OK I GIVE UP!!!

[soldyne 111]

My game must be bugged.  I can't get sims to go more than 20 tiles in any direction with any form of transit (bus, subway, rail, car) without it registering as a long commute.

 

I even have sims walking across the dang street and calling it a medium commute.

 

I am using Rush Hour with NAM and perfect pathfinding.

 

every time I get a city of 100k or more the pattern is always the same:

30% commuters using car

70% using mass transit (half of them using subway)

30-45 minuet average commute (as per the charts and graphs)

no congestion on any line

 

but, 50% of my buildings are abandoned due to commute time and it just gets worse from there!

 

if I cant get this resolved in some way then I will just have to stop playing this dang game.  what is the point of playing the game if all my cities are doomed to cap at 100k?

[+Guest]

I had a similar problem in an older city of mine that got to around 180,000 Sims... sometimes what you're talking about happens even though the roads themselves aren't bogged, but the transit stops and the subway tubes get so overcapacity that nobody bothers taking them (especially R$$$... they seem to hate waiting at the sub stations too long).

I'm not sure but I think that Perfect Pathfinding might force some Sims to want mass transit even when driving might be faster. But I have no way to back that claim up. Try changing your setting to Better Pathfinding or something, just to see what happens.

Also, does anyone know if the game takes into account the time waiting at transit stops when making the average commute graph? Because if it doesn't, you might be getting a false commute time... your true average commute might be upwards of 100 or more.

But I have no idea what's going on with those wacky Sims saying that an office across the street is a Medium commute.

[tungston 19]

Soldyne:  Are you refering to the cities like your experiment with mass transit?

[soldyne 111]

Date: 12/4/2005 8:46:13 PM Author: tungston Soldyne:  Are you refering to the cities like your experiment with mass transit?

quote>

 

yes, but I only had a singe neighborhood.  even by car on an uncongested avenue I had abondonment issues.  although I had no congested stations either.  no congested lines.

 

I am thinking of raising taxes on R$$$ to max and starting over.  I remeber Bones1 talking about a 50 minute commute penalty when they use mass transit.  I remember most of my abondonded buildings being R$$$ buildings.

[juaquin 0]

Soldyne, your problem may be that your tax structure is making your city too attractive to $$$ sims.  You may be drawing in too many of them to employ.  Remember that $$$ sims are usually the CEO's and managers and the great majority of employees are usually $$ and $ sims.  my taxes always favor $$ sims and I still seem to draw enough $$$ and $ to maintain a good balance and consequently not much abandonment.

[tungston 19]

Soldyne:  I like the commercial zones grouped, CS likes to be close to CO, and residential, and both like to be in high traffic area's created by landmarks.  How are the employment ratio of the commercial?  By having comercial separating residential as you do adds commute time.  Having jobs next door doesn't mean the sims are going to work there.

 

High tech likes parks to get high ratio of jobs, along with being close to the border of the city. 

 

You may already have this information, but there seems to be something that is causing the sims to vacate.  I wouldn't be too quick to blame it on a bug.

 

EDIT: It is a myth that high wealth are CEO's and managers, just look at high wealth commercial buildings, they don't separate the jobs into wealth status.

[hym 358]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have used the RCRCRC setup for a long time and have never had abandonment problems linked to that layout.  Many of my sims (who are largely high and medium wealth) only commute one or two sections to get to work.  It was mentioned that the perfect pathfinding file might make the sims take mass transit when it would be more efficient to take a car.  For the record, I use the Better Pathfinding file and have never have the problems mentioned above, even at a city population of 170,000 sims.

[Rymac91 15]

I found it's really smart to not place Apartments on a Avenue because they will complain about the traffic noise and the congestion regardless how much there is...I just place Commerical on a Avenue and it also reduces the conjestion since the jobs are on the mainway..

[soldyne 111]

ok this is what I have gathered:

 

juaquin:  I have thought about this before, but every time I raise taxes on anything to 10 or more the demand drops suddenly into the high negatives.  what exactly do you set the taxes to to better control demand?

