CorIndustry - A Look at Vanilla Traffic

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

As some of you know I've been playing without the illustrious NAM while I learn the basic game. For the one or two other peeps on the planet who might be starting out NAMless, I feel the following might be of some use. The rest of you may feel free to skip this long, picture packed mini observation.

So, I've been playing a natural (random) growth region in which I've zoned mostly farms that are interspersed with the initial god mode trees to simulate the real world where I live. (For the curious my progress starts here and continues with several posts over the past couple months there in the rest of the thread.)

This post is not about that tho. This is phase two where the industrial revolution has started and factories are pervading the countryside.

 

The Acres family farm is a short distance from a major four lane highway. They are planning to retire and haven't set out any crops this season. The Big-O Factory Development Corporation has purchased the farm (dirt) cheap. The Acres's sell with the condition that they can keep the small tractor shed and a tiny parcel of bare ground.

^ Yes, there is an Ugly Yellow Pause Thingy in some of my pics. I like it sometimes to indicate, well ..., that my game is Paused.

 

The development begins with building the streets and adding bus stops.

 

Next they add a water system.

 

And then survey it from above ground to be sure all of the parcel is watered. Some nearby residents get public water as an unintended bonus.

 

The building locations are prepared by de-zoning the farm ground.

 

The Mayor has specifically tweaked the tax rates to create the desired demand. (Note: These settings are not some magic set. They are based on the local and regional influences at the moment.)

 

Using Ctrl-Zoning (as described in the Tutorial:Precision Zoning) the hope is to attract larger factories and cramped living quarters for some workers along with some low density commercial so they can buy some bread.

 

We check and see there is a nearby Medical Clinic and boost its funding sufficiently to handle the increased patient count cause the radius includes a part of the new residential zone.

 

Now we turn on time and wait for the factories to grow. The Sims aren't overly enthusiastic about moving here so we plant a grass tile. These uneducated Sims are just wild about such a thing.

 

Now to zone for more residential and add a local Doctor's Office. I did the zones separate to preclude 4x2 buildings from growing.

 

When the Tenements grow (which is the look I wanted for here) I click them all to Historical so they don't later try to merge together and morph into a bigger building. I did zone them high density so I can change my mind about it in future years.

 

Then I zone the final two residential parcels.

 

Plop a bunch more pretty green grass and the Sims rush in.

 

And fill in the rest of the area with grass and a playground for the kids.

 

A wee bit of traffic congestion occurs.

 

Not to worry, says Jamil Herd. Upgrade those parts of the Streets to Roads.

 

All better now.

 

And here it's completed.

 

Set the medical funding at an appropriate level for the new Clinic.

 

But wait! say the local denizens. You said this would create jobs for all of us. The outsiders took most of the jobs before we even got moved in.

 

Hmm. Ok, that latter statement is prolly an exaggeration, but who is working where? the Mayor asks.

 

Jamil, bulldoze a piece of that Road. That'll keep the interlopers out.

 

Well, that hurt the factory jobs some.

 

Yeah, but let's see where the peeps are working now.

 

Rebuild the road and run some more time. Here's the jobs graph.

 

Alright then. Where do the local Sims work now?

 

Run a bit more time and here's the jobs graph.

 

And, finally, we see a significant reduction in traffic coming and going from the new industrial complex.

 

The total commuters from the 6 residential buildings in those three stages are:

• 563 initially
• 575 during isolation
• 599 final

And the total commuters on that entry road

• 1383 initially
• 697 final

So, it appears that without NAM one needs to take into consideration who's going to work where and where will they come from, or go to, as one of the key aspects of the amount of traffic.

[SecretMbr_735754 2,157]

Thanks Cori, enjoyed this demo.  You've made the game more interesting.  I never used to pay too much attention to the complexities of traffic, but now am experimenting with the transit networks.

[TekindusT 3,809]

Nice approach! It reminded me to those times when the so-called "natural growth" CJs were popular.

[Prophet42 1,501]

Nice work, Cori.  Also keep in mind that once a sim finds a job, they tend to keep that job, unless their route gets blocked, the building is destroyed or delapidates, or their wealth level changes.  This occurs with or without the NAM installed.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

4 minutes ago, Prophet42 said:

This occurs with or without the NAM installed.

Oh? I was under the impression that the Simulator Z found them the closest job based on speed of travel to and from same. So, this might actually be useful to NAMites too? In other words it might be a good idea to force the Sims to reconsider where they work if they are traveling a long distance.

[APSMS 1,892]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Oh? I was under the impression that the Simulator Z found them the closest job based on speed of travel to and from same. So, this might actually be useful to NAMites too? In other words it might be a good idea to force the Sims to reconsider where they work if they are traveling a long distance.

While this is true, the simulator is designed to keep jobs generally sticky so that they save on CPU time.

The caveat of this is that if your traffic simulator picks the wrong paths and the game decides that the given block is going to keep similar jobs, but the roads to those jobs become increasingly congested, then with MDTS these Sims will end up having their jobs take too much time to commute to in the morning (Well Joe, I'm sorry, but you took 6 minutes and 23 seconds to get to work, and are now 23 seconds late; as a result you're fired. Good luck, and have a nice day) which can result in abandonment as well as actually increasing worker turnover due to constantly reevaluated traffic routes and times.

z1 discovered that higher commute times allows the simulator to be lazier in its search for the right job; the pathfinding algorithm assures that it is more consistently correct in its route evaluation the first time rather than having to do a re-eval of the situation every single pass. In theory, it does do a calculation for each pass, but I think testing and simple observation demonstrates that in generally stable cities, Sims will tend to remain at the same job for as long as possible until internal or external factors cause a job shift. It's part of this that made SC2013's simulation so silly (total lack of memory on the parts of the Sims, even with regard to where they lived, not just where they worked), but I think it goes a long way in keeping the game playable, since assuming all other factors unchanged, as long as a Sim's path to work is still valid, the simulator can safely ignore it (if it chooses) in the next calculation pass and keep the game running as fluid as possible given the single threaded limitations and the increasingly heavy workload that the traffic simulator occupies as part of the demand and development simulations.

 

[raynev1 1,886]

      Pretty neat test you have applied . I never really took into consideration why my traffic would get wonky at times . Whenever traffic would get too heavy somewhere . I would usually start a re-development process of the congested area with some commercial , they really like the heavier traffic . Look at the demand graph and wash , rinse and repeat as necessary until everyone is  happy .