Unemployment Issue that I cannot understand

[Veshan 0]

This is a topic I know has a lot of coverage and I've taken all the advise I've seen on it and I just can't seem to avoid it: I always get unemployment in my cities, which leads to economic collapse as my middle-class and rich sims dry up when my sims get dumb (as they keep moving in and out and resetting their intelligence) and stop demanding high-tech jobs.

To preface, I have NAM installed using the fewest addons possible to get the routing fix, and have capacities set to classic. I also have the IH R$$$ fix installed. That's all.

I'm trying to build a single city: I want to build up an single spot of land as high as it will go, not a region. I know you get some benefits from making off-regions (most of all extra land), but I think I should be able to at least build a city that can sustain its own populous's jobs (maybe this is just impossible).

Anyway, in trying to understand the degree to which sims can or can't generate the demand to get the number of jobs they need, I ran a simple test the result of which makes no sense to me.

I zone low-density residential in the center of the map, a ring of commercial around that, and a ring of industry around that. I build out of a grid of avenues and still only have 12k sims, so congestion is essentially zero and my average commute time is about .3. There should be no issues getting to jobs. I have built no amenities. My sims are 0 in education and health. They are also all poor by result. Poor, 0 EQ sims are supposed to produce 50% low wealth commercial and 115% dirty industry (both of which only employ poor sims) according to https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=621664a2c4cb094cc835badd152e801d&topic=963.0. I read this to mean for every 100 poor, 0 EQ sims there should be 115 dirty industry jobs and 50 low wealth commercial jobs. Maybe this is wrong, but in any case, this experiment should be a senerio in which sims generate enough jobs from themselves if that can ever happen, as poor 0 EQ sims only make jobs for poor sims. And indeed, there do seem to be enough industry jobs. Or, there would be if THE SIMS WOULD TAKE THE STUPID JOBS THAT ARE THERE!

Yes, I am getting unemployment and I cannot understand why. The first picture below is the overview of the city. You can see unemployment.

The next image show some sims happily commuting to work. The commute length is "short."

And then a nearby industry location has no commuters despite there being unemployed sims well within what should be considered a "short" range.

Indeed, despite being well within range of my sims possibly as many of 50% of my industry locations have no commuters despite their being unemployed sims. How is this possible? Can someone please explain this to me?

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

How's commute time? Query some houses and check. If they're mostly Long, your industrial is too far away from the residential.

[Veshan 0]

As I showed in pictures two and three, commutes between residentials near the jobless sims and industry are "short", not even medium. The jobless sims get "long" but that's just he default thing it says when you have unemployment whether it's because there are no jobs available or because the jobs are too far away. Moreover, in another test I've seen sims travel all the way across a map of this size to get to industry and still have a rating of "short". There's not traffic, so the commute hasn't been extended by congestion, and you can see that they jobless residentials are one block of unused commercial way from the industry. It's way too short a distance for commute times to be the true issue.

[Ion_Cannon 677]

Industry seems to work a different way in regards to commuters than commercial does. For example often a query can report a greater number of sims commuting to work at a factory, than it has jobs. It seems sometimes the simulators lumps them together, to get a better idea for the amount of jobs available and the workers involved, query the roads instead, region census might also shed some more light on the problem. Interesting stuff though

[olddan123456 4]

I don't think the problem is the number jobs but how the sims get to them. Since low wealth sims are much less likely to use cars try putting in a bus or rail network and see if that makes a difference.

[edman2012 33]

I agree with olddan123456, a certain percentage of sims are pretty much forced to take mass transit. You can alter that percentage for each wealth level with the traffic simulator configuration tool

[z1 566]

There is something very basically wrong here. Have you verified that you have water reaching your whole map?

How's commute time? Query some houses and check. If they're mostly Long, your industrial is too far away from the residential.

With the NAM, there are only two circumstances under which a commute is Long:

• The Sims are commuting to jobs in another city or to SimNation. When this happens, the commute is always Long.
  
• The Sims cannot find a job at all
  

Notice that a residential building's commute time is the average of the commute time of its employable residents.

