How do external train connections help?

[enchant 2]

With the exception of cosmetic appearance, what do the external train connections do for me?  Why should I put a train connection within my city?  Does it increase how fast my city grows?  Help the commercial or industrial areas?

[Ferias 0]

How do you get to other city? Only car?  

Train can reduce using cars.

[enchant 2]

So there is some portion of the population that regularly has to travel outside of of my created city?  Ok, I can see that.

[JJogurt 18]

It has the biggest effect on industry I would say. Industry will level up immediately once you build a freight station near them.

[Turjan 1,048]

Yup. You can see the effect very drastically when your train connection clogs and your industry and commerce take a nosedive.

[BlakeMW 84]

I don't know for sure, but I think that immigration also happens by train, ship and plane, this reduces the load on the highways and the big traffic snakes heading to newly zoned residential.

Why do I think that immigration happens by train? Simple, because normally the population arriving by train is about 50x higher than population leaving, this indicates really strongly that it is immigration.

 

edit: Another factor in confirming the immigration hypothesis is that after you've built passenger connections the big traffic snakes disappear, as newly arrived cims either depart by car from the relevant stations or take mass transit/walk. Before they have these options, they are forced to arrive by car via the highways.

  Edited October 10, 2015 by Grater  

[Turjan 1,048]

Why do I think that immigration happens by train? Simple, because normally the population arriving by train is about 50x higher than population leaving, this indicates really strongly that it is immigration.

Yup, that's how it is. As my tourism has bugged out, the effect is even more pronounced in my city: outside trains leave nearly always with zero passengers.

[ethansprang 41]

Freight stations give big industry boosts.  Passenger stations give big Office boosts.

Basically, they are traffic solutions. If your highways are too congested from cars and trucks entering and exiting your city, rails are a good way to divert a sizable portion of the traffic. Industry and commerce will generate sizable numbers of trucks. Cars come from tourists, new residents moving in to new/upgraded buildings, and, oddly, university students (!?!).

This can also work for freight traffic within the city if you have raw material specialized industry that feeds your generic industry and you want to avoid a massive truck conveyor line.

[Linoa06 1,374]

For cargo, train connections are amazing.

Passengers, well, maybe less so but there are people commuting in and out of your city, citizens and tourists alike. (As said above, office boosts are nice too)

  Edited October 10, 2015 by Linoa06  

[BlakeMW 84]

I'm quite certain that Passenger Stations do nothing for office beyond provide transportation service which can be equally but more easily provided by bus or metro. You could just spam 6 bus stops and achieve the same effect without having to route a railway through. In terms of transportation network, office has the lowest transportation requirements, they employ fewer workers than other types, don't attract customers, and don't have any truck/van traffic, this makes office ideal for servicing by bus.

Contrast with the Cargo Station; Industry has a separate service category - Cargo. It is fulfilled only by Cargo Station and Cargo Port/Hub. It is also incredibly potent at leveling industry. If you provide industry with Cargo service, you only need to provide very modest other services - just fire and police really. If you try to get lvl3 industry without cargo service you need to provide extensive service coverage: police, fire, recreation, health, education including university - it can be done, but is much more expensive.

As well as providing a huge service boost to industry, a cargo station also has a dramatic effect on the transportation network, by removing a great deal of truck traffic from the highways, it can also create serious traffic jams if it is overloaded, or if the road network is not designed well.

[JJogurt 18]

I'm quite certain that Passenger Stations do nothing for office beyond provide transportation service which can be equally but more easily provided by bus or metro. You could just spam 6 bus stops and achieve the same effect without having to route a railway through. In terms of transportation network, office has the lowest transportation requirements, they employ fewer workers than other types, don't attract customers, and don't have any truck/van traffic, this makes office ideal for servicing by bus.

You are semi-wrong =)

From my experience fulfilling the transportation requirement for offices isn't just about spamming bus stops nearby, but about effectiveness of your transport system. Your network needs to make sense and it needs to be able to take you to as many destinations as possible. In other words, office wants to be near you transportation hub, and putting a train station nearby helps. And besides, train stations produce a ton of sound pollution. I makes sense to place them near your commercial/office zones.

Also, offices don't exactly employ fewer people than others. Level 3 office employs the most people per square in the game. A 4x4 Lvl 3 industry building employs 32 people while its office equivalent employs 48. The thing is that Lvl 1 office starts with few employees, but then gains much more with each level up.

 

[ethansprang 41]

@Grater - very true.  I'm always disappointed in the meh effects of placing a train station in my CBD.  I mostly use it to pump tourists into my skyscraper tourist magnets and the surrounding Hi-Commercial.

[Turjan 1,048]

 I'm always disappointed in the meh effects of placing a train station in my CBD.  I mostly use it to pump tourists into my skyscraper tourist magnets and the surrounding Hi-Commercial.

That's probably because it's an isolated station. My CBD railway station has about 1500 passengers per week, but it's also transport hub. I don't think that the citizens do many things in the CBD. I assume that's because the game uses the SC4 ratio of commercial to residential blocks (1/2), so it's very few people who visit a building.

