Neighborhood Connections

[lucashp 1]

I've been wondering a bit lately, On connecting your cities. What would be better for demand, And commute times. Plan A (What I did before) Only use avenues, highways, and mass transit to exit the city. Plan B All roads on the edge of the city are connected with the neighboring cities. I guess In plan A you could also use the major avenues, But the roads would either be really congested (Do not want) or divided.

[Neddiggis 1]

Plan B isn't a good idea as it can lead to eternal commuters. If a connection from City A to B has a commuter cross it and they find another close connection to City C then they will often take it. If they keep doing this untill they reach city A again then they will never actually find jobs, and artificially raise the population too.

[THE_Chris 0]

Having highways, roads AND rail connecting cities is natural and looks good in region view, but all that happens even with the NAM is the roads and rail get jammed to bits and the highways sit there empty.

[s_olah 87]

I always connect them with roads and rail first, and as the city grows, or the number of commuters rises, I just replace them with avenues, or build another rail line...so my advice is use the ones that are required...I like railways, they're fast and reliable, just make sure to have a really well connected train station...

[Dukat 2]

I'm using plan A, plan B definitely got no advantages. My only road connections are highways. This way highways get a good rate of usage. And being once on the highway, the citizens actually stay on them after they commuted to the neighbour city and take the exits closest to their jobs/target destination.

I even hamper direct traffic between residential and commercial areas in the same region, forcing people to use highways to get to their commecial jobs. In the end, my highways got a acceptable utilisation. I do that for optical reasons, even accepting higher commuting times. But it is so great to have highways utilized in an acceptable amount.

[NetPCDoc 1]

Hello lucashp,

It really depends on the reason for which you are making the neighbor connections in the first place.

If you are making connections for demand cap relief - then make up to three of each type of connection to each possible neighbor; after three - the return (i.e. cap relief) on your investment (making another of same type of connection) isn't worth the hassle.

If you are making the connections for commuting purposes - only add more connections when the ones you have are overly congested (I like to wait until they reach something like 200% utilization); and if you are using lower volume connections, consider upgrading your current connections (to larger volume types of transit), before adding more.

A quick tip, please remember - for commuting purposes, avenues can mate end-to-end with highways - to speed up your inter-city traffic.

-NetPCDoc

No detail is too small to be micromanaged.