 

tungston: I redid the design from the first experiment and added more commercial to each block.  I am not sure how much commercial to add.  I also put IHT in the buffer zones on the out skirts of the neighborhoods.  I only had about 6000 ID and IM jobs which were in a neighboring city.  should I mix the IHT in with the comm and res?

 

hym: I have thought about your idea before.  are suggesting a checkerboard pattern of R and C.  what about IHT, should that be thrown in there as well?  I will try better pathfinding and see if that helps things.  hopefully it help my city run faster at least.

 

Rymac91:  I always did the opposite and here is my thinking:  when the res buildings get large there will be so many people living in a single building that when they leave in thier cars (even just to go a parking garage or down the street) it will cause instant congestion on a road.  I put roads near commercial as they like high traffic.  now perhaps I am confusing traffic with congestion but that was my way of thinking.  I will try your way and see what happens.

 

ok, I think that was everyone.  just to let everyone know, I reinstalled NAM from scratch and put in perfect pathfinding with 10x commute mod.  this still did not solve the problem.  I still had tons of long commute times.  what is even stranger is that my average commute time went down to 15 minuets!!!  I let it run on cheetah for 5 game years and no changes.

 

overall, in my city of 150k i had 30k car commuters, 25k subway, and the rest was passenger rail and bus.  the only congested area was a small strip of subway line near my airport tram (for some reason that dang thing employs 10k workers!).

 

thanks for the responses everyone.  I am calming down now but still am frustrated with game.  I made my original design as a way of trying to be efficient yet not so grid like.  I am trying to design an efficient and nice looking central downtown area that I can use in a city journal idea I have.  but I can't start the CJ until I know this is going to work.

[soldyne 111]

ok I have done some more work and this is what I came up with:

 

first I will show you the current zone placement I have been working with.  my original thinking was to place all residential facing an avenue and all commercial facing a road.  I wanted small business districts like little cells in each residential block hoping that it would help reduce commute times by giving the sims a close place to work in.  this did not work like I planned.

 

note that the center area is for civic buildings (hospital, schools, etc).  The center and the 2tile strip in the middle of the large neighborhood is also for the future addition of monorail if I ever get far enough to need it.  the empty 3x3 areas around the commercial are for future parks or libraries or whatever fits.  the roads have road top mass transit bus/subway stations on them and so appear not to be connected but they really are (they dont show up in zone view.  here you can also see the proposed buffer zone to the south and east which is being used as my IHT district:

http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/3299/currentstyle8gg.jpg align=baseline>

 

this next pic is an idea I came up with after reading all the replys in this thread.  I decided to invert my zone placing by having all commercial face an avenue and all res face a road.  If anyone thinks this is a good idea then I will most likely replace the outer avenue ring with a road.  I kind of like this idea now that I see it laid out as all my commercial zones are placed along my main arteries into and out of my neighborhoods.  I think I will combine this zone placement with a new tax law of 10% R$, 9% R$$, 11% R$$$.  these tax rates seem to work well without causing excessive negative demand.  I will also try the better pathfinding version of NAM instead of the perfect pathfinding (and I will get rid of the 10x commute mod as it does not seem to work very well):

 

http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/5834/newstyle2cw.jpg align=baseline>

 

please give me some feedback here.  I dont want to quit the game just yet, but, I still need help.

[pnorrell 4]

The second pic in your last post (and Rymac91's advice) is the way to go. Keep your residential zones on roads and streets. They should have nearby access to highways and avenues but should have to go through commercial zones to get there.

[tungston 19]

These are a couple of examples of zones in sucessful cities, I don't know if you would be able to use anything like them in your CJ.  Of course there are neighboring cities.  With a solitary city some of the zone sizes might need to be adjusted.

 

https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/files//Sucessful%20city%2001.jpg align=baseline>

 

 

https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/files//Sucessful%20city%2002.jpg align=baseline>

[juaquin 0]

Soldyne, I usually start with all taxes set at 9%.  When I get to about 15,000 sims I lower $$ taxes to 8.9.  Then I just watch the RCI demand graph and make sure that R$$ always has the highest demand.  It's a bit of a juggling act because you have to make sure they all stay in the positive.  Also you don't want to go too low, you still have a city to run.   

