Commute Inconsistencies

[Hipodrome 2]

I've recently come back to SimCity after a decade+ break. Downloaded some key mods, including the bug fixes and NAM. I am otherwise using the Steam version. I have built my first 'successful' city, but have recently noticed more and more issues, or inconsistencies which can be a bug, but can also be my ignorance.

 

1. The key one relates to commute times. I often see neighboring buildings where one building will have a "long" commute, and the other will have a short one. I wouldn't care so much, except it often ends up that one of the buildings get abandoned due to commute time. I recently zoned a little suburban area (all in the same city) and half the buildings are abandoned. I demolish, the get built back up, and half of those, and some of the existing ones become abandoned. I've verified my road network is functional - because of the sims do indeed use it as planned.... Here you can see half the buildings either having no job, or being abandoned. After this screen shot I had to demolish half the (abandoned) buildings.

Here's another example of a few buildings all colluding to 'lose work' at the same time

 

2. Some buildings just seem to not have their road connection applied to them. I've had this with residential and commercial. Streets, roads, and pedestrian roads (from NAM.)

 

My suspicion is that this is due to an overly-complex network system. I have, on top of the Maxis stuff, RHW, wide roads, GLR, GLR in avenue, GLR in road, subway, and a train... This has definitely been happening more now that the city is large and complex.

 

Any help would be super appreciated. Cheers!

[TheMurderousCricket 5,042]

Hey @Hipodrome. First of all, the complexity of networks usually does not cause Sims to give up on commuting. NAM specifically improves Sims' tolerance to use elaborate communication systems so a person who walks then boards a monorail then a GLR and then a bus should still successfully get where they want to go.

I suspect a much "simpler" cause. Namely, that you don't have enough workplaces for your population.

Unfortunately, the game does not communicate it clearly but long commute times may mean that some residents at a given location are simply unable to find suitable jobs.

A "long" commute time can sometimes (though not exclusively) be considered as a warning sign that your Sims either, indeed, have a hard time reaching their desired locations or they can find no suitable workplaces to settle in.

[rsc204 21,804]

To diagnose issues like this more easily, it's useful to get more specific data, the Census Repository Facility provides regional stats on Residents and Jobs. This was discussed recently over here, you should compare your data to the information given there, it should clearly show if you've just overbuilt residential or if perhaps there is something else going on.

[Lucario Boricua 7,026]

@Hipodrome I notice you have some residential development along pedmalls. I'd like to know, are you using NAM 47, or an earlier version? Residential zones can't be built on the puzzle piece pedmalls, but hey can be built in the draggable pedmalls @Ulisse Wolf and I developed for the latest Network Addon Mod version, published earlier this week. Make sure to upgrade to add this functionality, it'll give you lots of flexibility for your city development plans!

I also notice you have a lot of dilapidated and abandoned higher wealth buildings. Some things to check:

• Does the education match between the job types you have and your residents? You might think you have jobs available, but there might be a mismatch between the education level of your sims and the types of commerce and industries you have. If you have high-wealth offices (CO-§§§) and hi-tech industry (I-HT), you'll need to invest generously in education across the board, until the city's Education Quotient (EQ) is around 150 overall. Otherwise you might need to add more education options, or more jobs requiring moderate levels of education, such as manufacturing industry (I-M), medium and high wealth commercial services (CS-§§ and CS-§§§), and medium wealth commercial offices (CO-§§).
• Have you raised the city's CAPs for commerce and industry, using rewards or transportation network connections? You might need to do that to enable more jobs for the residents you currently have. Especially powerful options include high-capacity transportation links (Maxis Highway, Subway and Monorail), commercial-oriented rewards (stadiums, convention center, TV studio, radio station, movie studio), and/or industrial-oriented rewards (army base, marina, university, disease research center, advanced research center).
• Make sure you have the I-HT jobs fix, you might not be providing high-wealth jobs in your hi-tech industry areas to your rich residents.

 

[Hipodrome 2]

Thank you very much everyone! This is very helpful. I downloaded the census building as per @rsc204 's suggestion expecting to find I was lacking in jobs. But unless I am reading this incorrectly, that's not the case. It seems I actually have 123,700 vacant jobs. I would have thought the issue is (as was discussed in the linked discussion) that because I have too many jobs sims won't come. But actually I don't have any issue getting new buildings. It's just that often these buildings won't find jobs, despite their apparent abundance...

 

@Lucario Boricua thank you so much for your comment. I am using NAM 46 and will look to upgrade it to 47 this weekend.

I replaced those res buildings with commercial and it worked. I also plotted a bunch of reward buildings I avoided (wasn't sure where I wanted them) and that seemed to have improved demand for CO, but the census would suggest that isn't the issue? I have installed the HT fix, and my education is about 145 atm.

Any other thoughts, or maybe corrections for how I'm reading the census page, would be incredibly welcome. I've learned a ton from this tread already!

