Help! All subway and bus use suddenly stopped

[danny30 1]

Hi, I have a serious issue. While trying to lower my city's budgets I reduced the funding for my mass transit, and shortly afterwards all my subway and bus use has gone to Zero. I tried raiseing the budget back up above where it was before but it hasn't helped. I checked all the subway pipes and they all look fine. Has anyone else experienced this before and what can I do?

 

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

After you restored the funding, how long did you wait before you panicked?  If the city is of any size, it may take several Sim-months for such adjustments to be seen. 

 

Next time you need funding, don't mess with something as critical as mass transit which is the guts of the simulator.  Use the moolah command instead.

[danny30 1]

Yes, I waited a year of game and it's now going back up. What is the point of having a budget slider if it all goes to zero when you lower the budget. Yet another simcity 4 flaw. Thanks again Nonny. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Whoa!  You slider went to zero by itself?  That's a known bug.  It is caused by some custom content that is far out of band.  Or if you are missing the Opera House Fix.

[danny30 1]

The slider never showed as Zero and I do have the opera house fix. I'm not gong to alter the mass transit funding again.

[crishy 57]

One year is definitively too little especially when talking about larger and well built up cities. Everything takes longer to develop in them. Wait more and the transit usage will probably go up again.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Danny, you really should understand that things like this in a simulation of this magnitude take time.  Put your thinking cap on and consider the number of variables that must be examined and/or tweaked each time the simulation passes over the data.  And the data field or universe of discourse is not small: Every tree, flower, prop, building, Sim, road tile (especially intersections) has to be examined.  Millions of objects, and you wonder why the program eats your processor. 

 

The simulation is looking after an enormous time period (without limit) whereas most simple simulations run only for a few moments.  About the only real life simulation I can think of that even comes close to this one is the NOAA weather simulation, and you know how inaccurate that one is.  The last time I looked at it, years ago, it ran continuously, and took more than 24 hours to complete.  The result was that the weather office would take snapshots of its state to use for weather predictions, inject more data and continue running the program (which will never end).  The time time, the segment running in Montreal was on a CRAY XMP front-ended by a pair of Multics systems.  And we worry about running this on a microprocessor??

[bearcatnat 3]

Is it possible the mass transit workers were on strike? I had that happen to me once, and it did take about a year for them to come back to work, even after I had put the transit budget slightly above 100%.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Hmmm.  Strikes and riots are usually reported on the ticker if nowhere else.