Mass Transit / Public Transport stopped working

[Gadam 38]

Has this happened to anyone else?

I was happily playing along when i noticed a ton of "No Jobs"  signs popping up due to long commutes. I checked my train, subway and bus stations and they all were showing zero usage, zero maintenance cost and zero capacity. The query doesn't even recognize that there are any train or subway stations in my city! I've tried re plopping the stations but nothing happens.

Is there anyway i can fix this? I have a feeling I'm going to have to start from scratch.

 

Thanks.

[Prophet42 1,503]

Did you recently upgrade from a previous version of NAM to NAM 34?  If you did, did you do a custom install and make sure that all your previous installed options were checked so they would be installed in the new version?  Another possiblity is if you made in changes to the traffic simulator through the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool, maybe that messed something up.

[rsc204 21,866]

Actually, I think this might be due to having a badly modded-station in your city.

When Maxis released the game, the default bus stops and stations had very low capacities. Maxis also did not make good use of a property "Transit Switch Entry Cost", which has since been proven to be vital to keeping stations functioning as intended. Much of the original custom stations as a result are based on the poorly modded Maxis lots, which can cause big problems.

In essence, when one station reaches around 400% of it's capacity, the entire network for the transit type will literally be switched off. NAM has modified all the original Maxis content, along with everything included in the NAM itself to avoid such issues. When you see the "NAM Certified" logo, you can be sure it will function properly. RTMT also has correctly modded stations too, so those two should be the defaults everyone uses.

The NAM installer includes a project called SLURP. This is intended to find such broken stations, and replace them with fixed versions for you automatically. This is a long term process and does not cover all possibilities right now.

Assuming you have not modified the traffic simulator (if you have, I'd check that first), you want to look at all the plopped stations and stops in that city. Anything with a low capacity could be causing the problem. To give you an idea of what is low, NAM/RTMT recommended a minimum of 17,000 for a simple bus stop and 45,000 for a basic train station. Full details on this problem and the correct settings for stations are outlined in this post. But if you can work out what station is causing the problem, I'd be happy to mod it correctly for you if that helps :).

[Gadam 38]

I do have NAM 34 but updated on the day it came out. This issue only appeared yesterday, so i'm not sure if it's directly related to that?

I have removed every bus stop, train station, subway station and transition i  had in the city. I'm now currently re plopping them back in (Taking a long time!) and at the moment they are functional. If/ when i plop the culprit back in, i'll report back.

Guys, i really appreciate your input and wisdom, this is an amazing community!

[Gadam 38]

17 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Actually, I think this might be due to having a badly modded-station in your city.

When Maxis released the game, the default bus stops and stations had very low capacities. Maxis also did not make good use of a property "Transit Switch Entry Cost", which has since been proven to be vital to keeping stations functioning as intended. Much of the original custom stations as a result are based on the poorly modded Maxis lots, which can cause big problems.

In essence, when one station reaches around 400% of it's capacity, the entire network for the transit type will literally be switched off. NAM has modified all the original Maxis content, along with everything included in the NAM itself to avoid such issues. When you see the "NAM Certified" logo, you can be sure it will function properly. RTMT also has correctly modded stations too, so those two should be the defaults everyone uses.

 

I think you were right. I was using a mixture of NAM, RTMT, SimGoober,, Mattb325 and regular Maxis mass transit stations. After looking at all of them i noticed some weren't NAM Certified and had quite low capacities. I've only re plopped the NAM Certified and high capacity stations and so far it seems to be working. Quite the way to spend a Saturday night!

Again, thanks for the great advice.

[rsc204 21,866]

Like I said before, I wouldn't be too harsh on anyone for this, since the problem was not really known about when most of the content was created. I'll have a dig around in my plugins folder, I know I've modded MattB325's stuff so I can upload some fixed lots. I don't use a lot of SimGoobers content, but I do believe SLURP should cover the basics. They are quite easy to fix, you just need to edit the capacity to be higher and then add something called a Transit Switch Entry Cost to them. The later isn't as complex as you might think, you can just use the pre-set figures on the page I linked too. You can even edit these in a user-friendly editor, SC4 Tools.

[Gadam 38]

It wasn't my intention to be harsh on any of the people that spend their time creating all this amazing content. So i apologize it came across that way.

Thanks again for the help. I'll see if i can fix those values.

[rsc204 21,866]

3 hours ago, Gadam said:

It wasn't my intention to be harsh on any of the people that spend their time creating all this amazing content. So i apologize it came across that way.

I think it's me that's coming across the wrong way actually . If anything, I was being overly apologetic for pointing out problems with the work of others. I just wanted to be clear that this isn't a sign of bad moding or anything like that.

[Divinyls Fan 21]

I have no mods in my game. Half of the trainline in one of my cities started having zero traffic. I worked out which station/s it started from, and re-laid it and the stations, bit by bit to try work out what was wrong. One stop further than before the zero began to get traffic, and I thought that manually placed trees right besides it were causing the blockage, but after the second stop improved, nothing I did after that worked. I checked for breakages, there were none. It is a large tile city, and the trainline was getting heavily congested for some time before that. Now in the next door city, a brand new trainline is getting zero, as well as a new highway. That city has a population of 90K.

Is it broken/glitched?

 

Also, do power lines across water block ferries?

[CorinaMarie 29,894]

1 hour ago, Divinyls Fan said:

Also, do power lines across water block ferries?

While I don't know about your other questions, I can answer this one. No, the power lines do not block ferries.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

15 hours ago, Divinyls Fan said:

I have no mods in my game. Half of the trainline in one of my cities started having zero traffic...

A) What version of the game are you running?

B) By "zero traffic", do you mean the route query tool says zero (when hovering over the tracks), or that there are no visible automata moving along the tracks?

A picture similar to Cori's might help.

[Divinyls Fan 21]

SimCity 4, I guess it is deluxe? Its the free one from Origin that replaced my old disks. My old disks didn't have elevated rail, parking garages, route query, monorail, those ride testers (helicopter, car etc) and signs. This one from Origin does. The title of it in my library just says SimCity 4. It doesn't say Rush Hour or Deluxe, but it has extra features like it is.

Yeah route query says none, the stations have 0 usage. In one city it is half of the network/line which didn't use to be the case, and in another city where I've just built one and a highway, the whole thing is none after running it for a few months sim time. That city has 90K people and the train connects to a city with loads of spare jobs.

[Divinyls Fan 21]

Never mind, I've switched regions.

[toteking 96]

I am having the same issue. Not working passenger train and elev/sub trains. Nothing they not displayed and zero traffic. I dont know what is happening. Neightboor cities are working well and normal, traffic is displayed. But main city is fully stopped. Rest of traffic, buses, cars, tucks are working and displayed normally.

[toteking 96]

Here gifs of when it worked normal some time ago:

[rsc204 21,866]

3 hours ago, toteking said:

I am having the same issue. Not working passenger train and elev/sub trains. Nothing they not displayed and zero traffic. I dont know what is happening. Neightboor cities are working well and normal, traffic is displayed. But main city is fully stopped. Rest of traffic, buses, cars, tucks are working and displayed normally.

If a Mass Transit station should reach something over 400% of its capacity, then the network(/s) it supports will stop working. As mentioned in my post from 5 years ago, this is a well-known problem and using the original Maxis low values for station capacities just doesn't meld well with how we play the game today.

Any NAM or RTMT stations will not suffer this problem, neither will most content made after 2010, since by then we knew about the problem. But have a look for any stations with 10k or less capacity you may have in your Plugins folder. Come back to us with a list (or if possible links to the content), and we can get the modding fixed up or attach some patches which will get everything working again.