[rsc204 21,804]

So just the basics, ignoring your population and only looking at your actual workforce, you have 206k workers for 329k jobs. So you quite clearly need more sims (to fill the vacant jobs), not more employers/businesses, even if there is still demand and they grow, it's just exacerbating the problem at hand. A good rule here is that just because demand exists, doesn't mean you actually need it. The Prima Guide is the ultimate 'rule book' here, it's pretty comprehensive and no 5m read, but essential for anyone who wishes to fully understand how to work with the simulator running the game.

In this scenario, why are new residences abandoning?, well most likely they are a combination of the wrong wealth/education level for the jobs that are available. A high EQ is good and drives I-HT / CO demand, but if you have 2/3s of your jobs for I-D and I-M, you will need many more R$ sims than R$$$, however again if conditions are nice, only R$$$ will develop without your intervention.

Are you using any sort of demand mod or CAM, because the number of CO to CS jobs just pops out as wrong. How did you manage to get so much CO buildings without any CS present?

[Hipodrome 2]

I see! I will take a look at this guide.

If I understand you correctly I need to make an area not nice for R$ to show up? That seems odd haha. But ok. 

Regarding the high CO - I am not using and demand mod I think. I am using NAM, IRM Base pack and industry quadrupler. Could it be because I've primarily zoned the middle and highest density commercial? or maybe because I have big blocks with commercial?

[Propfam 2,286]

On 30/3/2023 at 7:24 AM, Lucario Boricua said:

Have you raised the city's CAPs for commerce and industry, using rewards or transportation network connections? You might need to do that to enable more jobs for the residents you currently have. Especially powerful options include high-capacity transportation links (Maxis Highway, Subway and Monorail), commercial-oriented rewards (stadiums, convention center, TV studio, radio station, movie studio), and/or industrial-oriented rewards (army base, marina, university, disease research center, advanced research center).

Speaking of caps, why don't you use my mod instead?

Sorry for the plug.

[rsc204 21,804]

5 hours ago, Hipodrome said:

If I understand you correctly I need to make an area not nice for R$ to show up? That seems odd haha. But ok. 

It may seem counter-intuitive, but IF you are in need of more R$ sims, you will struggle to develop that if your city is too nice. But to clarify my previous comments, I'm not saying 100% that you specifically need more R$ sims, the data doesn't conclusively show that. But more generally the sims moving in aren't the right combination of Wealth/EQ for the jobs available. Using the other data views in combination with the census data, you should be able to get some clues about what is really in demand.

This data shows the split between workers for a given employer by wealth/EQ and an understanding of this is somewhat necessary to figure out exactly what is going on.

That's the problem with these kind of questions, there really isn't a simple answer, rather you need to dig into all the data you can to work out what's happening.

5 hours ago, Hipodrome said:

and industry quadrupler.

I suspect this is key to your problems, don't get me wrong it's fine to use such mods, but you do need to understand what they really do. If every Industrial lot has 4x the number of jobs, then it means you will need 4x the population (Res) in order to sustain them, which probably goes a long way to explaining the imbalance. When you install a mod that alters how things work, you have to similarly alter your approach to playing. Likewise, if you added this mod having built your city, you create a huge problem, recovering a healthy RCI mix in such circumstances is hugely difficult. The game plays best with slow, small changes, monitoring things and reacting to them, but if you zone huge areas and try to rush things, it's all too easy for something to go wrong. By the time the simulation is showing those problems, it's already too late to fix with simple changes. For really extreme examples, it may even be easier to start over with a city/region, because you now have a tussle with the simulator to try and re-balance everything.

For example, if you need huge numbers of uneducated sims you don't have, that's not so hard. But if you need the same for highly educated sims, that's a problem, because it will take many years before sims are well educated if they have just arrived in your city. In the meantime there may not be other suitable jobs, so long before they are educated enough to take those jobs that exist, they will have abandoned their homes due to unemployment. It's a vicious cycle when this happens and very hard to break free from too.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,042]

25 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

This data shows the split between workers for a given employer by wealth/EQ and an understanding of this is somewhat necessary to figure out exactly what is going on.

With one exception being SPAM - which allows R$$ and R$$$ citizens to work in agriculture as well.

[Propfam 2,286]

52 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

With one exception being SPAM - which allows R$$ and R$$$ citizens to work in agriculture as well.

Sorry for being broken record but is there SPAM version that works with the CAM? What are the side effects?

[TheMurderousCricket 5,042]

39 minutes ago, elfrjz said:

Sorry for being broken record but is there SPAM version that works with the CAM? What are the side effects?

I am not 100% positive on that but I recall that when you use CAM, you don't need to use SPAM any longer.

CAM (though I might be wrong) comes with its own agriculture simulation and both mods cannot (and don't need to) coexist. I only use SPAM because I am not a CAMmer and I like the visual and employment variety it quickly and easily brings into the game. 

[rsc204 21,804]

1 hour ago, elfrjz said:

Sorry for being broken record but is there SPAM version that works with the CAM? What are the side effects?

No, the single biggest problem being that CAM includes growth stages beyond those supported by SPAM. Much like using regular industrial's with CAM, at the least they would probably benefit from being re-worked to account for the CAM growth stages in PIM-X, same for the job numbers.

