How important are multiple lines in bus/metro?

[BarkersCities 7]

How important are multiple lines in bus/metro?  I've poorly designed my transit systems on all of the cities I've built, and they still seem to work fine.  I literally build only 1 line, and it loops pretty badly through the whole city with tons of stations.  Do you see any advantages to splitting the lines as opposed to just linking one line everywhere?

And question #2, is there a need for more than 1 bus station (or depot, I don't remember what it's called).  I build multiple, but I'm not sure that is necessary.  Will the number increase unlimited from 1 station, or is there a limit?

[BlakeMW 84]

Long lines work fairly well. I prefer to use a lot of short lines for ease of management, but the cim pathfinder seems to work well enough with either approach. 

You only need a single bus depot. The only time the bus depot is actually used is creating buses to fill lines. Buses don't seem to ever go back to the bus stop, unless you destroy the line or turn off the depot (turning off the depot will result in all buses returning), so a bus depot would appear to be able to handle any number of buses.

[Ltw 401]

Having more metro-lines is an approach I prefer. I use multi-track stations at some places to let citizens switch lines. Furthermore it really works to use long lines, I make the lines as long as possible and letting them terminate at the ends (I don't make loops). Even though it is possible to let more then one line run on the same track I avoid that. I prefer to let one line per tunnel so that it doesn't get congested and I can turn up the number of trains quite easily. If a line is really busy you can let trains get in and out of the stations almost instantly without them having to wait, this is more difficult if you have more lines on the same track. One important side-note is that my approach is very expensive. Even though it costs a lot of money there are a lot of people traveling by metro in my city, so in the end I get it back through ticket-prices (success not guaranteed though).

Furthermore, one depot is enough indeed. However, if you have Skylines: After Dark buses that are driving on a day-line or night-line are also returning after the line closes. If this is the case it could be beneficial to have more bus depots or at least having your bus-depot on a location close to the bus-lines.

[mrsmartman 200]

I really think that all functionalities of CiM can be merged into CSL through DLCs.

[Ltw 401]

On 6-12-2015 at 1:49 AM, BarkersCities said:

How important are multiple lines in bus/metro?  I've poorly designed my transit systems on all of the cities I've built, and they still seem to work fine.  I literally build only 1 line, and it loops pretty badly through the whole city with tons of stations.  Do you see any advantages to splitting the lines as opposed to just linking one line everywhere?

And question #2, is there a need for more than 1 bus station (or depot, I don't remember what it's called).  I build multiple, but I'm not sure that is necessary.  Will the number increase unlimited from 1 station, or is there a limit?

I've been playing with my public transportation a little bit and I have an update on how things work, at least on how I approached certain problems since my last update on this topic.

First of all the number of trains you use is very important, I use the Improved Public Transport Mod which could help a lot in dividing the trains evenly on your line. The vehicle unbuncher which is included in this mod could help a lot. However, there are quite some downfalls of this approach, I explained my view on the vehicle unbuncher further in this thread.

Furthermore I have added two lines that share the same tunnel, even though I try to avoid this it was necessary since I've extended one line. This line had an terminating station in the middle which caused a lot of trouble with congestion once I've extended it. Basically I had to split this line into two lines so that I have two terminating stations instead of three in one line. In my experience it works quite well to use one tunnel for two lines if you don't use that many trains. Furthermore it would be important to use a separate track for the terminating station. Only on the parts where the trains are driving through it is possible to use the same tunnel, but since terminating makes it quite hard to adjust the trains of different lines on each other I would recommend avoiding terminating on a shared track. Furthermore it depends on how busy your lines are: if you have busy lines you are less flexible which makes it better to use a separate tunnel for each line. However, combining less busy lines could save you a lot of money if you use the proper amount of trains.

The second feature of the Improved Public Transport Mod I would like to address is budget control. Basically it is adjusting the number of trains/buses on the number of travelers on that line, which could increase the profits per train/bus tremendously. However, this feature could lead to congestion on your tracks/roads. If the number of travelers is lower it would remove some vehicles from that line, which means that trains will return to their station and buses will return to the bus depot. Personally I haven't noticed a lot of problems with my metro-lines that use budget-control. The trains will just return to the terminating station (at least in my city this was the case) which won't lead to a lot of congestion. However, it is more of a challenge with buses. Buses will return to the bus-depot which could lead to a lot of congestion near the depot. Especially when considering the fact that bus-depots are dispatching as many buses as needed this makes it really annoying. I tried to solve this problem by building several bus-depots throughout the city, with access to one of my highways. This reduces congestion a lot. However, unless you were planning on using budget-control on every line you have I would keep it at one bus-depot only.