Huge Mass Transit Profits

[simcitynate 134]

My city had reached about 40,000 citizens when I decided to put in some bus stops. To my great surprise, I immediately found my mass transit fares were making me over $20,000. The only reason for this I can think of is this one bus stop which is at 450% capacity and over 76,000 usage. Sure, posting these kinds of profits is nice, but I can't help but feel these are ill-gotten gains due to some glitch. However, if someone can reassure me that I've simply stumbled upon an ingenious way to get rich quickly, I think I could live with that.   

[Propfam 2,288]

On 11/9/2023 at 3:42 AM, simcitynate said:

My city had reached about 40,000 citizens when I decided to put in some bus stops. To my great surprise, I immediately found my mass transit fares were making me over $20,000. The only reason for this I can think of is this one bus stop which is at 450% capacity and over 76,000 usage. Sure, posting these kinds of profits is nice, but I can't help but feel these are ill-gotten gains due to some glitch. However, if someone can reassure me that I've simply stumbled upon an ingenious way to get rich quickly, I think I could live with that.   

Eternal commuter loop. That happens when a minimum of 3 cities have road connections not far from the edge. Sims like neighbor jobs, despite being far. So they drive the car to the nearest NC. The problem starts when they arrive on the 2nd city. Since the job is too "far," they decided to drive again to the 3rd city. Assuming this is an arranged triangle with 3 cities, they assumed the 1st is much closer and they drive their car again, and again, and again, and again. The result is exponential traffic, which explains why you have 70k traffic.

Another variables are the mode of transit and the length from one station to the next. Since you're using bus stops, I think it's about $0.1/tile/sim. The length also matters. From personal experience, if you made a set of transit lines stretching from one corner of the city tile to the another end, sort of like a spiral, with residential placed in the one side of the spiral and commercial/industrial on the other, ideally without any stops and both sides are completely isolated from any network access aside from 2 stations, you can get profits as high as $120k a month. Yes, 120k! I do have around 260k sims, so the traffic is crazily high. I also use monorail, which generates about $0.3/tile/sim which just 2nd on the most expensive transit after a ferry ride.