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  • catty-cb
    catty-cb

    Commute times / trips (SC4)

    Contributor/author(s): Keegan Lucas

    Your commuters only travel at one mile per hour.

    That's right folks. Let me explain my experiment.

    I set up a 2x2 zone of dense industrial with a road leading to a 2x2 zone of residential. I started with 10 spaces between the two zones. What popped up were two low income lots with 8 people total, and then an industry that had 9 jobs. This kept the simulation simple. I would then move the residential zone 10 tiles further after recording average commutes.

    This is what resulted - with 10 tiles between, there was an average commute time of six minutes. Every 10 tiles further added another six minutes (approximately). By the time it was at 100 tiles we were at 62 minutes.

    What does this mean?

    Well, Maxis has finally owned up to a truer sense of scale with SC4 (much appreciated). They tell us that a tile is 16 meters (roughly 53 feet) across, as opposed to telling us SC3k's tiles were about 200 feet across. Unfortunately, unrealistic commute times have persevered. 100 tiles is about a mile, and that means your sims are traveling 1 mile per hour.

    I was excited when I heard that sims might be willing to travel up to 2.5 hours. Well, that's time spent on about two miles, and it honestly messes with the whole regional idea.

    It seems to me that they've never gotten the commute times right. Play SC2K again and you'll see how closely you have to build every zone for anything to survive. SC3K expanded this quite a lot, but is still not realistic. And now this.

    See also
    bullet_text.gifHow to make dedicated bus lanes
    bullet_text.gifTraffic and Mass Transit Overview
    bullet_text.gifMega income from toll booths

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    Well, different networks have different speeds, right?  Are they all the same?  You mention roads in your experiment, did you try anything else?  I think in the NAM documents something is said about how the "commute time" is approximate and not an actual calculation.

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    1 hour ago, jbkone said:

    Are they all the same?  You mention roads in your experiment, did you try anything else?

    Not something anyone can help you with as this document was retrieved and uploaded to the omnibus just before the website it was on permanently died.

    Will have a word with @Cyclone Boom and/or  @CorinaMarie  and see if they can add something that flags these as reference only and that the author if they are still playing SC4 almost certainly won't be using the Contributor/author(s): name anymore

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    @catty-cb

    Sounds a useful idea for this to be clarified, since many of these article authors will be inactive from the community nowadays.

    We are a little busy at the moment in non-site related things, but we'll see if this can be done in batch for adding a clarification note where the contributor message is shown.

    -CB & Cori

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    9 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

    but we'll see if this can be done in batch for adding a clarification note where the contributor message is shown.

    -CB & Cori

    Thanks absolutely no rush to do it, there have been a couple of posts along the same lines on other omnibus articles and while it's really great that people are reading them, unless a miracle happens they aren't going to get answer from anyone.

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