Advice needed for buses...

[Dj_oj_1980 0]

Hi there,

 

Does anyone have any advice on the best way to use buses? I have 3 cities in my region, one industrial (3k population), one commercial (20k) and one mixed (20k). I have a bus depot in each one, and a terminal in the industrial and mixed cities. Each city also has a train and ferry connection.

 

Is there any best-practice on how to place the bus buildings? Do I need both types in each city, or just one depot to serve all?

 

I've also seen a few posts suggesting they're a waste of time all together, but perhaps they've been fixed now we're on 4.0?

 

Many thanks,

 

DJ OJ

[tnobles 38]

Still the same as they've always been.

[perafilozof 143]

Busses from the bus terminal are copy-pasted to every other city that has a bus terminal or a bus stop. So don't build too many garages.

 

Shuttle busses and a few bus stations inside one city will get the sims moving. The problem is that is all they do, move them. They don't actually get them where they need to go. They just move them from one station that has a lot of sims waiting to another. So don't go crazy with the number of bus stops.

 

A bus system will help you lower the number of cars in a city, just don't expect it to be effective at anything else.

 

When it comes to moving from one city to another you need the whole deal, buss station, train station even a ferry if possible to help and get more sims moving between cities.

[Larsz 7]

I have been only zoning along one side of the street and always put the bus stops on the un-zoned side so they do not compete with some of the other service vehicles. I use 1 terminal and locate it in the center of the city. Even though buses are more "shuffle" service than "shuttle" service, they do help keep Sims walking.

[Dj_oj_1980 0]

Thanks. Having fewer bus stops isn't something I had thought of - time for some fiddly bulldozing!

 

I'm mainly trying to get the mechanics of travel between regions nailed. Will the regional buses move people between stops within a city as well as between cities? From what I've read it sounds as though a sim could get on a regional bus in city A to work in city B, but instead end up touring city A's bus-stops all day rather than filling a vacancy in B.

 

I don't mind too much about what happens to individual sims, as long as the bus system isn't having a negative effect on the number of workers who fill jobs in a connected city - so City A doesn't have 10,000 commuters on a sight-seeing tour while City B closes down because it's short of 10,000 workers.

[Yaffle 29]

My observations are that city A's sims in and City B's sims are unrelated, as in it's all made up. You can't watch John Smith get on a bus in city A, watch the bus leave, switch to city B see a bus arrive and look for John Smith. He won't exist, as a bunch of new sims will be generated.

Buses go to "sinks" (stops with sims) and accept sims until they are full, or there are no more sims, and then go to the next sink where they dump newly generated sims irrespective of the utility of the stop. This is why they go around in circles, heading back to the closest sink even though it's a dumb place to go in reality.

 

Watch a bus (or streetcar) for a while. They can just circle from one stop to another apparently taking sims 200 yards and taking slightly longer than just walking.