Long-distance railroads and avoiding the eternal commuter bug?

[sizarieldor 2]

Being aware of the eternal commuter bug, I planned a tree layout for connecting the different cities in my region. But this is a little heavy on the central node city.
 

So. If you place a railroad in cities A, B, C... Z - a continuous railroad track - but there are only train stations in cities A and Z, will the sims do the logical thing and use the train between A and Z only? Even if there are various job opportunities in the cities in between - B, C, D, etc.? Can the sims be "distracted" on their way?

This way, the sims may travel between geographically close cities (with one or two other cities in-between A and Z), but without having to go trough the central node city.

EDIT: No, apparently not, I tried with cities A, B and C, where city B is empty with only a single rail line in it, and the inhabitants of A failed to travel to C.

[OrSpeeder 72]

I tried this on a region of mine with RHW and normal roads, it worked fine.

 

Probably your issue is the lack of station then.

 

A solution might be make like happened in the real world: along long rail tracks, people would build a small station and a tiny village around it. (at least where I am from there are several cities taht started this way)

[cmdp123789 710]

Alright! Lets clarify some stuff!

First off, welcome to the forums!

So, what you're trying to do is basically generate a regional traffic, which unfortunately doesn't work. See, in order to have people move around, you need population. My point is, you are never going to have people going from city A to C if you don't have something in B. Even though we play the game as a region, the engine does not support that kind of traffic. The best you get is people from A to B, and from B to C, but no such thing as A to C.

Now, there might be a way to move people in a different way, but I would recommend you ask in the NAM section so that one of the NAM experts can help you with this. NAM is the Network Addon Mod, so I would recommend you download that, then make sure you get use to it, and of course ask in the NAM thread.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I have actually had a long haul railroad across several city tiles, but each tile was an operating outfit with population, jobs, etc.  What happens is that Joe Sim may go from A to B and not finding a job there go from B to C and so on.  The trick is not to allow Joe to get back to A or he may ride forever ('neath the streets of Boston/He's the Sim who never returns).

I no longer have that region as it was lost years ago in one of my restarts.

[sizarieldor 2]

Wow, nice, care to elaborate?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

As I said, I no longer have this region, but it consisted of a gigantic U around a central sea.  The two halves on the North and South edges were actually bridged at the west end by railroad bridges, which was tricky because of some of the land forms.  There was a land bridge at the east end, but not transportation connections.

I deliberately built cities, one after the other, extending the rail system working from the south east city westward along the south side until I reached the point where a needed to connect across to the north west city.   I built a small community on the north west tile, then connected it to the larger city on the south by rail bridge.  I then proceeded slowly to build to the east until I had rail connected cities right around the central sea.  This took quite a while (several months elapsed time).

To see if I could get a Sim to go from the south east city to the north east city, I used the MySim feature to cajole a Sim around this loop.  I was surprised that, after a few false starts, I actually got it to happen.  It took quite a bit of persuasion and several days effort.

I am not sure whether I was just lucky or not.  It was several years ago, and I had an early copy of the NAM.  It might be interesting on the next iteration of RRW to try this with that.  So far, I consider RRW to be in development and haven't tried it.

There are ever so many more rail options now, I am not sure whether doing this would be easier or harder.

[OrSpeeder 72]

Alright! Lets clarify some stuff!

First off, welcome to the forums!

So, what you're trying to do is basically generate a regional traffic, which unfortunately doesn't work. See, in order to have people move around, you need population. My point is, you are never going to have people going from city A to C if you don't have something in B. Even though we play the game as a region, the engine does not support that kind of traffic. The best you get is people from A to B, and from B to C, but no such thing as A to C.

Now, there might be a way to move people in a different way, but I would recommend you ask in the NAM section so that one of the NAM experts can help you with this. NAM is the Network Addon Mod, so I would recommend you download that, then make sure you get use to it, and of course ask in the NAM thread.

You are slightly wrong.

 

Like Nonny Moose said, people DO move to A to C if they don't find what they want at B.

 

I built a region that was like this:

 

I==R
 | C
 F

I is a industrial tile, it is also the ONLY tile that has powerplants and garbage collection

R is my original tile, and turned in a balanced town, but skewed toward residential

C is my "downtown"

F is a farm tile.

= and | are roads, = is a RHW 10s and | is a RHW2

 

C has 160k people, R has 100k people, I has 5k people, but 50k jobs, and F has 10k people and more 50k jobs

 

When I use the route query tool, I can follow some sims from C to F, from C to I, and so on, when I consider their travel type (for example, once I was mucking with some stuff, and ended with buses going directly from C to I, thus I knew that all buses arriving at I were residents of C).

 

all my "road" tiles have tiny towns (about 50 of population and 200 jobs) in them, my intention was to simulate gas stations and their surroundings.

 

Also there is a guy from "F" that is a hero, it is a single sim, that WALKS from F to C in the morning commute, and WALKS back at the evening commute, I have no idea why  (probably congestion in the RHW2 resulted in walking being faster for that guy).

 

My RHW 10s starts at the southmost part of C, and ends right at the entrance of I, this is because I made "I" to be a industrial park of sorts, the RHW splits in several smaller roads, and there are tollbooths to enter "I", this is inspired by a industrial park near my home (ie: it is a single neighbourhood with tollbooth in the entrance that employs something like 50k people, and everything beyond those tollbooths are industries, I was there a couple times to deliver parts).

