Airport Traffic

[kant01 5]

I am always disappointed by the car traffic going to and from the airports. In real life large airports generate quite a bit of traffic that can become quite a headache for the city to deal with. Right now you see traffic going to the airport, but only for jobs. Is there any way to add traffic that is determined by the number of daily passengers? Would you need a mod to do this?

This may seem like a strange request since most people want to get rid of their traffic. I just want a bit more realism with the airports.

[the7trumpets 10]

I tend to agree, on all accounts.  Actually, I think commercial zones should need to get to an airport, symilar to how industrial zones need to get to a city border or a seaport, but I think the 'city border' option should be removed, and they should have to travel regionally, if necissary to find an airport or seaport (depending on the type of zone).

 

However, the design of the game doesn't allow for this.  As far as I know there is no way to make actual trips generated from a zone unless it is a place of residence or work.  There is 'background traffic', which is essentially congestion on networks which results in automata showing up, without trips actually being calculated by the pathfinding engine.  However, the background traffic is just globally defined in per zone type (residential, commercial, and industrial).  If there were a population background traffic property that could be inserted into the building exemplar of any lot, that would be ultra-cool, but the code for the exe simply doesn't exist.  Sorry

[kant01 5]

What determines the number of passengers at the airport? I have noticed that the number usually follows the commercial number closely. So the engine must figure for every CO job, some number of workers will need to use the airport during the year. This is just a guess. It seems that there should be a way to take that number and turn it into cars that actually produce trips from the office to the airport. It might have to be done the way trucks are done for industrial lots--just assign a number of passengers to each commercial lot depending on the number of jobs that needs to make a trip to an airport (or out of town if the town is too small for an airport).

Likewise, a certain number of tourists should be determined based on the number of landmarks, CS, rewards, and so on. These tourists would makes trips beginning at the airport to various destinations of interest throughout the city.

Oh I wish it could be done!

[Tropod 144]

One thing that could be done; is to Transit Enable the Airport. Doing this though, would/could effectively play a little havoke with the game, but it's an idea that could perhaps do what you're after.
Quite some time ago, I did actually Transit Enable an airport because of some experiments I was doing at the time. Basically what was happening was; commuters would travel to the airport, with the number of *commuters* being based (in part - among other factors) on the Transit Switch Traffic Capacity property for the airport. The commuters wouldn't actually travel anywhere after reaching the airport that could be *seen*, but they still commuted to the airport in the morning; & for the evening commute Sims would commute in the opposite fashion as they did their morning commute. So it was effectively, half-a-functional-airport that's capable of dealing with commuters, which means accepting traffic of any/all kinds. Which is what you'd want basically really isn't it; being able to somehow increase the traffic presence of an airport.
What sort of impact this would have though, on demand, & jobs etc for Sims, I'm not sure. But it might very well have some unknown odd affects.

[the7trumpets 10]

Interesting....

So you somehow managed to turn the 'commuters' number into a number of jobs that the simulator could fill? Or am I misunderstanding?



On another note, I noticed the 'Occupant Trip Zone Filter' and 'Occupant Trip Purpose Filter' properties in the automata exemplar. I wonder if since there is an 'airport' zone, whether we could use that to at least create visual automata going to/from the airport.

[Tropod 144]

oh, it was so long ago that this was done. I just know that Sims were commuting to the airport, not only because of the Jobs there, but also because the airport had been Transit Enabled.
Those Automata properties sound like they're worth a shot though.

[fitchy 3]

Found this by searching.  Is there a mod for this yet?

 

I think it would add much needed airport realism.