[Athens2004 1]

Good point, but the second problem (for me) is trying to get those sims off their cars and onto the mass transit system. Every time, these sims insist on using cars despite spending over thousands upon thousands on Mass transit... any advice for a large car-free city with road connections in all directions?

[RSFAndrei13 0]

Your continued use of perfect pathfinding might be the problem.

I'm not sure if it was the current NAM or the NAM versions that used ZIP files instead of EXE, but there was definitely a warning about how experimental perfect pathfinding was, that it should only be used as a test and not a mean of reliance.

Take SilentRob's suggestion and go with Better Pathfinding.

[soldyne 111]

verywell then!  I have installed better pathfinding with no other NAM mods.  not that I am complaining, but I was not fully aware that the perfect pathfinding might have been causing my problems.  we shall see.

 

I am also going with my second zone layout.  I am not counting tungstons zone placement out quite yet so I will use his ideas as a fall back plan.  I normally dont like clumping everything together like that as I dont really experience that where I live.  I would say that I live in a medium density residential area and there is low density commercial service all around me in every direction clustered in small areas.  that is what gave me the idea to do commercial clustering in the first place.

 

it is interesting that as I examine my own town I realize that indeed all the major commercial areas are along a major avenue and all the residential areas are along streets and roads.  surprising that I had not noticed it before.

 

my only concern is with this 10 tile trip = long commute bug I keep running into. I certainly hope perfect pathfinding had something to do with it, otherwise I have no idea what to do.

 

I will also try to manipulate the taxes better and try and keep the rich sims out of my city.  I aways have maximum demand for all wealth levels in my city.  I am not sure if that means I am a good mayor or a bad one but over time my city does seem to get overrun with R$$$.  at one time my cities average income was about 120k per year.  thats a lot of simoleans! now that I think about it perhaps they are not abondoning due to commute time (even though the building reports this in the query) but are abondoning due to no jobs available for their wealth level...interesting....

 

ok I have lot to absorb.  it may take me a while to get any results.

[Abc987 3]

Hope it turns out OK

[soldyne 111]

ok, well I have made some great progress and it is thanks to all of your replies.  I dont have any pics right now but I can post em if they are requested.

 

I used the design I said I would (posted above) with better pathfinding.  I had some trouble around 300k population.  I built a small suburb community (I posted pics in the Show us your suburbs thread) and after that everything stablized and my population shot up to 500k within a game year.  I have maybe three or four abondonded buildings in the whole city and everything else is quite stable.

 

I manipulated the taxes to keep R$$$ and R$ to a minimum which has greatly increased mass transit use.  infact pedestrian and subway traffic both beat car as a means of commute choice.  followed by bus and passenger rail.  there are only two problems which I am trying to solve yet and that is that my monorail system is nearly unused (only about 10k out of 500k use it) and even with all the subway traffic and walking average commute time is still about 50 minuets.

 

I think I will actually take Tungstons and Hyms suggestions into account for my next test city and see what happens then.  so far though my design shows great promise.

 

thanks to everyone and If I get some interesting results I'll be sure to post em.

[Micah 16]

Glad to see you fixed the problem... Can't wait to see those photos.

[soldyne 111]

ok, just so I feel like I have finished this experment in mass transit I will post a quick pic of my last city in this experiment:

 

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/5492/500k5ad.jpg align=baseline>

 

I feel that this is a decent size for most cities and in my CJ, Newtopia Valley , I plan on having 9 such cities as the center anchor for the region.  I have not totally forgot the other posters ideas and am still doing some small experimentation with different zone layouts, but the main design pattern is still the same.  It may not be 100% efficient or ground breaking but it is different and unique and that was also a goal of mine from the beginning.

 

thanks for all the support everyone, and remember to visit  Newtopia Valley whenever you get the chance!

 

btw, you can see pics of the suburbs in the  Show Us Your Suburbs thread!  take a look!