Freight Path Mini Tutorial

[CorinaMarie 29,788]

This is just a mini tutorial showing industrial freight preferences for how it chooses to ship its goods out of town. The main principle is that they want the quickest route to the neighborhood connection. (I tried to explain this in chat, but I feel I wasn't able to convey my idea very well.)

In the following picture the key elements are: 

• The industries in the upper left are zoned so their street access is to the north which means the rear of the buildings are to the south and adjacent to the rail line.
• The truck traffic for the farms north of the rail line passes by a rail station before it connects to the road.
• The industry and farms south of the east/west road are farther from the train station and therefore do not use it.

The main thing is that in order to convince them to use the freight station, it must appear to them as the quickest route. They will not drive a wee bit further to get to it if there is a neighborhood road connection in their sight.

 

In this next picture, I'm showing how the industry is zoned so the rear of their buildings are adjacent to the rail line. When that is the case they will just toss the freight directly onto a train. No train station is needed.

I made the industrial zones face the direction I wanted by holding the Ctrl Key and then drawing the zone starting at the street and then dragging away from it.

I hope this clarifies what I was saying in chat.

 

Edit: This was created to illustrate a principle. It is NOT a recommendation for how to deal with slopes.

[Mary Maurine Mayo 984]

@CorinaMarie

Thanks this helps. 

[Mister Giggles 310]

43 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

The main principle is that they want the shortest route to the neighborhood connection.

Quickest, not shortest (Assuming you use Simulator Z).

Edit: The rest deleted because I'm fairly sure I understood transit switch entry cost incorrectly.

[CorinaMarie 29,788]

@Mister Giggles

I edited that sentence to reflect your input.

The current need was for someone using plain vanilla, but I imagine that still makes it more correct than saying shortest.

[SecretMbr_735754 2,158]

Im going to go try this myself right now, to see if I can build an industrial area that primarily uses freight stations, freeing up roads for car traffic.   I mean why bother having freight stations if they are hardly used?  That's no fun.

 

[Mary Maurine Mayo 984]

I made the industrial zones face the direction I wanted by holding the Ctrl Key and then drawing the zone starting at the street and then dragging away from it.

I hope this clarifies what I was saying in chat.

 

Can I do that with farms. 

[CorinaMarie 29,788]

1 hour ago, Mary Maurine Mayo said:

Can I do that with farms. 

Yes, it will make the arrows point the direction you want, however they won't grow then. To make the lot on agricultural ground be where I want, I zone first then draw my street (or road) so only one single tile is adjacent to the road. Then that's where the building's lot will grow.

[SecretMbr_735754 2,158]

Look at all those trucks lining up to get at the frieght station... ah, they just don't have anywhere else to go, and no throwing freight on trains as they pass by.

  Edited July 11, 2016 by RandyE  
I propose 2 seperate rail lines. One for freigt, one for passengers

[CorinaMarie 29,788]

On 7/11/2016 at 4:59 AM, RandyE said:

Look at all those trucks lining up to get at the frieght station...

Beautiful.

I believe a lot of traffic can be controlled by similar methods. You prolly saw this pic in the Bus thread:

That's a similar concept where the residential sims have no other choice if they want to get to work.

 

[SecretMbr_735754 2,158]

that's the the way it seems we have to design the cities, forcing what traffic we want to go where we want to make use of the transport systems.   Each bus stop, rail station, freight station must be strategically plopped so that they actually get used as intended.  So its a matter of matter of preventing traffic some places and allowing the flow in other places.   These vehicles are robots with simple instructions.

also we might find using one way roads useful to direct the automatons to where we want them to go

 

7 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Beautiful.

I believe a lot of traffic can be controlled by similar methods. You prolly saw this pic in the Bus thread:

That's a similar concept where the residential sims have no other choice if they want to get to work.

I see you used one single road to connect the residential to the industrial.  That's how I'm going to build now, no more massive grids allowing the robots to just go crazy all over the place following their GPS instructions.  Total traffic control is now the rule in SimCity!

 

[CorinaMarie 29,788]

1 hour ago, RandyE said:

I see you used one single road to connect the residential to the industrial.

In the subway / bus pic there is no road at all from that residential. The yellow line is the subway traffic.

Also,  did you notice how I have the Fire Station touching streets of both sections so the fire trucks can get to either area without the Sims being given non-subway access to the other section?

1 hour ago, RandyE said:

That's how I'm going to build now, no more massive grids allowing the robots to just go crazy all over the place following their GPS instructions.  Total traffic control is now the rule in SimCity!

Yeah, I feel this is a good plan. When I get back to designing cities I, too, intend to have traffic control in mind from the beginning.

[SecretMbr_735754 2,158]

5 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

In the subway / bus pic there is no road at all from that residential. The yellow line is the subway traffic.

Also,  did you notice how I have the Fire Station touching streets of both sections so the fire trucks can get to either area without the Sims being given non-subway access to the other section?

Yeah, I feel this is a good plan. When I get back to designing cities I, too, intend to have traffic control in mind from the beginning.

I looked again, what a good idea, no road at all, just a sub or rail line, and the fire station in between.  So, yet another project is to build a large city with every aspect of transportation being controlled.  Then we can generate some interesting flow charts demo-ing the logic of the automata.     It is really irritating getting those 'commute too long' or abandoned due to 'commute time' messages.

[CorinaMarie 29,788]

This was one of my earlier versions of forcing industry to use a rail station. It's not the most efficient layout, but I didn't intend it to be. This was part of a story line I was imagining as I played. Later in the story the freight train company failed to make a sufficiently large donation (bribe) to the mayor's fund and so she authorized an avenue connection in the southeast section of this city tile.

