How do regional busses work?

[Grimhood 1]

I've started an electronics specialized city in a region with other players with larger cities than my own.  I'm experiencing some strange things with my population...people running out of money and at the same time industry complaining about a lack of workers.

 

One thing I noticed is that one of my neighbors is flooding my city with busses.  I wonder if they are taking my workers back to his city, but too slowly for them to get to work and make money?  Traffic in my city is great, and I have bus stops everywhere, with my own municipal bus station.  Does anyone know how regional busses work?  Do they pick up and drop off in the same distant city, or do they only pick up and then bring the people back to the home city?

[bz2king 3]

According to the Prima Guide, they travel throughout the region to any city that has another Terminal, uses their bus stops, and brings them back, so technically, you should also be getting some of theirs too. But, with all the bugs in this game, I wouldn't doubt that this isn't working as intended either.

[Grimhood 1]

Thanks for the info.  I suppose there's no way to stop it either, aside from disconnecting my city?

 

Hmm...maybe I'll try that actually.  I do have a rail terminal to ship my electronics...

[bz2king 3]

Unfortunately, I do not know of a way to completely disconnect your city from the others, since, thanks to EA, the game is built around cities not being independent anymore.

[Grimhood 1]

Well, I could cut off the road connection, that will prevent other city's busses from coming in.  But that kind of defeats the purpose of playing in a region.  I will see if I can figure it out.

 

I have a lot of residents that are miserable, but I can't really see why.  When I look at the population map, I see in some of them that there only students...I guess that means nobody can work to bring home money?  Not sure what I could do about that one.

[AlexMBrennan 11]

I very much doubt that the bus takes people from your city to another as they are not necessarily running at the same time - odds are they just generate sims based on city stats or act as workplaces.

[SockoJr53 51]

It's quite a phenomenon, you need to study the hive-mind mentality of locusts to understand bus behavior in SimCity. Buses from other cities in the region will flood your city without warning or mercy. They will occupy all your streets, clog traffic up and consume all of your poor unsuspecting Sims. There is nothing you can do to stop them, you can't fight them, you can't reason with them, you can't bribe them to leave you alone. They will come, and they will destroy.

On a less fear-mongering note: I had a city of only 26,000. I placed a shuttle bus depot, not the big regional depot, the small shuttle depot. Upon placing my first few bus stops, I was inundated with at least 50 regional buses, forming massive U-turning conga lines up and down my roads. They totally backed up all my roads and did nothing productive. I didn't even want them to begin with, I only wanted a few small shuttles to run around downtown, not these big bafoons.