commuting between cities

[Just a guy 0]

Good afternoon all,

First I would like to thank everyone for all of the help people have provided me with in the past...it is greatly appreciated.

My question is this:

Will Sims travel across one city to work,live & shop in another. 

I"m not talking about two cities that are touching, I'm hoping that if I have a line of cities (1, 2, 3)...will Sims living in city 1 travel out of 1 across 2 and into 3 if I have freeway, rail & monorail going all the way across all 3 cities.

Thanks for the help and I hope the little suckers will commute all the way, it would make my development go a little smoother.

[Cleaner475 150]

I would also like mto know this - i know that when you create a sim on the My Sim panel they can work outside of your city but it never tells you what city they go to. It is something I have been wondering as I previously built a massive region with seven giant cities and built a highway between all of them but I don't specifically know if ones in city one drove through city two and into city three. I think they do it with rail and they definetly do it with ferries. So I suspect that its the same with roads.

[DFire870 2]

Yes, sims will go far to go to work. It depends on the size of the city tiles, and if you have any mods that alter the commute limit. In one region I did (which was all large tiles), I had almost all my industrial in one tile (as part of a seaport), and the sims commuted to it via rail from a tile that wasn't bordering it.

Your best bet for sims to commute that far is to use rail and monorail.

[sebastin 1]

subway and monorail commutes sims the longest way. also highway can give you distant commuting. And remember, if sims commute to another city, the commute time is only counted to/from the border of the city.

[Barbarossa 51]

Sims will travel to distant tiles for work. Just be aware that you will never see them when looking at traffic in those tiles (at least, I don't think you do). The game only considers in-tile traffic. Like buses, inter-tile traffic does not contribute to your congestion or any other measurements.

Barbarossa

[Just a guy 0]

Thank you for all the replies...

This gives me some new directions to go with my cities.

It does kinda bring up a (somewhat) related question.  Has Maxis (EA) built in a "lazy" factor into the game?

I have a small subdivision in my main city and I have a bunch of "No Job" zots.  The weird thing is I have monorail, subway & bus stops all with 8 squares of the unemployed Sims.  My only thought is they are doing better on welfare and can't be bothered to get a job.

Thanks again for the help...you are all on the top of my Christmas card list now

[DragonStallion 0]

The monorail system can be replaced by the High Speed Rail project for even higher intercity commuter speeds, but the tracks use wide turns and are best at zero to light grades. They are a 1000 piece to plop. The hubs are 3000 to plop and 300 to maintain.

[sebastin 1]

how is the HSR made to commute faster than monorail? how much faster is HSR compared to monorail and subway?

[DFire870 2]

Actually, Barbarossa, that's not true. On my CJ region, I have sims commuting from the downtown area to the seaport. They are separated by a large city tile, and I've looked in traffic view and queried the train tracks, and both show a substantial amount of traffic. In fact, the tracks are so overused that I had to lay three side-by-side, and they're still packed! So inter-city commuting and congestion does actually show up.

[Sketchley 0]

Agreed with DFire870. The simulation determines where all of those sims are travelling, working, and sometimes, not working (they continue travelling to a neighbour city or disappear into the twilight zone.)

[PolytAffe 0]

I tried experiementing a bit with this. It seems that if you only play one map and you have a resident commuting from that map to another map it adds ~160 minutes to the commute time. If you then play the other map it will calculate the commute time from the edge of the map to the workplace. Returning to the map with the resident it will recalculate the commute time to what it is supposed to be.

I will try and see if i can get someone to commute across a map and see what happens.

[Barbarossa 51]

Good to know. Thanks, guys. I will keep this in mind.

Barbarossa