[BlakeMW 84]

I'm quite certain that Passenger Stations do nothing for office beyond provide transportation service which can be equally but more easily provided by bus or metro. You could just spam 6 bus stops and achieve the same effect without having to route a railway through. In terms of transportation network, office has the lowest transportation requirements, they employ fewer workers than other types, don't attract customers, and don't have any truck/van traffic, this makes office ideal for servicing by bus.

You are semi-wrong =)

From my experience fulfilling the transportation requirement for offices isn't just about spamming bus stops nearby, but about effectiveness of your transport system.

Sadly that is not true at all. It doesn't matter any whatsoever how much "sense" your transportation network makes, well, it might matter to you, but it doesn't matter to the game.

As an experiment try making an office block without any connections at all, no way in or out, totally an island. Remarkably enough, it will still work just fine. Even with absolutely no commuters coming in, the block will work just fine, the offices will fill up with employees, who (we suppose) teleport to work, the buildings will go to lvl3 just fine. If it has only a road in but no way out, garbage trucks will drive in, pick up garbage, then "teleport" home, same with police, fire and hearses.

The dirty secret of the traffic simulator is that cims don't actually have to be able to get to work at all, the simulator does not take commuting into consideration when it comes to calculating the "health" of residential, commercial, industry and office. Also its often happy to teleport agents if they can't find a path.

There are some things which do matter, Residential needs to be able to receive immigrants, Commercial needs to be able to receive vans and customers (both are happy to teleport home though), industry needs to be able to receive supplies and deliver goods. Services with a vehicle generally only require a way out as usually the vehicle will be happy to teleport home (the only exception seems to be medical services, ambulances are unable to teleport sicks cims to the clinic/hospital and require a physical route).

The height of absurdity is that bus routes don't require buses to provide service rating. So you can add a bus line to your completely isolated office block, buses wont be able to get to it, but this wont impair its service rating in any way whatsoever, I guess if there are no actual cims there, the lack of any actual buses doesn't matter.

What does this actually mean when it comes to office and industry? Basically it means the functionality of your passenger service doesn't really matter at all. In the middle game, if you're playing the game straight, and have proper road access to the office/industry, you might want to have passenger service to take commuter cars off the road, later in the game, because commuters don't matter for anything they are one of the things the game can sacrifice to keep performance up, and the effectiveness of your commuter network kind of stops mattering altogether - except that shoppers do matter and can't be separated from commuters, so you still need to have passenger service to the commercial districts.

 

[Turjan 1,048]

 

Also its often happy to teleport agents if they can't find a path.

The game finds also other creative solutions, like here in my city:

I've built a bridge since. Looks much better :-D.

(the only exception seems to be medical services, ambulances are unable to teleport sicks cims to the clinic/hospital and require a physical route)

Yes, and the problem is even more severe as the game actually only utilizes three health buildings per city or so.

 

What does this actually mean when it comes to office and industry? Basically it means the functionality of your passenger service doesn't really matter at all. In the middle game, if you're playing the game straight, and have proper road access to the office/industry, you might want to have passenger service to take commuter cars off the road, later in the game, because commuters don't matter for anything they are one of the things the game can sacrifice to keep performance up, and the effectiveness of your commuter network kind of stops mattering altogether - except that shoppers do matter and can't be separated from commuters, so you still need to have passenger service to the commercial districts.

I noticed that, in my biggest city, the game stopped serving the city center pretty much altogether. That had no negative consequences, but no commuter ever went there. Trains and metros were empty. There seems to be some code in place that concentrates traffic on the area where you are working on at the moment. As soon as you start working somewhere else, traffic goes away again.

[ethansprang 41]

Can't you get "not enough worker" alerts for offices, just like for Industry?  How do you get those if Cims don't need to travel to offices?

[BlakeMW 84]

Can't you get "not enough worker" alerts for offices, just like for Industry?  How do you get those if Cims don't need to travel to offices?

If you check carefully (mouseovering the icon in the building information) the tooltip tells you to "zone more residential to ensure there are enough workers", it doesn't tell you to make sure that workers can get to the building. The tooltip advice is correct. It means there are not enough unemployed workers of the relevant education levels in the city. The solution is to create more population (or in some cases, just wait for it to move in / get born/ grow up).

Note that mature cities go through severe population "boom and bust", which oddly enough forms a sine curve (check the population statistics, also the birth rate one too), while your city is in the "bust" phase the population is dropping as cims die in droves and you'll have a hard time with workers, when the city is in the "boom" phase lots of new cims are popping into existence and graduating from various educational facilities and new industry/commercial/office will fill up in no time.

The boom/bust cycle obscures the not enough workers issue, it might look like you had a new block suffering worker problems, so you add a metro, and 6 months later it's thriving, but actually all that happened was the cycle advanced and new workers became available.

The only "zot" which is really relevant to mass transit is the commercial "not enough customers" one (and related, "attract wealthier customers" one for upgrades), that one really does require customers to walk into the store and may indicate a problem with the transit system.

  Edited October 13, 2015 by Grater