I agree with olddan123456, a certain percentage of sims are pretty much forced to take mass transit. You can alter that percentage for each wealth level with the traffic simulator configuration tool.

This is not true; transit type is merely a preference forwarded to the traffic simulator. A city can run fine with no mass transit at all.

  Edited June 23, 2012 by z1  

[olddan123456 4]

A city can run fine with no mass transit at all.

I don't want to argue but that hasn't been my experience at all. 9 time out of 10 if I put a transit station near an area of unemployment the shirker sims there will find jobs. The RTMT system has been my friend for years.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

In a pre-designed grid like this, you are taking your chances. In this situation I would use bus transit (RTMT) and probably subway. Urban Sims quite often do not have cars and really want to live packed together in a tenement close to the industrial pods. One of the problems with "planned" cities is that they don't take into account all the variables that can affect the well-being of the Sims. If you want a big single tile city, you have to start small and let it just grow as needs crop up. This is my biggest current city, and it started with the port installation with factories up against it, and grew from there.

This snap is about two weeks old (RL) and the city, while not much more developed, has expanded to include a subway to El Bridge to Subway link connecting the island to the harbour and the bridge to the island has been also replaced by two more very busy road bridges. Seems my Sims really like my island, which also has now a number of commercial offices. You'll notice the lack of grid layout and compartmentalization. Many residential neighbourhoods have little commercial strip malls and corner stores.

Military city planning as you find in Phoenix, AZ only works if you take into account the residential requirements first and forget any real ideal. In Phoenix, much of the industry is laid out along the Black Canyon Highway which is in the central west end running north and south as far north as the Grand Canyon.

Frankly, with what you are doing, I would obliterate that city and start over.

[vortext 573]

While it's entirely possible to develop a single city your current design is not the best to achieve this. The sims in your example probably can't find work because the demand created by them is being fullfilled on the other side of the tile. In other words, there maybe enough jobs allright but sims simply cannot reach those due to the zoning lay-out. My suggestion would be to get rid of the entire ring system and instead make small and easy to reach commercial and industrial areas and let those develop for a while.

[z1 566]

A city can run fine with no mass transit at all.

I don't want to argue but that hasn't been my experience at all. 9 time out of 10 if I put a transit station near an area of unemployment the shirker sims there will find jobs. The RTMT system has been my friend for years.

I believe you; I should qualify my remark. First of all, for a city to run fine with no mass transit, it needs to use the NAM traffic simulator. Second, even then, this will work only for relatively small city sizes. The bigger a city gets, the more necessary rapid transit becomes in order to avoid abandonment issues. And buses have their place, too. Their greatest usefulness is ferrying Sims to and from rapid transit stations, although they also provide a perfectly good substitute for car travel for some Sims.

The reason I made my original remark was that in the city shown at the beginning of this thread, even a complete lack of mass transit could not explain the utter lack of growth in the city.

[Darkwings 5]

The lack of growth could be the effect of an instant-all-map-zoning without actually letting the city grow in a natural way.

If you zone the whole map without having water, healthcare, police dept and major house, you'll end up with a horrible growth, slowed further down by the chaotic congestion-prone layout. Even a single small flower park can change the situation for a R block.

  Edited June 24, 2012 by Darkwings  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I generally start with no mass transit and set the car pool ordinance. When things start getting dicey, I start adding main route RTMT stations only. I use the NAM, and the Sims will walk to the bus stations on the main drag.

As I have often said, my cities are not planned and pre-zoned. They grow by the topsy method. I just put down a pod of commercial or industrial and let the chips fall as they may.

[Lukav Minaev 2]

  mid 2012 question, did you got the answer yet?

 

i think it had related to you RCI demand graph. or maybe your taxing.

i've built grid like city like yours (with no neighbouring city made yet), with small clinic and elementary for resident and police and fire office average coverage, water&power offcourse. it usually grow healty demand. My city got crampled easily.
 

i even upgraded the grid for my large city

I-D <road> C-I <road> R-II             ---- for starter

I-D&I-M <road> C-I <road> R-II <road> R-III <road> C-II&CIII <road> I-M&I-HT         ----- after got enough IQ

 

my city demand grow healtily, every zone i built will grow something