Commute time unrealistic?

[Richie99 159]

I learnt the real size of a large city tile is 4km and I was so surprised that sims could jump from one transit option to another just to travel 4km?Also,in real life can traffic get so bad that people take more than hour to travel 4km?Please I need explanation.Is the game mapped according to scale or not?

[Magneto 316]

I could also argue that roads are useless in Sim City because a 4x4 km surface ain't very big: we could easily walk that distance instead of driving it.

 

But we like to build roads, just as we like to have different options of mass transit too... If those are useless, what is the point of building them, aesthetics put aside?

 

It is therefore necessary to "bend" some rules to make those choices useful and desirable. The "reality" has to be scaled that way to make the simulation work.

[Richie99 159]

Yeah.

[Prophet42 1,503]

The commute time and distance travelled is totally unrealistic in SC4.  Even in Chicago, I travel 26 miles (42 km) in 40 minutes for my commute to work.  In SC4 it's a struggle just to travel 4 km.  In reality a Sim should be able to travel across a region in less than an hout to get to his/her job.  That is probably my biggest gripe with SC4.

[z1 566]

The  speeds of travel types in SC4 are actually somewhat faster than their RL counterparts.  What makes them faster still is that there is no stopping for stoplights, and no waiting for the bus or train.  In most cities, most Sims can get to work in well under six minutes - the original maximum commute time set by Maxis.

 

If you're playing without the NAM, this seems impossible if you look at the commute time graph.  There's a very simple reason for this:  A maximum travel time of six minutes seemed way to short, so Maxis arbitrarily multiplied the travel time by 25 for the purposes of this graph.  That's why the Prima guide says that the maximum commute time is 2.5 hours.

 

The NAM got rid of this factor of 25.  But this did not make the commute time graph correct.  There are many other factors that bias the data; the biggest one is that as the amount of traffic through your neighbor connections rises, the average commute time rises disproportionately.  You can get average commute times much greater than the longest commute time across your region.  So the NAM version of the commute time graph is reduced by somewhat more than 25 to take into account neighbor connections.  Still, because the values displayed in this graph do not follow a linear function, there's no way to make it completely accurate.  That's why almost ten years ago, Tropod, one of the founders of the NAM Team, said of the original Commute Time Graph:

 

 

About the Commute Graph; ignore it. It serves no real purpose really, especially more so if you have neighbour connections.

 

So if you do the math, you find out that the Sims are traveling quite rapidly, mostly because they don't have to stop for anything.  For example, since car speeds are 50 kph, Sims can travel from one side of a large region to the other in 4.8 minutes.

 

In reality a Sim should be able to travel across a region in less than an hout to get to his/her job.

 

As you can see from the above calculation, Sims actually can do that.  The limitations on their travel, and why you get "abandoned due to commute time", are due to restrictions in the traffic simulator, primarily the destination finder (at least in the NAM).

[Richie99 159]

I observed the game clock during morning rush hour and saw some people taking about 3 hrs to travel to work in the same city.How about that?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

It's a game and not at all realistic.  If you want realism you'll need a lot bigger machine than you can afford to run a full city simulation with the eye-candy graphics.  I don't understand why people expect any realism in a 16 Km² space.

 

Accept it for what it is, and stop generating stomach acid over things that can't be controlled.

[z1 566]

I observed the game clock during morning rush hour and saw some people taking about 3 hrs to travel to work in the same city.How about that?

 

The game clock and the automata have nothing to do with actual commute times.

[z1 566]

Now that this thread has covered so many ways for calculating commute time that don't work, I thought I'd share one that does.

 

First, for users of the NAM, commute times as such aren't so important.  When the game says "abandoned due to commute time" and you're running the NAM, you actually never have run out of commute time.  Instead, this means that the traffic simulator (and specifically the destination finder) was unable to locate suitable jobs for your Sims within what it thought was a reasonable distance.  What this distance is varies; the more rapid transit you have in your city, the larger this distance is.  Since most people don't want to cover their cities with rail lines, this is why extensive use of subways in large, spread-out cities is extremely useful in keeping your city healthy.

