commutes after I re-zoned more Industry. The R lots which were working at the one remaining workplace (a fire station) did not change to 'long', they kept showing the right designation. Then I tested no car zots by de-zoning all the R lots which had long commute times, and dezoning all the jobs. This caused no car zots over the remaining two R lots. When I put jobs back in, thier querry showed 'long' instead of medium and short like before.

So, a summary, and the 'semi' official bug report:

1. Once R lots are classified as having 'long' commute times in the general query, they cannot get assigned medium or short designations, regaurdless of how the commute changes.
   
   
2. Once R lots cannot find a job, thier commute time designation in the query window is stuck at 'long' for life, regaurdless of how near you zone a job for them to work at.

I'm guessing that the first problem is related to the second. In order to get a sim to change jobs (other than using mysims) you have to buldoze the old job, which although it doesn't show a no job zot, probably raises the flag in the simulator, which is why it looks for another job. Aparently by the time it finds the new closer job, the damage is already done and the commute designation is already stuck at 'long'.

There still seem to be some instances when even though you have enough jobs, a newly zoned R lot will show a 'long' commute time in the general query. My only hypothesis on this is that the way the simulator works, there are some cases where a R lot gets tagged having no job before it has a chance to search for one and devlop, and other times it searches for a job and finds one before it's tagged as having no job.

I don't know whether this is related, or a potential cause, but R lots when dezoned and rezoned within the same pathfinding cycle always retain the same route and job placement. Hope this helps!!!

By the way, why was the commute x10 multiplier changed to x12? Or is that a bug too?

----------------

This is incredibly helpful. Thanks! After looking into this, I can verify that this is only a display (UI) bug. It is not effecting desirability nor any other simulator. I agree that this is something we need to fix, so we'll do what we can (no promises).

As far as that 10x bug goes, I'm not sure I understand it. We have a multiplier that we use to convert our debug data into minutes used for the graph. This is actually set to 25 and has not changed since the core product. If you want to play with it the property ID is ca76013b. Set it to 1 to remove the effect. I'm not sure what this will get you though. Again, my understanding is that this only effects the graph. Am I misunderstanding the bug?

[+Guest]

The x10 "bug" is what you guys at Maxis put into the game to make it kinda more realistic in the fact that all Sim's just look for the closest available job. What it does is basically multiply all commute times by 10 (or, now, 12), which kinda hurts people who try to create really realistic citys, as in real life the commute may be like 40 or 50 minutes for someone in point a going to point b, but in SC4 (if all traffic and speeds and whatever were equal), the commute would be 400 or 500 minutes.

[phungus420 0]

This is also to offset the fact that regional commutes are not calculated in commute time. REalistically this game would virtually give no value to commute time if this "bug" were changed. If you want you can multiply all speeds by 10, but it's boring since commutes will never really go above 20 min. It really is too bad regional comute times are not calculated, or added in, I think that is the true "bug".

[AlexPi 0]

Hello, I've just had a very interesting experience. I had a very nicely laid out Medium sized city, with Res, Com, and Ind. There was almost no traffic in the whole city and plenty of jobs. At one point in the game, a corner of my city started having NJZs. I tried relaying roads, redoing the layout, etc... Nothing helped. Until... and this is the strange part... I disconnected my SimNation connections in that part of the map.

Here is what the corner looked like:

Legend:
<= SimNation Connection via Ave.
= Avenue
- Road
R Med. Residention

<===================
|R R R|R R R|R
|R R R|R R R|R
|R R R|R R R|R
<===================

Once the SimNation connections were severed, everything became fine. People were commuting all over the place and no more NJZs. I even saw people drive half way across the map with only a Med. commute time.

I found this very interesting, and so I posted it here. Maybe the job finding engine gets confused at certain points, like when having too many SimNation connection??? Anyways, I hope this helps

Edit:
Here's an image of the area:

[Ombedor 23]

Could this have been a problem with sims not being able to turn left on avenues?  If the job finding engine identified the top SimNation connection as the "workplace" for the neighborhood, and they couldn't turn left to get on the avenue, then they would get NJZ.  Just a theory.  the7trumpets has posted a modd to fix the left-turn bug, maybe that would fix the problem as well.

[redlotus 16]

----------------

On 10/8/2003 10:34:25 AM Ombedor wrote:

Could this have been a problem with sims not being able to turn left on avenues?  If the job finding engine identified the top SimNation connection as the 'workplace' for the neighborhood, and they couldn't turn left to get on the avenue, then they would get NJZ.  Just a theory.  the7trumpets has posted a modd to fix the left-turn bug, maybe that would fix the problem as well.

----------------

Unfortunately, 7's fix doesn't change the inherent properties of avenues.  Sims cannot turn left onto an avenue because there is a median in the way.  You were, however, very close to the answer to AlexPi's issue.  Here is an example that shows the real problem in action:

As you can see, there is no route for the sims to get to work, because sims cannot do a U-turn at the neighbor connection.  When Alex bulldozed the neighbor connection, the avenue automatically formed a U-turn, and sims were able to get to work and back.  It could have also be fixed by placing a road that connects the two lanes of the avenue right at the edge of the city (where the red arrow is pointing).

AlexPi, if you could give this a try and let me know how it works, I would appreciate it.  So far it has worked for a few people (myself included), but I don't think I've seen it tried when the residential lots are at the edge of the city.

[Ombedor 23]

I understand what you're saying redlotus, but I think your example is a little different.  In AlexPi's example the sims were working in the neighbor, not at a business on the edge of the map.  I was speculating that perhaps they couldn't get to the neighbor connection due to a problem turning left from the roads onto the avenue.  Once he destroyed the neighbor connection, the job finding engine located new jobs for the sims within the local city, and now they could commute to work by turning right onto the avenue.

[AlexPi 0]

But I thought sims don't work at SimNation, only at connected cities. These two particular connections were SimNation connections. As far as I understand, SN connections are for cap relief only, no one actually drives there.

[Ombedor 23]

----------------

On 10/8/2003 1:43:40 PM AlexPi wrote:But I thought sims don't work at SimNation, only at connected cities. These two particular connections were SimNation connections. As far as I understand, SN connections are for cap relief only, no one actually drives there.

----------------

Hmmm.  That may be true, I don't remember.  If you are right, then my theory is invalid.  Maybe you could try to verify what's going on by replacing the avenue neighbor connection with a road neighbor connection and using the route query tool to see where sims in that corner commute to.  Then replace the road with an avenue once again and see if they revert to NJZ again.