Traffic Observation/Question

[Sfletcher 1]

I was watching the flow of traffic in my city today and noticed a few things I don't understand. I watched my street cars for about five minutes on one section of road, and I noticed a two car trolley came through, and then was followed a moment later by a section. Now this particular city has nine cars, so what I don't understand was why I had two sets of cars following each other, instead of one on each side moving in the opposite direction?

 

So after the trolleys I started to watch my high school busses, and the same thing occurred. I had two high school buses following each other, not going in different directs (yes I have bus stops in both directions from the schools).

 

So now I started to watch the shuttle buses. Once again the same thing, in some cases I had two or three shuttle buses one after another following each other?

 

I over laid the transportation maps, looking at where passengers were waiting, in two cases I noticed multiple shuttle buses moving in the general direction of stations with a lot of waiting passengers, but in the case of the other 10 shuttle buses, they were in districts of the city that did not have heavy passenger ridership yet they were still following each other.

 

Any ideas?

[jpsurratt2005 4]

The traffic system seems to be very problematic.  I've had a string of 10 school buses all follow each other.  I've seen garbage trucks do the same thing.  I've also had traffic drive a low density road and avoid a large avenue, simply because the route is shorter.

 

I really hope they fix these problems as they really cripple the efficiency of even having a well planned out transportation system.

[john2218 8]

The problem is every sim wants to go to the closest available non occupied structure that needs them...  They have no memory of where they lived before they went to work or school and no memory of where they worked when they wake up each morning.  Once the structure they were going toward fills they will all decide to go to the next closest... Once thats full they all start moving to the next ect ect. Its shockingly horribly designed.

[pkderek 51]

The problem is every sim wants to go to the closest available non occupied structure that needs them...  They have no memory of where they lived before they went to work or school and no memory of where they worked when they wake up each morning.  Once the structure they were going toward fills they will all decide to go to the next closest... Once thats full they all start moving to the next ect ect. Its shockingly horribly designed.

Exactly. There is no strategy or AI involved. It's all jumble up on the closest thing and once that is full or used, on to the next closest. It's absolutely hysterical when your whole city is burning to the ground yet you have 5 firetrucks following each other to 1 out of the 30 other fires. I gave up on the game.

[Sunfighter 186]

The agents are not able to communicate with each other. And thus you are getting the balling up. I guess it was a calculation cutback they decided on or something. I dunno why. Seems like itd be a very simple task to do...but again..maybe im missing a complexity in the glassbox engine that makes such an easy task really difficult.

[Sfletcher 1]

Perhaps this will be fixed in a mod, or expansion. Going from plain vanilla SimCity 4 to the NAM was a huge improvement. The one other glaring disappointment, and maybe I'm just missing this and don't know how to do it yet is with zoning and buildings. In much of my SimCity 4 cities I have a grind system with zones and buildings going right flush against a 90 degree intersection, I can't do that here because of the modules. And I don't really know how to rotate like in SimCity 4. It's only a minor frustration, but still makes the design harder. When I zone out of a city I feel like I have to much open grass in what I want to be a concrete jungle.  I was also vaguely disappointed in the transport system, but not as glaring. No subway, and yes I'm sure this was talked about somewhere else, the limited selection of ferries, and airport design, made me feel more like I was playing Tropico 4 than SimCity. I guess we will wait and see if these are fixed through mods or an expansion.  

[perafilozof 143]

Yeah this is so anoying, I have lost many buildings simply because fire trucks will block each other, and or rare occasions will they respond to more then one fire at the same time.

 

I have around 50+ buses in one of my cites and they just love to drive around in 15 buss lines. 

 

And don't get me started on sims going to and from work using the 2 lane streets I used for resource deliveries and ignoring a parallel 6 lane high density avenue with street cars.

[azxcvbnm321 17]

Wait a minute, what happened to the lauded Glass Box engine where we're told every drop of water and electricity is tracked and accounted for?  The way Glass Box was sold, we're supposed to be able to track every sim, and the excuse given for small map sizes was that Glass Box was so computer intensive that a larger map would make the game unplayable for those with older PCs, even though computing power is around 10x better than it was during SimCity4.  For a city building game of this type, pathfinding is the most important mechanic, they should have worked on this the longest and used their best programmers to get it right before moving on.  

[Sfletcher 1]

The path finding drives me simply nuts. I agree with a pervious comment, today I watched my entire fire department some 12 trucks stop in front of one small house fire. They blocked a street in both directions causing a traffic back up. This compounded with the bus and trolley frustration.

[zogleheros 2]

Communal bus (the big ones) get stuck on bus stops. Only way to unstuck is turn the stop off and on again. 

Do you know of a way to refuse entrance to communal bus from other cities ? It's getting annoying.