Regional Play Traffic

[Dreadnought 8,225]

Yo, People --

I'm not sure this is the proper place for this question -- and I apologize if I am mistaken.

Regional Play -- satisfying demand between regions AND getting Sims to travel to jobs in other cities.

I have read everything I could find in the tiny game manual and what was said in the Prima Strategy Guide.  I'm still very fuzzy on some possibilities.

Example:

               City A                                   City B                          City C

               Commercial   >>> >>>    Empty   >>> >>>       Industry

               Residential

City A has some Commercial zoning and lots of Residential.

City B is virtually empty -- only road and rail connecting between A and C.

City C is heavy with industry.

Question:  Will Sims board a train in City A and travel through City B (no stations or zones) in order to look for work in City C ??

Is that the way this regional thing works ??  OR -- do the cities have to be adjacent for this concept to work?

I apologize again -- this time for being a bit dense -- but your input is welcomed.

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

Now that I've seen this posted I, too, am curious for the answer.

My guess is that you'd need some industrial (or more specifically available jobs) in City B to make the Sims in City A see that tile as a viable destination. But let's say that the jobs aren't actually accessible to them once they go from A to B (no connection or stations on the rail line). They can't turn back and return to City A. (That part is a known fact.) And so now already in City B with no way to a job there they would travel on to City C.

Or not. Best wait for the experts to say.

[rsc204 21,804]

From what I observe/know, sims will only travel through a city if the city has a station/highway link/development of some kind. I've a small edge of one city where I had to run my monorail through to avoid the eternal commuter loop. I didn't plan any development there, but had to reconsider when Sims wouldn't travel through it otherwise. Since placing a monorail station and a motorway junction, sims are now happily travelling through it to get to either side as I intended.

But sims travelling so far is not really how the game was intended, it's a by-product of how the region aspect of the simulation works. So in any given city, the traffic simulator knows exactly where the jobs within that tile. But for sims either entering or leaving a city, all the simulator knows is that there are X people travelling into a connection or that there are X jobs on the other side of a city exit. It doesn't know where those sims originated from / will eventually work.

So a sim in City B leaves to City C. City C knows the sim is looking for work in City C, but not how far that sim has come for a job. It could be that in fact the sim has come from City A originally. According to how the simulator works, if 50% of the sims arriving in C come from A and 50% come from B, those from A should get priority finding jobs. But it doesn't work this way in practise, because it doesn't actually know where they originated. Much like the eternal commuter loop, where sims keep travelling between cities, but never actually take a job. If sims keep travelling through cities, realistically at some point they may not find an actual job. But in City A, once a sim has left the border, the simulator assumes they will find work. If they don't, this can unbalance your cities/region, especially if the numbers get very high.

So whilst it's appealing to think of Sims being able to traverse entire regions for work, in practise it doesn't work so well. Ideally, your zoning should be sufficient that most sims will not have to cross more than one or two borders before finding work. If you've cities where a load of commuters enter from outside the city, only to leave it again, then you should try to zone jobs or alter the transport networks to persuade them to stay. But there will always be small fluctuations as you move between cities. The key is to balance the residential -> commercial / industrial mix to try and avoid this happening en-masse.

[Dreadnought 8,225]

2 hours ago, rsc204 said:

From what I observe/know, sims will only travel through a city if the city has a station/highway link/development of some kind. I've a small edge of one city where I had to run my monorail through to avoid the eternal commuter loop. I didn't plan any development there, but had to reconsider when Sims wouldn't travel through it otherwise. Since placing a monorail station and a motorway junction, sims are now happily travelling through it to get to either side as I intended.

So whilst it's appealing to think of Sims being able to traverse entire regions for work, in practise it doesn't work so well. Ideally, your zoning should be sufficient that most sims will not have to cross more than one or two borders before finding work. If you've cities where a load of commuters enter from outside the city, only to leave it again, then you should try to zone jobs or alter the transport networks to persuade them to stay. But there will always be small fluctuations as you move between cities. The key is to balance the residential -> commercial / industrial mix to try and avoid this happening en-masse.

Yo, guy --  Thanx much for the input.

The way the Prima Guide explains the regional theory -- one city may have marginal commercial opportunities but heavy residential settlement.  The is the "bedroom community" they speak of so frequently.  Another city may be heavy commercial OR heavy industrial, thereby providing all those other Sims a job.  It sounds very simple as they explain it, but I figured someone with more experience would know the potential  "practical" problems.

Your actual observation of the game tells me that I MUST put a rail station in City B -- or no one will ride the rails in "B".  BUT -- IF a Sim leaves City A and arrives in City B but cannot find work, he is just as likely to turn around and go back to City A (the eternal commuter syndrome).  Or -- it is, at least, a real possibility since we cannot predict their movements with any certainty.

Sooooo -- it sounds to me like the residential, commercial, and industrial map tiles need to be in an adjacent configuration to make the "regional theory" work with any degree of reliability.  I figured trusting Sims to go from "A" to "C" was risky business.

Well -- at least this will help me plan the layout for a new region.  I'm working with the 8x8 region you kindly sent me and using "paint" to reconfigure the bitmap. 

Thanx, again --

[APSMS 1,892]

37 minutes ago, Dreadnought said:

Your actual observation of the game tells me that I MUST put a rail station in City B -- or no one will ride the rails in "B".  BUT -- IF a Sim leaves City A and arrives in City B but cannot find work, he is just as likely to turn around and go back to City A (the eternal commuter syndrome).  Or -- it is, at least, a real possibility since we cannot predict their movements with any certainty.

You can connect cities to have region-wide commutes, and there was a CJ a while ago that had a completely working Powerplant, Water, and Garbage system stretched across the entire region (Utilities were concentrated in 4 cities; all others imported/exported them). People also commuted cross region.

As RSC said, you can run into the problem where Sims won't find jobs, and keep roaming forever. Generally this is a bad idea, but if you are careful to keep job openings high, then you can manage this without ill effect. The risk is real, though, so tread carefully.

However, although it's true that the simulator doesn't know the actual starting point of any given Sim once inside city limits, it does know where the Sim comes from. Eternal Commuter Loops can only happen with three or more cities (most commonly 4, corner to corner), because Sims cannot backtrack on their route during the same commute period. So if a Sim comes from City A to find work in B, and cannot find it, he cannot travel back to A to find another job. He must either proceed to C, or be declared unemployed. Usually he won't become unemployed until you open up city A again, so he usually proceeds to the next closest job opening, either in C or D, or wherever outside B there happens to be jobs but not in A, because that was his starting point. You can observe this with intra-city commutes. Sims won't backtrack their commute on the same tile. They can only double-back if they switch travel types, like a Sim getting off a bus and walking.

The key to decent region play is really just to make sure that you provide sufficient play time to all the developed cities in the region, so that demand can be appropriately satisfied and searching Sims can find jobs. This is something I need to work on as well, so just be careful in your planning and be deliberate in how you set up your cities.