Garbage on streets and desirability

[ali20152015 0]

So, I see garbage on my roads. Why?

I do have landfill and road access to it and it's working fine. But why I see trash on roads?

Also, I have abandoned due to desirability in my C$$$ buildings, why? How to solve it?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

For CS$$$ you have to collect all the garbage to increase desirability.  Maybe your landfill is too far away.  Try dropping in a Waste to Energy plant next to your landfill, or creating another one closer.

 

The other requirements are very low pollution, green space (plazas) nearby, police coverage, good education levels (over 120), fire coverage, and high traffic on the adjacent streets.

[ali20152015 0]

Well, my landfill is in the neighbor city. Neighborhood deal.

And the landfill is not full

[cogeo 960]

The landfill in the neighbor city will not be getting full (actually it wil not be getting any garbage) as long as you don't simulate (run) that city, although you have a deal, and you do play the exporting city. This is due to asynchronous simulation. And of course this is an easy exploit (getting rid of your garbage withouf actually getting to the lanfill) -  call it a "cheat" if you want.

 

Garbage on streets kills desirabilty and you should get rid of them. You do have a deal, but it seems that it's not enough. Try increasing the amount. Check your garbage Dataview, to see how severe the problem is. Garbage tends to be concentrated at certain large lots (for some weird reason esp at hospitals ). Also check your garbage Graph. "Total Garbage" is the total amount of garbage in your landfiils (if you have any) AND on the streets. As you do not have a lndfill in your city, it is the amount of garbage on strrets only, and it should be zero. Check my BAT, it also includes a modified version of the Graph Mod, which adds more graph plots to the Garbage Graph, not just Total Garbage and Garbage Capacity. Increase the deal amount so that "Exported" garbage exceeds "Garbage Produced" (you have enough trash piled on streets). When your city gets cleaned, you can reduce the deal amount so that "Exported" garbage only slightly exceeds "Garbage Produced", to reduce the bill.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Perhaps, as cogeo says, you are suffering from your cities being out of sync.  You have to run each city in a region that has "deals" to keep them properly active and correctly funded.

 

I play the entire region, and try not to concentrate on any one city.  This was the whole point of the Rush Hour upgrade to allow regional play.

[ali20152015 0]

I cancelled the garbage deal. I put a landfill in the city. Now, everything is ok.

I think, I will stop neighborhood deals for power and water as well. They are useless. Well, the power is OK, but I find unrealistic that a city will buy water and garbage from another city.

The most smallest section on a region map can have a minimum of 80K inhabitants. Why a city with 80K people will buy water from another City in real world? It rarely exists. I like to play the game based on reality.

So, I think I will trade only power to only 2 cities. In each group of 3 cities, 1 in them will trade power. All will have their own water and garbage.

[cogeo 960]

Deals are... useless? How come? Especially for garbage, they are rather necessary. There is no other decent way to dispose your garbage. It will be either very polluting (landfill or incinerator), or... just some cheaty lot. You don't even have the option of a clean but expensive alternative. Landfills kill land value over a big radius and incinerators pollute the air and the water (you will eventually need those expensive water treatment plants). The space required just goes waste. Use them only in special small city tiles (I call them... Utilivillle), not in your main city tiles. These can buy all of their power and export the garbage, but can produce all of their water (they are generally "clean", and pumps in SC4 do not have any special placement requirements as in SC3000, they can be placed anywhere, and take up very little space). Btw if you are interested, they can be modded to be within some certain distance from a water source.

 

I always use deals; at least cities can just sell their excess production without losing money and without having to lower the sliders, which results in a more expensive power unit cost.

 

Ehmmm, and in real world, cities often need to transfer water from huge distances, if local water sources can't satisfy their needs.

[ali20152015 0]

I have never got a big problem when having landfill. In fact, in all my cities I have a mayor rating of more than 80. Everything is green in pollution and land value etc to the fullest.

I don't use mods for landfills. I use the default Maxis. Then, I place a recycling plant. Also I am buying power from another agricultural city. It has 4 oil plants. And everything is green to the fullest.

I use parks, invest on education, etc that's why.

By the way, i make high monthly revenue without cheat. Low wealth residence pays 2.8% tax in my city. I will lower it to 2.3% soon. Medium wealth residence pays 3% and high wealth 3.4%.

Low wealth commercial pays 6.5%, medium wealth commercial 6.8% and High wealth commercial 7.2%.

Agriculture 7%, medium industrial 8.5% and high tech 8%.

I make a lot of revenues.

By the way, is there a way to avoid less same buildings beint built? Example, I zoned a small area with high commercial and I got 4: buildings the same business.

[Prophet42 1,503]

I agree with cogeo.  I find deals absolutely necessary to build a region.  I usually have one city the supplies all the power, all the water, and collects all the garbage for the region.  That city also usually becomes a heavy industry city.  I find that the neighbor deals add a lot of realism to the gameplay.  For example, Chicago supplies many, many suburbs with water from Lake Michigan.  Chicago supplies the water up to 30-40 miles away.  Same with garbage.  Usually there is one land fill that is used by one company that collects garbage from many cities.

 

In your specific situation, you need to look at several things:

 

1) Neigbhor connections.  For garbage make sure that the connection from the neighbor actually can trace a path to the landfill

2) You have to have a certain amount of extra capacity in the 'supplying' city to be able to increase the deal amount.  You need to make sure that the landfill is large enough to handle your city's capacity plus the extra capacity from your neighbor city.

