No traffic on bridge

[lostintwilight 0]

I've Googled this without success. I have a city of 10,000 people, separated by a river. I have the two parts connected with a bridge, but when I query the traffic, it says none, both ways, both times of day. I can see a few cars on it however. I also have no rail traffic on my rail bridge.

My city has been transferred from another computer, and I always had traffic on the bridge.

I've done some experimenting. First, I removed all the mods I'm using, but there was no change. When I tried a shorter bridge, I finally got some traffic.

So the way it looks, I can't have a long, elegant bridge. I must go with a short one. Any thoughts out there?

[citycowboy 183]

I'm not a tech expert but I've played the game a lot and a lot of times the sims don't use conventional wisdom. I have a question, is your city set up so that one side has more residential than the other? What I mean is if your city is balanced with RCI on both sides of the river, they won't use the bridge because they don't have to to find work. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

A population of 10,000 could easily find work locally especially if the city is balanced on both sides of the bridge.  Try increasing residential on one side only.  10K Sims is only a village or small town, so the simulation hasn't enough objects to be really settled down.

[rsc204 21,805]

Check the paths using the Drawpaths - this requires Buggi's ExtraCheats.dll mod to be installed, then press CTRL + X in game and type DRAWPATHS into the box and hit enter. Make sure the direction arrows all line up and go in the same direction, if they don't then simply demolish and re-build the bridges, somewhere you've a pathing issue, easily caused if you changed the driving side from the existing region for example.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

And the converse of drawpaths is hidepaths.

The paths on the bridge should be on the driving side for each lane.

[lostintwilight 0]

All residential zones are on one side of the bridge in my town. I've also tried destroying and rebuilding the bridge. I've tried different types of bridges, even a custom one I picked up somewhere in my mods. I've tried a road in place of my preferred avenue.

I've given this a lot of thought and I think I would like my town better with a shorter bridge after all. Of course I'll have to do some major land/ water modifications, but in my mind I like what I see. 

But I'm going to keep a copy of the city as it exists with the long, trafficless bridge, as I intend to get to the bottom of the problem.

Question: How is Drawpaths different from the in-game query tool? 

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Question: How is Drawpaths different from the in-game query tool? 

This (and this is an old image, but a perfect example):

The query tool only tells you where traffic is or isn't; the drawpaths tool (which is a very powerful and important debugging tool) tells exactly where problems are, in that it shows every path that traffic could possibly go. If there is a problem, it'll manifest itself as a flashing path, backwards path (sometimes), or just being absent altogether (like above).

 

  Edited August 18, 2015 by Ganaram Inukshuk  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Another testing technique here would be to put ferry docks on each side of the river and see if they get used.

[lostintwilight 0]

I apologize for getting information regarding this problem out there in bits and pieces, but I've been very busy working. 

So, yes, I have all my residential on one side of the river. On the other side, is 100% of my total industry, and about 10% of my total commercial, along with connections to neighboring towns. So the residents have every reason in the world to use the one bridge to that side! 

Like I said earlier, I always had traffic on the bridge on the computer I originally transferred the city from. I just can't swear whether or not there was traffic on the bridge, on the new computer, from the start.

I have a few ideas: 1) play my original copy of the city on the other computer utilizing the same mods I'm presently using (wasn't using them before), see if it affects bridge traffic. 2) transfer a new copy of the original city onto the new computer, in an effort to rule out that I picked up some sort of bug along the way of installing mods (but I don't see how this could be possible, since I've already tried running the city without any mods, to no difference).

I'll also look into the drawpaths tool. I'll keep you all posted.

[rsc204 21,805]

Honestly there isn't a lot of point in doing most of what you outline here, either the paths have been reversed rendering the bridge functionless or some other factor is at play causing no traffic to cross. Once you've established the pathing is correct and rebuilt the bridges (far less work than checking everything) you are left with something to do with the game, i.e. sims don't feel the need to travel across the bridge, such things would be a little trickier to diagnose though.

Buggi's extra cheats.dll is not really intuitively named, actually what it does is provide access to the developer functions when playing, hence the ability to see game paths amongst many other useful tools, it's not so much a mod as it is a tool no SC4 player should be without.

[lostintwilight 0]

Here is a pic of my bridge with drawpaths enabled. The top is the resident end. I'm not clear on reading it, so maybe someone can interpret it for me, and see if they can identify the problem.

[lostintwilight 0]

Just noticed something in the game. When I'm zoomed out, I see where the green arrows are missing on the bridge, whereas they're visible everywhere else. So I guess my problem has presented itself. Question is, what now? Rebuilding the bridge makes no difference, and it makes no difference which direction I drag from to build it.

?

[matias93 7,535]

First, the absence of paths in outzoomed images is a visual glitch, not an indication of bad pathing. What I would consider is the cause of the problem is that the bridge crossings are themselves neighbour connections, so maybe the simulator cannot manage to do all that pathing in the same piece.

You could try shortening the bridge a couple of tiles to separate the avenue crossing, the neighbour connection and the bridge entrance, to ease the pathing.

[lostintwilight 0]

I believe I've reached the conclusion that it is simply a glitch. Here's how I came to that conclusion: First, I joined the land masses in my city where the bridge connected, thus eliminating the need for a bridge. So I'm left with a simple road, and still, no traffic. I checked the neighboring city (a much larger city) where this road comes out, and strangely enough, it also says "none". Next, I copied my region from my old computer onto the new one, just like I did in the very beginning. I went into the city in question and checked the traffic on the bridge with the query tool, and just as I suspected, it revealed normal traffic using the bridge. Out of curiosity, I plopped down all of the lots I got from Simtropolis, just to see if their presence in my city caused the problem, but the traffic continued as normal on the bridge.

Also, having my bridge that close to a neighbor connection shouldn't have had anything to do with it, since it was always like that, not to mention I did try moving it away from the edge.

It's very bizarre, but I don't see what else it could possibly be but some freak glitch that effected that area of my map. I just hope it doesn't happen again.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Seems something was missed in the Qualify Assurance phase before the game was released.  With millions of possibilities, a program like this can never be truly be said to be anything higher than a release candidate.

We know the Q.A. cycle was affected by the forced insertion of UDI, but I doubt this problem would have been found in a longer Q.A. cycle.  Testing a program of this complexity is, of elegant necessity, NP complete.  Think of the millions of computer hours that this game has been played and glitches like this turn up one or two a year.

[crishy 57]

Simulation in SC4 is awful so try not to lose too much sleep over that - unless they do not have jobs elsewhere and you are losing people because of that, which does not seem to be the case here.

Residents will almost always choose the closest job available, and you seem to have plenty of jobs in the middle of the city, so I am not terribly surprised at that.

Similarly, houses on the edge of the map will always go to a neighboring city with jobs instead of jobs further towards the center of the current map - even if the jobs in the neighboring city are in fact farther away - if a neighboring connection connection is available nearby.

  Edited August 24, 2015 by crishy  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

What are you expecting from the simulation?  It is designed to get workers to and from the job, and the algorithms seem to make the Sim go to the nearest one for which he is qualified with the exception that qualification over a neighbour connection occurs (wrongly) after the border is crossed.