Minimum Mass Transit Usage To Keep Station?

[BrianD90 30]

Hey guys just a general question because I like to see other's play style. When building mass transit what are your personal minimum usage numbers you like to see in order to keep the station you've built? For instance, I'll usually demo a station that sees under 300-500 usage AFTER I've taken steps to try to increase its use. Of course there are exceptions but that is my general rule.

Input?

Also, I'm not sure the minimum usage needed to offset the cost of the station upkeep using the default fares with NAM, anyone have this info?

[RobertLM78 1,597]

11 hours ago, BrianD90 said:

Input?

It really depends on location, but generally speaking I want to see a minimum of 1000 usage for tram stations and substantially more for commercial centers - usually 5000 minimum.  But I think playing and building styles come into play here, so I wouldn't take anything I say here as any kind of blueprint.

11 hours ago, BrianD90 said:

Also, I'm not sure the minimum usage needed to offset the cost of the station upkeep using the default fares with NAM, anyone have this info?

As far as the details of fares with NAM, I don't know.  To be honest, and to tie back in with your topic, the ridership numbers are more important to me not for fiscal reasons but rather keeping the commercial districts 'busy' with customers. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

16 hours ago, BrianD90 said:

Also, I'm not sure the minimum usage needed to offset the cost of the station upkeep using the default fares with NAM, anyone have this info?

Doing some quick math I believe these are the correct numbers:
 

Break Even Costs - Mass Transportation

Using NAM default fares.

Station Type	Fares	Monthly Cost	Break Even Volume
Bus	0.0010	§5	5000
Train	0.0010	§10	10,000
Subway	0.0010	§20	20,000
El Rail / GLR	0.0010	§20	20,000
Monorail	0.0010	§20	20,000
Ferry (Passenger Only)	0.0100	§10	1,000
Ferry (Car & Passenger)	0.0100	§20	2,000

 

[Terring 6,473]

The minimum usage I want to see is... 1. Even if one single Sim is using a bus stop or a train station, I'm happy. In fact, I have plenty of stops and stations that hasn't been used yet. I still keep them, because you never know when they'll be used.

[Prophet42 1,501]

I tend to agree with @Terring. Even if only one Sim is using the station, I find it useful.  Sometimes I'll plop a station just because I think a station should go their.  Sometimes I'll plop a station (usually bus) just to spur growth in an area that seems to have stagnated.  I'm not so worried how much the station is being used.  Also, my budget is usually in the black, so I am not so worried about the cost.

[longhorn 25]

For me it depends.  I'm far more likely to consider a station or line a sunk cost and rezone or redevelop around an underutilized station rather than demolishing it.  However, I also have stations near stadiums and parks that get almost no use due to the fact that sims don't really require recreation.  I mostly put them there for realism, but I suppose their expense is simply part of the overall public expense required to maintain parks and stadiums.  I recently built an Olympic park with multiple rail and subway connections.  The whole thing is a financial black hole, not unlike the real Olympics.

[Lucario Boricua 7,028]

One thing to consider is that most real life instances of mass transit services operate at a loss, since they more often than not help move around people who are otherwise unable to drive (too young, too old, those with disabilities and those too poor to afford a car). Only a minority of services, and usually in very high use environments and/or uses in which the fare is substantially higher than general mass transit, do turn a direct profit.

This makes transit-oriented development the approach of choice: the profit won't come from fares, but rather from added tax revenue from activity stimulated by the transit services.

[cogeo 960]

There is no definite answer to this question. But it may be good to know how fares are calculated.

Sims don't pay "entrance" tickets, and you can see this in all ingame (and custom content) stops and stations: the "Transit Switch Fare" property (which would charge the passengers served by the station) is absent, and the default is 0, which means that no "entrance" fares are collected. The only transit lot that does use (define) this property is the Tollbooth, with the value set to 0.1, meaning that it charges §0.1 every car passing through.

Instead, fares are calculated based on the distance traveled ie "passenger-kilometers" in reality, or "passenger-tiles" in SimCity 4 . The property that defines these is called "Income per tile by travel type", and the description in the reader is: "Income gained for each tile: walk, car, bus, rail...". As @CorinaMarie posted above, these are set to §0.001 for ground travel types and §0.01 for ferries. So the fares you collect depend on the number of passengers AND the distance traveled. Eg 100 sims traveling 50 tiles would pay 100 × 50 × 0.001 = §5 fares. This would be enough to pay for the "maintenance cost" of a bus stop (duh, what a modelling design here!), but then... there is the bus stop at the other end of the journey... but that stop may serve passengers originating from/arriving to another one or other ones. So it's really hard to calculate fares based on the "usage" reported in the stops'/stations' queries. What is important is place transit stops and stations near dense residential and commercial or industrial centers, or selectively at isolated buildings located far-away (usage won't be high, but the distance would be long). As your city gets more dense, and you add more transit stations, usage will increase a lot. Also remember that R§ sims are very much likely to use mass-transit, R§§ ones a lot less, and R§§§ ones really very little.