 

More important than commute times, then, is good traffic flow.  The Traffic Congestion and Volume Data Views are especially helpful in determining how well your traffic is flowing, where the congestion is, and what networks are being underused.  Finally, the Route Query Tool is invaluable for finding out the details of how many Sims are going from where to where, and what their exact paths are.

 

Using the Route Query Tool, it is also possible to determine actual commute times for individual Sims, accurate right down to fractions of a second.  Here's how:  First, start with the speed and Transit Switch Entry Cost (TSEC) of all the travel types.  The TSEC is given by the formula "TSEC = .96/speed", and represents the time in minutes it takes the Sims to cross a single tile.  Based on this, and using the speeds for travel types found in the NAM Unified Traffic Simulator, the proper TSECs for various transit stations are as follows:

Pedestrians, bus, and subway stations: .064
Street stations (RTMT): .032
Road and avenue stations (RTMT): .02
Underground garages: .02
Above-ground parking lots and garages: .064
One-way Road Stations (RTMT): .013
Highway stations: .0064
Freight rail stations: .0091
El rail and GLR stations: .0083
Passenger rail stations: .0069
Monorail, HSR, and Bullet Train stations: .0043

So for example, if you have buses traveling a ten-tile stretch of RHW-2, the time it would take them to cover that distance would be (10 * .0064) * 60.  The "60" at the end converts minutes to seconds.  So it would take the Sims 3.84 seconds to cover this distance - exactly the same amount of time it takes a pedestrian Sim to travel one tile on any network.

Subways are not affected by TSECs.

To further complicate things, though, these figures are only completely accurate when the usage of the underlying network is at exactly 100% of capacity.  As usage drops, these figures rise up to a maximum of 30% higher when usage reaches zero.  As usage rises, these figures drop to a minimum of 30% of their original value when usage reaches 250% of the nominal capacity.  Within these boundaries, a plot of speed vs. usage is essentially a straight line.  Fortunately, the Route Query Tool will tell you exactly what current network usage is, so you can determine the commute time to arbitrary accuracy.  Note, however, that this applies only to commutes that are completely within a single city.  Once a Sim leaves a city, its individual identification is lost, and it is not possible to determine its total commute time.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Gee, thanks, I think.  There are some players who seem to want to have this down to the last second (of recorded time, etc.).  In general, I just play the game, and consider such things to be "too much information" to say the least.

 

I do find it interesting that some players find this kind of statistical stuff interesting.  I suppose they follow sports with the same avid interest in the "facts".  Mostly this seems to be an obsession of fans who follow baseball, my son being one of them at one point in his life.

 

I have the census repository, too.  I consider it to be too much information as well.  My overriding statistic that I use is the panel when entering a city.  I check the ratio of jobs to Sims, and use that as an initial mini-goal for working on the city.  Generally I try to keep my cities balanced at 2 Sims per job.  In some of my current cities, it is getting hard to do the mental arithmetic because of the size of the numbers.  One of my cities is approaching 500,000 Sims.

[z1 566]

In general, as Tropod avers, the average commute time figure is worthless.  However, the commute time of a single route (which is what is being calculated above) can be very useful.  Suppose you have a city with a lot of congestion, and you want to place a rail line right outside the congested district.  But will Sims actually go out of their way to use that rail line instead of their current routes?  Before you tear up whatever's going to be replaced by your rail line, put in stations, etc., it would be nice to have the answer to that question.  The calculations above allow you to get that answer ahead of time.  In short, by using such calculations, it is possible to do detailed traffic design ahead of time for your city and not have to rely on trial and error.  This makes the calculations more than just academically interesting.

[9gruntsand1hammer 3,198]

Commute time is very unrealistic, I've had several instances where houses abandon and their workplace was only a couple of blocks away and traffic was green in the area. In the real world people will commute for hours a day. I did when I lived in Southern Ontario 230km every day. If your job is the same city tile as your house it shouldn't abandon because of long commute. This is the only feature in the game I don't like because I feel that it's not really realistic.