Neighbour connections cap increase requirements

[monkeywater 910]

When I am taking advantage of neighbour connections for cap increase, does it matter how long the connection is?

What I am getting at, is if I connect two tiles with an avenue, and only drag a ground highway for a few tiles on either side of the neighbor connection, is the cap relief the same as if I have a highway making connections but with a longer amount of highway on tile?

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

To the best of my knowledge the length of the transportation network on either side of the connection does not matter. Only the type of connection has bearing on the amount of cap relief. There is an interesting topic over on Devotion called Neighbor Connections - Exact Demand Cap Equation Derived which has a spreadsheet of the caps and which shows that the conventional wisdom and printed information in the Prima Guide appears to be inaccurate for the amount of diminishing returns per connection to the same neighbor.

One interesting takeaway from that thread is if your city tile is surrounded by unnamed neighbors (which are called Sim Nation) then any connections to them count as the same neighbor. So if having connections going to a north Sim Nation and south to a different tile called Sim Nation (and other directions) those additional connections fall under the diminishing returns part of the cap relief.

[Lucario Boricua 7,028]

This also explains one thing I did with one of my recent regions. I've been finally making widespread use of the Real Highway Mod and starting use of High Speed Rail / Bullet Train in my regions and I've been able to lift the major cities out of economic depression and stagnation by:

* Using short stubs of RHW re-skinned Maxis freeways to boost the economic bonus of the freeway connections (RHW is based off the unreleased rural road network, which has the lowest cap relief from neighbor connections, MHW has the highest cap relief of the road networks)

* Starting the high speed rail network between major cities to further add another bonus (HSR, based off the monorail, has a very high cap relief from neighbor connections)

This also boosted regional traffic demand because the additional job creation stimulates cross-border traffic between the city districts.

[monkeywater 910]

The monorail has the ability in a large city to go to the game max limit, 65535 passengers, very quickly if you have a heavy transit network.  I'm currently doubling my HSR to 2 parallel lines to solve this.