3) The neigbhor needs to have enough cash in the treasury to handle one years worth of the deal.  For example if your current deal is for 9 units of garbage and costs $100 a month, you will need to maintain $1200 in your treasury.  Lets say you need to increase the deal to $19 units at a cost of $200 a month.  That means, before you are offered the increased amount, you will need to maintain $2400 in your treasury.

 

Trust me, figure out the issue because it is worth it.

[ali20152015 0]

I had everything you listed. But didn't know why trashes were on roads. I'm trading power and water only. I don't think I will trade garbage.i prefer each city deal with their own garbage.

Perhaps, because i live in a country where we don't sell garbage to other cities, that's why for me it's unrealistic.

Also, in my country, it's the government which supplies water, power etc. Not mayors. A city will not pay another city if the power is coming from there. It's a state thing!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Neighbour deals work well, especially for start up cities.  There does come a point when the purchasing city has to go out on its own, and you can tell when this is because the costs will have grown to he point where it is cheaper to have the facility in-city.

 

The important thing about deals is you must run each city to keep in sync.

[ali20152015 0]

Neighborhood deals are expensive. My city uses more than 130,000 water. And I pay $7,280to get water from the other city.

If I place a large pump, water treatment with 3 water towers, it will cost less.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

And it will cost even less if you use

[cogeo 960]

Ali, the deals aren't really exponsive! The selling city gets a 10% profit (over the production cost), and that's all. But let's see the deal types one by one:

 

Power: It's actually cheaper to import power than generatre it, as your power plants may only be operated at 75-80% of their capacity (otherwise they wear out fast), which means that their real cost is 25-33% higher than the listed one, and obviously higher than the 10% profit for the deal (of course this 10% sums up if you have long chains of deals, eg A->B, then B->C etc). Add to this the pollution (air and water), the cost to build the plants, and the space wasted (not just the space taken by the plants, but also all the area they affect, suffering pollution and decreased desirability and land value), and you will see whether it's really worth.

 

Water: This is probably the only supply type that may be worth to produce your own, rather than import. Pumps take up very little space and can be placed anywhere, not disrupting your city, not polluting and not causing any NIMBY effect. So they can easily be placed in your main cities. Water towers have a high(er) cost (per unit of water produced), but not indeed considerably higher, but take up more space, as you will need many of them, to cover the needs of even a small city, and of course the look of an array of water towers is unrealistic, so they are only good for small villages or towns. And I'm not very fond of the Large Water Pump either. Per unit of water produced, It costs 10% more to build and 10% less to operate (compared to the normal pumps). 10% might look somewhat good, but having to... accommodate all that excess production at once, might be a problem. So I would say it's marginally useful. Basically it saves space, but the space needed for normal pumps is not much anyway.

 

Garbage: Heh, this is the service type that you SHOULD almost always seek to outsource. Not only ANY non-cheaty form of disposal is extremely polluting (recycling can only eliminate up to 20% of your trash - the rest must be disposed) it is also very expensive to run. Recycling centres cost you $350/mo for reducing the garbage produced by 25,000 pop by 20%. Did you ever check how much this really is? Check your recycling centre (close to the end of a month, so the total figure shows up): 18 tons! Yes, $350 for 18 tons of trash, or else some $20/ton, by far the most expensive utility in SC4. Not even to be considered, actually a badly modded building. In SC3000 it costed $350 too, but would instead reduce the trash produced by 50,000 sims by 30%. At about $6.5/ton, still too expensive, but maybe a viable option to be considered by a "green" mayor. In SC4 it's just a joke. Landfills, on the other hand, kill land value over a big radius (not just the area they pollute, but also cause a NIMBY effect), and they are not cheap either. You will discover this when they get half or more full. The real cost is above $3/ton, the 2nd most expensive utility in SC4, way more expensive than the W2E plant, which in turn pollutes more than a coal plant. The game has a bug in cost calculation of deals when landfills are involved though, which you can mmm... exploit (cheat? ) to export your trash on the cheap: sign a deal with a city with an almost empty landfill, and export your grabage for pennies (don't "run" that city, the landfill will never get full, and it will be forever taking your trash for almost nothing - nowhere close to the actual cost). The only utility type that can make a city profits, is the W2E plant, and this is because it gets paid twice (for both the garbage taken and the power exported) while the expense is charged only once, ie another miscalculation, but produces high pollution too.

 

The amount you pay for your water is way too high. For 130.000 cu.m of water you need 7 (well, 6.5) pumps, for a monthly cost of 7x350=$2450. Add to that a 10% profit, and this becomes ca $2700. If there's another intermediate city in the chain this would become some $3000. But  $7280??!! I don't know. There is definitely something wrong here. Aging pumps maybe? Are you sure you need all this water? Are your numbers correct? As far as I can remember, there must be a bug in water deals. triggered when a city imports water from 2 cities instead of 1. It seems that the smaller water amount is actually subtracted (rather than added) from the larger, but I'm not sure. Try sourcing your water from one city at max.

 

And Moose, sorry, but 200,000 m³ of water for §100, is... a bit on the cheap side, isn't it?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

<snip>

 

And Moose, sorry, but 200,000 m³ of water for §100, is... a bit on the cheap side, isn't it?

Of course!  It is a cheat of a kind made in 2006.  It was designed as a fuel source for my tokamak power plant.  If you want reality, you don't have to use it.  I built it when I got sick of maintaining so many water sources for a 16 Km² town.