Problem: Rail vs Bus / Car commuters

[Stanil 15]

Hello. I‘ve got a problem with my region. I‘m trying to optimize traffic from my main city to a southern industrial zone, which is a different city tile.

 

My main street connection to the southern city is overcrowded like hell. Therefore I built a railroad from the city center to the southern industry city. But for reasons unknown my Sims still use the roads, although they are totally overcrowded. It is an RHW-4 connection with c. 16,000 commuters of which c. 12,400 are travelling by bus.

 

I have got some screenshots for your orientation.

 

Overcrowded street:

 

Unused railroad:

 

Railroad track:

 

(1) Is the main station in downtown.

(2) Is a second station half way, in order to allow more commuters to take the train.

(3) Is the neighbor connection.

 

Important: I already checked if the connection is alright. It should be okay. When I cut off the street connection it takes some ingame weeks, but after that all commuters take the train.

 

Any ideas?

PS: I assume the RHW-4 isn‘t overcrowded at all, as I can see from the capacity table of the NAM project, which I didn‘t know earlier. But nevertheless the question remains, why NOBODY wants to take the train.

[Compdude787 916]

If you want to determine whether a network is actually over capacity, look at the traffic congestion data view, not the volume data view.

[jmsepe 2,038]

Agree with Compdude. please don't forget to post the image of the congestion view panel. It might say something.

 

Nevertheless, make sure the train is complete, I mean the railroads are connected properly to each other. Also, take note of the location of the stations and the connections to them. 

[Stanil 15]

Thanks for the comments so far. The road is overloaded indeed:

 

 

The railroad is connected, I tested it, as I already mentioned in my opening post. My commuters seem to hate railroad :-(

[Stanil 15]

When I cut the road, it looks like this after some weeks:

 

 

On the other side of the connection it looks like this, after I cut the road:

 

 

Everything is okay BUT there is some congestion on the railroad as well:

 

 

The congestion is all along the railroad (and the main station is totally overloaded), but the congestion on the street is only in the last segment, especially the last two tiles. Can this be (part) of the reason?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

One of the points you need to decide on is where the origin of the traffic lies.  If much of it is transiting the downtown without stopping, then stretch your rail system further into the outlying area.

[cogeo 960]

For the commuters to pick any form of transportation (or combination), the commute must be possible to be carried-out all the way. At the residential end, rail stations do offer parking facilities, so these actually cover a larger area than rhe houses within walking distance from them, utilizing the park-and-ride feature. Still, you can make them yet more desirable, creating a local bus system (one or two busstops close to the station and some number of them in the area around, acting as a collector - check the roadtop mass-transit ones, they take up no additional space). As for where to place the station(s), keep in mind thas the simulator almost does not allow commuting to the opposite direction, eg sims won't drive a short distance back to ride the train, instead they will use their cars. So better place your stations close to the edge of your R area (in the direction towards their workplaces, not the opposite), or consider using multiple small/cheap stations instead, to reduce the time needed to get to the station; there are small stations on the STEX that don't need any additional space, built entirely on the tracks.

On the industrial/commercial end though, rail station do not offer some "shuttle" or "taxi" service, ie sims can't get/hire cars to get to their workplaces, they can only walk, so rail stations there only cover a small area, the buildings within walking distance from them. Still, if the commuter has to take a long walk to reach his/her destination, the simulator will rather reject the route, and your sim will use the car instead. So you need to either use multiple small stations, or instead setup a local "distribution" bus system. Don't know if sims will be using the bus all the way from their homes though.

Something that makes rail (and MT in general) in SC4 not desirable, is unfortunately the parameterisation of the Traffic Simulator. It was done by American members, favouring the car and the RHW (although they claim that it was done "for realism"). That's why one-way roads (and all road networks) have such high capacities and rail that low, and the Maxis highways are so much put aside. The simulator just chooses the car because it is faster. So some modding work (with the simulator) is needed to make it more MT-friendly - there's even a tool for this. More specifically:
- Take a look into the original (default) simulator and check its settings (for comparison only).
- Check the NAM ones (even the low-capacity one has much higher capacities than the original actually)
- Check the transit form preference (they are per wealth class). In the NAM they are tweaked towards the car. I have made a special version for my own use, with the MT preference somewhat increased, and the "choose the fastest" preference increased a lot (I think it's the best - if you have a fast and efficient MT system then your sims will switch to it).
- Check network capacities and speeds. Roads, One-way roads (or ANT?) (I have set them much lower cause I don't use RHW), Avenues (they have almost forgotten them), Highways (same goes here), and finally Rail. The conclusion (as well as the decision what to do with them) is yours.
- The "Bus adds to Traffic" property was changed to True by the NAM Team. This makes buses offering no benefit over cars, in terms of traffic (they congest networks as much as cars). I don't know why it was changed to True. Consider setting it back to False.

Some rail stations are also badly modded, with the switch cost set to a very high value, which makes them unattractive (this is the "cost" in time, not money or tickets). Check if yours is OK.

Hope this helps

[Stanil 15]

Wow. Thank you very much, that was a very interesting answer. 

 

I will have to check though how to use or tweak the traffic simulator.

[Stanil 15]

I tweaked the traffic simulator, should be fine now.

 

Now to my next problem, still related to railroads and commuters. I have the Mac OS X version of Sim City 4 and I downloaded a lot of custom content from the STEX and from SC4 Devotion. There is a whole bunch of rail stations, that do not work correctly. The problem is that lots like the Simtropolis Train Station don‘t display the correct capacity, and therefore they are constantly shown as crowded. For example Simtropolis Train Station should have a capacity of 30,000 but in my game it is shown as 3 (in words: three ;-)).

 

I downloaded ilives Reader and had a look into the stats of the lots. I do not see a difference between a working rail station like Helsinki Station and a non working station like Simtropolis! In both stations the values for Transit Switch Traffic Capacity and Catalogue Capacity are correct.

 

Any ideas?

[cogeo 960]

Transit stations in under the Mac may suffer from a bug caused by the SC4Tool, which lowers the capacity to only the 1/1000th or so of the intended one. The rep count of the capacity property is set to 1, instead of 0, which is the correct. The solution is simple, open the file in the reader, go to the capacity property, open, highlight the text and copy it, then delete the rep, paste the copied value and click Apply. The property should contain the correct value and the the rep count be 0. Same goes for the Transit Cost property, and I'm not sure about the rest (the Budget Items) - check the ones from the Maxis station in simcity_1.dat to see which ones you need to fix.

[Stanil 15]

Thanks! That seems to work for the Langstrath station :-)

 

I used ilive Reader and just needed to change the rep value from 1 to 0, that‘s all.