Express tracks

[armpit43 172]

Hi guys,

 

Normally, the cities I build yield a high amount of patronage on mass transit and railway networks, when I have the NAM installed the numbers can be sky high. I am currently playing Sim City vanilla (No Nam or anything), so passenger numbers for railway based networks are extremely low. But for the sections that are high, I was wondering whether building express tracks have any effect on the simulation?

 

For example, lets say I have a normal railway line from the suburbs into the central area. Would the commute time be reduced if a in effect quadrupled the line by building a second pair of tracks with no/fewer stations? Similarly, would building NYC style express subway lines have any effects on how the simulation is run? For example does each station incur a time penalty so by bypassing stops reduce commute time?

 

Thank you

[TekindusT 3,809]

Moved to the SC4 Modding - Transit Networks forum.

- TekindusT, A&UP moderator.

[rsc204 21,866]

I shouldn't think so, I think the simulator sees each sims journey and the real world delays of stopping at stations don't come into play as individual sims don't actually stop at those stations. It would perhaps help to increase capacity of a well used line though.

 

This scenario is exactly what the Monorail network is for, it's faster than regular rail lines and so sims tend to prefer to use Monorail to cover larger distances.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Well, stations do have a so-called "Transit Switch Entry Cost" that is ised to calculate the time it takes for Sims to park their car and board a train, for example. The station where this takes place is the transit switch, and the entry cost is a fixed time penalty to simulate real-life conditions, where you may have to wait for a train or walk from a train platform to a bus stop.

 

On the other hand, once Sims have entered a transit switch and incurred the "Entry Cost" time penalty, they can teleport to any tile on the lot instantly. This would be a hindrance if entry cost was high (large time penalty) and station footprint was low (no big distance to cover in an instant), but it would encourage station use if the entry cost was low and the station footprint was large: Sims could easily enter the station and instantly teleport a few tiles, speeding their commute up.

 

This mechanism explains why you often see trains that end at a railside station (not even on the tracks, but next to them) and begin again behind the station: The Sims travel to the station by train, and the process of switching over to pedestrians, teleporting to the other edge of the lot in zero time, and switching back to train commuters is actually faster than covering these few tiles by train!

 

Then again, station and line congestion probably give rise to time penalties, but exact calculations would probably be very complex and require you to know the values of properties such as the Transit Switch Entry Cost mentioned above.

 

All in all, I guess that making "express lines" by leaving out stations probably won't be all that beneficial in SimCity due to the mechanism I clumsily tried to explain above. However, offering additional lines to alleviate congestion (and, possibly, to shorten the distance covered by eliminating deviations from a straight line in order to accommodate intermediate stops) may work.

 

I'd also like to remind you that SC4 is a wonderful sandbox game that invites players to try out things and see if they work - so why not save that city (hey, you could even back up the city file) and experiment? There is much to learn and to try out, but nothing to lose.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Then again, station and line congestion probably give rise to time penalties, but exact calculations would probably be very complex and require you to know the values of properties such as the Transit Switch Entry Cost mentioned above.

No need to; practically all of the calculations have been done. =)

So long as you use the recommended TSEC and capacity values, you'll never have a situation where you have a bottleneck or, what I call, a funnel effect. Also, as far as I can tell, there's nothing about transit station size that determines a station's TSEC; it seems to be set in stone, no matter what the size of the station is. The only thing that a station's size helps determine is station capacity. TSECs are constant no matter the size of the station, but transit station capacities are more or less variable depending on the size of the station (and its overhangs).

 

I wish I could get better clarification on that, but the one guy who knows this stuff the best, I've not seen him all that much...