Bus

[+Guest]

I have two cities connected that are adequately served by subways and buses. However, most commuters commute by buses more than subways. How could this be since subways are faster(?) On both cities bus volume/ridership exceed 250k and subways reach the somewhere around 7k-8.5k. I'm not sure if I'll get into trouble but most of the buildings are dirty and population seems to drop from 530k to 500k and sometimes going lower. Traffic is really high mostly because of buses than cars.

 

Also, I tried to get faster commutes for residents by building a tunnel that skips stops in the lower part of the city, in order to get to the commercial offfice city on the upper 'tile' but then other heavily used subway tunnels were abandoned for this one.

Is building less more?

 

I will try to get screenshots.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

In the original traffic simulator, buses are overused due to the fact that an unlimited number of sims can ride in one bus.  If you have the Network Addon Mod, it fixes that problem, but from your description it sounds like you don't.  It's the most popular SC4 mod for a reason.  Highly recommended download.

[Ltw 401]

If busses are used more than subways that usually means that busses are faster. This is the commute time for the resident, not the speed of the bus itself. If someone has to travel to a subway station by bus/foot/car and has to travel by car the city center and has to travel further by bus/foot there this costs time. It could be that the coverage of your bus stops is that good that they don't have to travel by foot that much.

 

I don't say that you should demolish bus stops to achieve a higher usage of the subway, that wouldn't be very good to do (commute time would increase significantly). But you can build more direct subway-lines to the city center. Apparently subway lines are longer than bus connections and this is increasing commute time for people that travel by subway. You could also download the this is a subway station and a bus station. People can travel by bus to these stops and travel by subway to your CBD. In my cities I often choose a grid-like subway network. This leads to a large use of the subway because people can travel by subway quite easily. It is a quite risky investment but if done right it really pays off.

 

FWY: Busses work the same as cars, there is one 'bus' per person. The bus starts at the bus stop closest to the house of that person and stops at the stop closest to work. This means that busses always 'skip' bus stops. After the bus reached its destination it magically vanishes.

[z1 566]

Indiana Joe is right; the first order of business is to verify that the NAM is installed.  This should take care of your problems right off.  If it doesn't, then we can look at alternatives.

[.anonyman 28]

I agree with the others - NAM not only adds a lot of new features, but also fixes many of the bugs that plague SC4.

 

In the vanilla version of the game, mass transit systems (including subways) aren't affected by the number of stops; it's best to build a widespread system with lots of stops, even on every block. Your idea with the express tunnel was logical, but only in the real world.

 

Do you have enough subway stations at both the sims' homes AND at their workplaces? Have you tried adding parking garages near the ones in Res. zones? These things make for an efficient subway system.