After that the rail traffic dropped to like 50 and the owner was later arrested for failure to pay taxes.

[APSMS 1,893]

I'm pretty sure that only a side of the requisite industrial zone needs to be touching the rail, not only the back side.

Keep in mind that using the CTRL key to face zones will prevent (or at least make it difficult for) other sized industrial lots from growing (this includes lots with a different orientation, e.g. 5x3 vs 3x5). Obviously the front won't work (needs road access), but since industrial zones are by default omnidirectional, this isn't actually of much concern.

I would recommend using the CTRL key only when you are trying to get one specific IND lot (or set of lots) to grow in a given zone, like for the COM and RES zones.

@RandyE Tree-type network structures make your game run smoother, but wreak havoc on congestion unless you're running the game on high or ultra capacities, since the NAM is geared toward more realistic road networks and the more efficient pathfinder allows for more populous cities.

If you're running the MAXIS default simulator (no transit/traffic mods installed), then it doesn't really matter anyways, since Sims will always take the shortest route, and cram onto buses when the roads run out of room. Your grid effectively functions like a tree structure, since all the possible routes get ignored for the one that happens to be the shortest, even if it's a side street that 2000 other Sims are already using.

[Mary Maurine Mayo 984]

@CorinaMarie

I think I started to get the idea of how to control traffic. I started removing non essential roads forcing them to use the main road into the neighborhood's. Industrial I finally got a closer look at your first pic and I think I got the idea. Will retest and see if I got it. 

[CorinaMarie 29,788]

4 hours ago, Mary Maurine Mayo said:

I started removing non essential roads forcing them to use the main road into the neighborhood's.

I find this to be very helpful to keep traffic going where I want it to go. I also use it so I know which roads will get the most traffic and that guides me for where to place commercial zones. Use the route query tool to see where you have lots of residential traffic like cars and buses.

@APSMS makes a good point about Ctrl-Zoning. The size you make that zone does need to match the footprint of possible buildings what will grow. For the industrial this makes for more realistic looking layouts as there won't be all the random little accessory tanks and other junk growing. I generally use it for 3x3 as shown in my first pic to get some basic industry going. For the most part tho, I tend to skip industrial until I'm ready for High Tech and then I find that just regular zoning (with out the Ctrl key) works fine as their little accessory stuff is mostly (or all?) extra parking which doesn't give the cluttered look.

[CorinaMarie 29,788]

On 7/11/2016 at 3:53 AM, CorinaMarie said:

To make the lot on agricultural ground be where I want, I zone first then draw my street (or road) so only one single tile is adjacent to the road. Then that's where the building's lot will grow.

Per request, here's the clarification for this. Let's take a look at a traditional way to zone for farms:

 

And then one of the many ways it can develop is:

 

My alternative method is to draw the street so it only touches one tile of the farm zone. Note the street must be at least two tiles long. (I'm doing it that way in this example tho I could have extended it one more to touch the other two farm zones.)

 

And they grow with the farm lots in the corners where I want them. (Btw, for anyone new to the game, those no road access zots over the res really means can't get to a job in this pic.)

 

Next I connect the street to the residential and extend it one more tile to touch the other two agricultural zones.

 

And here we see the 4 farms are in a nice little cluster so if we wanted to plop a bus stop there it would be convenient to all 4 of them.

 

 

[Handyman 776]

On 2016-07-13 at 2:00 AM, CorinaMarie said:

Per request, here's the clarification for this. Let's take a look at a traditional way to zone for farms:

You never cease to amaze Cori.

Thanks for the demonstration, I will be using this

[tariely 4,496]

That's really nifty ! Thanks !

[Synergy67 88]

Very cool, @CorinaMarie I'm going to be doing some substantial farming in a new region, and have a feeling that with your focus on such development, I will be referencing your wealth of knowledge and experimentation. Do you use the SPAM mod at all for farming? Why or why not? Do you have any city journals of your farming communites? I like what you have done here in this thread. I want to create peripheral farming communities around city tiles, which will remain functional through the game, and not just as eye candy. I know people have created amazing rural communities through sandboxing and many plops, but I want to carefully grow it naturally and have it play. I know the SPAM is supposed to help make that feasible. Do you or does anyone have any advice, references, or links to other threads on the topic which come to mind?

[CorinaMarie 29,788]

25 minutes ago, Synergy67 said:

Do you use the SPAM mod at all for farming? Why or why not?

I've heard wonderful things about it. Early on after I joined ST I went on a downloading spree (like many peeps do) and that was one of the many mods I got. After some trouble with other things I installed (while not fully understanding what was what) I pulled back and decided to learn vanilla first. SPAM is still on my agenda for some day, but that'll likely still be in the far future as I've learned to use Reader and mod Maxis stuff in ways that please me. (Such as No Maxis Dirt Farms.)

The key thing I've learned about agriculture in the game is to grow them all first. Demand for farms will drop to less than none once there are 30,000 jobs of any kind in a given city tile. Those already grown farms will stay viable forever providing you don't pollute them with nearby heavy traffic or dirty industry.

 

25 minutes ago, Synergy67 said:

Do you have any city journals of your farming communites?

I haven't started a city journal because I don't want to feel any pressure to update on anything resembling a regular schedule. I have, however, posted in various Show Us threads. If you start here you can then scroll thru the next 3 or 4 pages and follow my learning progress of farm pics I've posted. And my last region pic is here.

 

25 minutes ago, Synergy67 said:

Do you or does anyone have any advice, references, or links to other threads on the topic which come to mind?

There are bunches of threads hither and yon on the topic, but for this I'd say just create a new topic so you can get tailored responses to your specific questions.
 

[Synergy67 88]

Oh nice! A whole farming thread to look at for ideas. I will be following the region thread too.