why aren't my sims commuting to the far region?

[jfrenchy 0]

so to keep this brief, I am playing the simcity4 deluxe stock region map named 'Fairview'. i kind of like the small region and maps as everything runs faster.

i have a residential city in one of the many tiny city squares this map offers. to the north and south i have agriculture only cities, also in tiny squares. a highway runs through all three, and the highway is connected, and all my sims are happy commuting farmers.

now comes city #4, also tiny square. it is to the north of agriculture city north; so it is two small city squares to the north of residential. the highway goes there too.

after setting up industrial city, manufacturing industry started building and freight trucks where on the go. when i switched to my residential city, my (as i assumed) educated farmer sims started to upgrade their living styles. new clothes, new cars and new homes: they became medium wealthy. must of been the manufacturing jobs!

then, just as fast as they upgraded, the 'No Work zot' started showing up all over the place. and here lies my problem, none of my sims commute to the industrial city!

so why won't they? there's a highway for the love of god going through beautiful farm country to great respectful manufacturing jobs. i've rebuilt the highways thinking it was broken, checked the route query tool to make sure traffic is flowing all the way through from both exits. it's all in tip top shape.

i read one post suggesting to install NAM. i did that too, using the medium setting for the traffic simulator, and that didn't help my situation either

now i'm guessing someone will suggest try rail, or monorail or something like that. I am planning to do that, and i was also planning to try buses but then i read how NAM treats buses as same as car traffic.

but why oh why aren't my sims taking the very expensive double rebuilt upgraded to elevated highway to the industrial city? it's in a perfect straight line.

to illustrate, the residentials live on a perpendicular street that is connected to the elevated highway. their only exit point is to the highway. once on the highway they can get off on one of the other residential exits, or go on and exit town. the farmers never had a problem using that logic.

and one last bit, there is only 5,000 or so sims living, so i know it's not congestion

thank you very much in advance for any insight!

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

If you're using RHW as your highway, you need to plop the neighbor connection pieces that come with it to get the connections to work. If you're using the default highway, then don't worry about it.

Another possibility is wealth mismatch. Even manufacturing jobs are geared toward lower wealth sims. In fact, 50% of jobs provided by I-M are exclusively for R§. Most of the rest of those jobs are for R§§. (Here's a chart if you're interested.) If you have a lot of high wealth residents, there aren't enough jobs for them. You would need high tech industry (which is actually glitched and needs a patch for it to properly work, available on the STEX) or commercial offices.

If you're having problems with R§§ being unemployed, I think you just need more manufacturing industry to employ them. Medium wealth houses often hold more residents than low wealth ones, so if you're seeing a population increase, you just need to increase your amount of jobs as well.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

That's not the way that the region works.

Basically, each city knows how many extra jobs and sims are in the city tiles adjacent.

If a sim takes one of those jobs in the neighboring city, it will commute to the border, and that's the end of that sim's commute. Then in the next city over, the city will know that a certain number of sims are coming from the adjacent city, and then a new commute path will be created to a job.

So cities aren't really very aware of what's going on outside of them, and commute paths can't be figured out beyond the city's border.

Which means that cities can't directly interact unless they're adjacent. They can only indirectly interact with each other (say if city A has residential, city B has industrial and commercial, and city C also has residential, how many residents city A is able to provide to city B will affect residential demand in city C).

[jfrenchy 0]

many thanks

indiana joe, you nailed it exactly, and that chart you included really explains it (thanks for that). here i assumed all the medium wealth upgrades was because of the new manufacturing jobs, when it wasn't really related - or maybe it was but that's besides the point - and I then was assuming the no work zot was because of trouble commuting, since i thought its where they wanted to go to. well a simple test: 20% medium wealth tax and bulldoze their houses to bring a revival of poor people, and in no time I could see people commute all the way to the far region using the route query tool

does anyone happen to know what the high tech industry fix is called on the STEX?

jasoncw, i've been wondering for a while exactly how the mechanics work behind city interaction in a region, and your post shed some light on my problem as well. if i got it right, my city A was sending commuters semi-aimlessly looking for work. they 'knew' about two neighboring cities with jobs, so they went off in those direction. however they had no idea about a far off city, until they reached city B, where now they were made aware of even more work just a little bit down the road to city C (my industrial city). until now i was under the impression that cities would know about the demands all over the region, even though it made me think why the RCI demand was acting oddly as i switched around towns.

so if I play with a city tile that is connected to say 8 other city tiles, I could create some really complex networks i'm guessing. does all that sound right?

thanks again, and ps happy 2013

[Cefien 361]

does anyone happen to know what the high tech industry fix is called on the STEX?

IH Missing $$$ Jobs Fix

read this thread for more comprehensive explanation:

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Long distance commute does work, but you have to run the intermediate cities long enough for the through traffic to develop. A city can only see jobs immediately over its border, and in a rather vague way. So unless you get commuters entering that city to find there are no jobs available, they won't carry on further. That is, you have to cascade the jobs the same way you have to cascade power deals.