But, you mustn't forget either that the SPAM content was intended to be used with the other customisations/changes SPAM brings. It is this part of SPAM that is not only incompatible with CAM, but has the potential to greatly interfere with the intended operation of CAM also. Since both of these elements exist inside a single DAT, unless you can pull out the Lots, Buildings and everything else needed, sans the other bits you don't want, already there is a big problem. But even if you could do this, the content won't be well suited for CAM without the requisite updates to the stats for this content.

1 hour ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

I am not 100% positive on that but I recall that when you use CAM, you don't need to use SPAM any longer.

This isn't really how I see things, because on one hand you loose some great farm buildings, fields and props and on the other you forfeit the SPAM changes for those in CAM.

Now of course you may well prefer how CAM handles Farms over the method employed by SPAM. You might even prefer to use other farms, Fantozzi's Colossus Farming mod being IMO the best out there. But if you particularly want either the changes SPAM brings and/or the SPAM content, then if you use CAM you are either going to have to give it a miss or potentially do a lot of complex modding to integrate the two.

[Hipodrome 2]

@rsc204 I think you were totally right about the imbalance between workers and industry, particular R$ and R$$$. Undeterred, I tried to fix it by starting a new city where I set taxes to prevent any R$$$ and R$$ sims. I've since lifted some of the prohibition on R$$ and it seems to be ok. Slowly but surely, I brought down the imbalance:

 

 

I still have abysmal CS$ and CS$$, I suspect for the same reason. But that doesn't seem to be as game breaking as the R$ and R$$$ imbalance. I might try and solve it in the same way. Is managing $ and $$$ through different cities with different tactics a legitimate strategy? or is this still the result of my unwise tinkering during the game?

 

By the way, is there any mod that increases the desirability requirements for $$$? It seems like for all groups the standard is "it's ok unless it's not ok". It's "not ok" for $$$ more readily than $ or $$, but the basic logic holds I think? Whereas I would have thought that $$$ should work the other - it's only ok if certain good conditions are met.

Thanks so much for your help!

[rsc204 21,804]

2 hours ago, Hipodrome said:

I still have abysmal CS$ and CS$$, I suspect for the same reason. But that doesn't seem to be as game breaking as the R$ and R$$$ imbalance. I might try and solve it in the same way. Is managing $ and $$$ through different cities with different tactics a legitimate strategy? or is this still the result of my unwise tinkering during the game?

Yeah, CS isn't actually anything like as much of a problem, that's because CS has a special role to play that is unlike other zone types. For example, there are no demand caps for CS buildings. So I think if you play through the region, as you do so if you pay a little more attention, you should be able to bring it back in line. After all, it's the entire regional figures that need to balance, in theory sims can travel through many cities to get to a job, if they need too. Although in practise it's more ideal if sims can find jobs no further than one tile away from their home city, mostly because of the Infinite Commuter problem.

2 hours ago, Hipodrome said:

By the way, is there any mod that increases the desirability requirements for $$$? It seems like for all groups the standard is "it's ok unless it's not ok". It's "not ok" for $$$ more readily than $ or $$, but the basic logic holds I think? Whereas I would have thought that $$$ should work the other - it's only ok if certain good conditions are met.

Many folks think of this as a bug or that somehow the game is broken, but this is a quite intentional thing done by Maxis. On the one hand, if you have demand the highest quality will be met before others, provided the conditions are right, but as you've seen the game will allow a lot of development of things it doesn't need before it's really problematic. There are a few mods that attempt to rein in this element of the simulator, for example I use this one (sadly not compatible with CAM). Likewise Cori's No Kickout Mod prevents automatic upgrading to higher wealths, which gives you more control over part of this process. But just with some manual oversight, one part taxes, one part keeping areas with lower land values and one part marking some of the bigger R$ high rises Historical to prevent them upgrading goes a long way to avoiding things.

The game much prefers to upgrade an existing area over building in new areas, previously unzoned, so you have to be careful here too, not to block all higher wealth development. But it's really about timing and whilst it's a lot more tedious game play wise, trying to keep low density and lower wealths until you've built out an entire region is an excellent strategy. Since you can then let things free to follow the demands more closely, but keeping a solid base of lower wealth sims and jobs in the process. You can do this on a city by city basis instead, but if you have a spanking city with a lot of CO$$$ and I-HT, new sims moving into a neighbour won't have the same base EQ and it may be a while before they do. In the intervening times they won't satisfy the demand in the nicer city, whilst generating demand for less desirable zoning to meet their demands. In the end, that's where these imbalances often stem from, things were all working, until a city with wildly different needs pops up next door hindering things somewhat. The same goes with densities, as per one of the original tutorials, build out before you build up, if you do this over a number of cities in a region, demand will be off the chart when you start upgrading zones and areas to support higher wealths/densities. Still a good idea not to rush things too much, but where I've done this is the past, a chain of 6-7 cities is enough to kick start rapid development of high rises and wealths when you are ready.