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

As long as you prevent the commuter loop this should work fine.  Movement is like a set of dominoes in that no Sim moves directly like a chess knight to an opposite colour two tiles away.  They must move along from tile to tile, which means there must be at least a toehold in each tile crossed.  Going from A to B to C if there are no jobs available in B but some in C the Sim will move on.  Where you get the commuter loop is if you inadvertently connect A to C, and the easiest way to make this mistake is with a ferry.

[NCGAIO 562]

images are the best explanations

 

 

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

18 hours ago, NCGAIO said:

images are the best explanations

 

 

 

Would be if permissions were set properly.  I can't get it, even from my google account.

[NCGAIO 562]

23 hours ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Would be if permissions were set properly.  I can't get it, even from my google account.

Sorry ... unfortunately we are no longer the owners on our will when we used applications

it seems that  automatical corrections after the upload  were preventing him

I miss the time when things in aplications changed only when we  wanted it be changed !!!.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Suggest you use a photo site that doesn't mess with doing strange things with your data.  Try imgur, it is free now.

[rsc204 21,857]

46 minutes ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Suggest you use a photo site that doesn't mess with doing strange things with your data.  Try imgur, it is free now.

Well that's not necessary a perfect solution either. I'm saddened to think at all the content lost when such services changed their terms or went under :(.

At least google, onedrive et-all should be around in one form or another. Still the real problem is (and I'm as guilty as everyone else), most people simply don't want to pay for the services they use. It's hard to demand anything when it's given to you for free, perhaps paying for things would be a better way?

[NCGAIO 562]

1 hour ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Suggest you use a photo site that doesn't mess with doing strange things with your data.  Try imgur, it is free now.

Interesting ... I went back to your answer and now I realized that the link was cut .. again.

I do not know how it happened ... again ... but all images loaded in this and other SC sites are on google photos and is the first time I see the changed link.

but ultimately what matters here is the demonstration of traffic is possible between the tiles A and  C  which shows that there is no calculation to distance outside the city limits that is playing.

 

 

39 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

.....most people simply don't want to pay for the services they use. It's hard to demand anything when it's given to you for free, perhaps paying for things would be a better way?

my dear ... nothing in the network is free.

Countless commercial interests rentabilizam ... and very well ... so it is possible to disturb me in my navigation with anything that does not interest me.

besides the fact of being in circles where never i joined or have my spam box every day more crowded than the main

and let's say spend my money to keep images that only serve to explain concepts to others at least would be foolish

I prefer to spend with myself

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

@rsc204:It is only recently that imgur became a free service.  I used to have a paid account with them, which is why I used them initially.  Seems their advertising revenue now allows them to provide their service for nothing.  Of course, everything posted on their site is probably public, but I don't put private stuff on it anyway.  If something is really private, I never put it on the net in any form, not even as a steganograph.  Here is a link on my private site you may not have seen.  It is in the form of a Reader's Digest First Person article, but this is the only place it was ever published.

[rsc204 21,857]

I used to use the free FTP server/hosting my UK ISP gave me. Here in Germany I get no such frills for 3x the cost. I'd struggle to pay for hosting if I had to, especially since this is just a hobby, so of course I rely like many on free hosting, photobucket in my case.

But I am concerned that this does mean it's beholden to them, one day all my images could just simply disappear. I was more commenting on the philosophy of getting everything for free in the internet age. It might seem like a great idea, but it's actually causing many problems. I wouldn't entrust anything I hold dear to an internet company, especially a free service.

I get it, for CJs/tutorials/helping people there is an issue with paid subscriptions. But the flip side of that is that we have no history. All the great CJs, tutorials and so much more besides seems to loose their images eventually. This lack of history is a major issue of the internet if you ask me. I mean, if SimPeg was a newspaper, we could all go to the library archives and at least view it. Singling out Paeng's Mountainview CJ for example, such a wealth of content and great tips. So much inspiration was contained there, only now I have to try and remember it, I can no longer reference it.

I realise why things are the way they are, I just wish there was another way .

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Alas, you are quite correct, my friend.  Nothing I have placed anywhere on the net, mostly with imgur is not backed up on my system.  I only use public tools because they are the accepted way of getting things into web sites such as this without a lot of hassle.

My private site is supplied by my ISP.  You can bet I have a complete backup of it on my storage, and that is backed up, and the backup is backed up.  I don't trust anything where I don't have control.  Fortunately, I am in a position where I can afford a few extra free standing hard disks, so you could say that I have a very private cloud, but I know where every bit of every byte is.  If there was a fire in this building I have only to unplug two disks and take them with me to have full recovery.

Over the years, I have gone from the era of broadcast radio (1940s) to broadcast TV (1950s) to business computers (1970s) to home computers (1980s) to the Internet (1980 forward, although it was called ARPAnet for a long time).  Communications has gone from about a week's delay for international events to no delay at all worth noticing.  The information overload is staggering, and I don't really know how anyone who is exposed to all this holus bolus these days keeps from going mad.  Maybe we are all mad (saving me and thee, and sometimes I wonder about thee ).