Commute Time

[Vader1000 0]

I've developed an impessive city (1,180,000 people to be precise) and I've found one very disturbing thing that is omnipreent whenever a city reaches that size.

1. Commute time is ALWAYS above 45 minutes.
2. There is usually a lack of stage 7 and 8 buildings on the edge of my residential zones and a lack of stage 7 and 8 (and sometimes 6) buildings at my city center.

All the data I've collected on the traffic patterns in my city have held true to this. 80% of the population works in the commercial sector but 80% of that percentage have jobs in the first few blocks of office towers. I end up getting a big donut-like shape of very conjested traffic and then an area of very light traffic. The times are absurd when one considers the actual size of the city and the usual commute distance of each particular building. I'm wondering if the algorithm is working right because I've never seen a peron needing 55 minutes to drive 10 blocks even if it is rush hour. Besides that, my bus/E-train system is highly coordinated and well-designed. It's served me very well in the past and I'm continually improving it. What I need to know, is what else I can do to lower that bloody commute time.

[EyeofMobius 27]

My cities have yet to reach a size as impressive as that however I wonder if your donut hole at least in the commerical district might be filled if your train network were modelled after a flower. Say a large stem flowing directly to the centre with a major hub station which then blooms out with short distance stops forcing the commuters to go past the centre before touching the ring.

[SC4BOY 20]

Is it possible you've developed "commute loops" in your maps.. this is characterized by heavy traffic uaually near the corners of your city tiles with extreme traffic coming into the dity and exiting the city without taking a job.. usually more or less in the corner areas of your maps, but maybe in the middle if you have adjacent small tiles..

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

A good point.  Because of an unfixable bug in the program your transportation map should be a tree that is essentially free from loops where the Sims can just go round and round.