Finally, I would like to note that the modding done by the NAM Team in their "Traffic Simulator" plugins has skewed the car vs MT preference strongly towards favoring the car:

• The Travel strategy percent Wealth$/$$/$$$ properties triplets (MT/car/fastest), determining the preference for each travel strategy, have the car preference increased.
• Bus speeds have been set lower than car (in the original simulator settings it was the opposite). This was supposedly done for "realism", but take into account that in order to use the MT, sims have to walk some distance first to reach the stations (this adds to the commute time), while there is no any overhead for using the car (in reality they would have to park the car, let alone searching for a parking space in a congested city or parking lot!). The end result is that sims set to prefer the "fastest" option, will almost always choose the car too, and the bus will only be used by sims hard-set to prefer MT, and of course only if and where it is available! So, unless you mod these (and the preference properties I mentioned above) back to the original values, expect low ridership. A NAM Team member some time ago admitted that they wanted low, "American", MT usage numbers (again regarding them as more "realistic", as the original ones were considered too high). Sooo....
• The "Travel type generates traffic" property for bus was set to True instead of False (originally). This doesn't affect MT usage, but there is no benefit in having bus service, at least as far as traffic/congestion is concerned. With this setting, 50 sims in a bus are thought to create as much traffic as if traveling with their 50 cars! I think this was done to increase commercial desirability (traffic=customers), but I also think it is wrong too: bus traffic seems to count as "customers" too, as do pedestrians.

Hope this helps.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

NAM's TSCT allows one to set all of the mileage charges. My sims pay "gasoline tax" to drive their cars, so my cities are flush with cash.

50% of my R$ workers use only mass transit -- They don't have cars, so they abandon tenements that do not have mass transit or jobs within walking distance.

Buses should be much slower than cars because one must wait a half hour or more (depending on transfers) for buses, but one's car is always ready -- unless it has been stolen.

 

 

 

[badwithnames14 35]

On 2018-11-25 at 2:47 PM, jeffryfisher said:

Buses should be much slower than cars because one must wait a half hour or more (depending on transfers) for buses, but one's car is always ready -- unless it has been stolen.

That's only if you live in a low density area, are travelling late at night, or have a bad transit system. Major routes in my city (region ~ 360 000 people, Victoria BC, Canada) have buses running as little as every 6 minutes at rush hour, with every 15 minutes during the majority of the day. Now they are only every 30 minutes after either 7pm or 10pm depending on the day of the week and route, and there's no overnight service past about midnight except on Friday and Saturday sure, but that's nothing to do with buses as much as it's a function of passenger demand and funding. Vancouver for example has 24/7 bus service, which also is only every 30 minutes on the night routes, but like not a lot of people are travelling at 2am so does that really matter to the game that only simulates rush hour?

Basically, no transit users don't always need to wait 30+ minutes. The majority of trips are done where and when you'll only be waiting 15 minutes at most for a bus. It's a scheduling thing, so no one's gonna tell me my fictional cities can't have high frequency buses! I admit stops still need to be accounted for, but then there's also bus lanes and priority signals that can make up that difference and it all gets complicated again.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

11 hours ago, badwithnames14 said:

Major routes in my city (region ~ 360 000 people, Victoria BC, Canada) have buses running as little as every 6 minutes at rush hour

That suggests that bus speed (or its transit entry cost) should vary according to funding -- with over-funding producing fast service. It would be nice if modding could do such a thing.

However, there are other reasons that buses are slower than autos. Buses (except expresses) mostly stick to roads rather than using expressways, and they stop frequently, and they wait for new passengers to fumble for change etc. Add in the delay for a transfer or two needed in a real commute trip...  Taking a bus means typically triples the time needed. At least that (or worse) has been my experience everywhere I've used buses over the last 40 years.

[PhantomSoul 3]

As said, I'm not sure that expecting mass transit to be commercially viable is missing the point. In my mind, the primary purpose of mass transit, whether buses, railroads, subways, etc, is to relieve road traffic in neighborhoods where further widening the roads is not a good option, like residential neighborhoods; no one wants to live on a freeway or boulevard, right? Or at the very least, the higher levels of traffic found on boulevards is better used for commercial purposes.

To me, how many people - other than 0 of course - use a particular transit stop is less important as whether it is adequately managing traffic congestion in the area and ability for residents in nearby neighborhoods to get to work.

[The Thinker 479]

This is not something that (despite my username) I've never really given too much thought to.  Usually I just tend to make sure that there are plenty transit stops within a reasonable distance of each other to make sure that pedestrians don't have to walk too far to each stop.  I suppose, if I had to put a lower limit on transit stop usage, it'd be a case of "well, just as a long as someone is using it!", though having at least 50 daily users for bus stops, 100 daily users for railway stations, and 250 daily users for subway stations seems reasonable to me.  Before I discovered NAM, I always accepted that I'd be making a loss on public transport, and so I alway developed my systems to be as comprehensive & efficient as possible; with NAM, however, I've found my cities' public transportation budgets actually turning a profit (and that's after factoring in ordinance costs).