Vandraad

Your rail connects these 2 cities, and you have the parking garage next to the one in your residential neighborhood, but you dont have a bus stop next to the destination rail station. This means your sims ride the train to the industrial town, get off at the station and are limited to walking distance. Pop a bus stop next to the station and various stops amongst the buildings.

Your passenger terminal on the railroad will need a parking garage next to it, yes? This way, the sims will drive to the parking garage, park, then ride the train to their destination. Without a place to park, they will just drive. At least, that is my assumption.

There really isn't any "one plan fits all" when it comes to transportation, unfortunately. I haven't been playing SC4 long myself so I still come up against this same issue all the time. I still find Highways and various surface mass transit (rail, GLR, Monorail) to be the most difficult to place. Highways require a lot of space due to their width, large turn radius and space needed for interchanges. Surface MT gives me problems because of the limited access points and the fact that once the sim reaches the last station, it's final destination must be reached either by foot or by a link to yet another form of MT. Also, I'm still unsure if surface MT needs to be in a complete loop and not just a line from A to B. What I can answer is the problem with entrances to and from highways. The answer is lack of room. Interchanges of any kind need a lot of room. It's best to either build the interchanges before adding any zoning around it. What you can do is start a city on a blank map and plop down a bunch of highway sections and create various interchanges just to see what size each needs. You then drag a Res zoning around it and delete the interchange. The blank area left behind is the minimum space needed.

Another tip to help with traffic issues is to funnel your sims into specific routes. Many people here liken it to branches on a tree. Main arteries that are high capacity fork into smaller and smaller roads until you're down to the street level. i.e. Avenues to Roads to Streets, etc. Don't give your commuters too many choices to get from A to B..because sometimes their choice is not the best choice. Your residential neighborhoods are actually too interconnected for effective traffic funneling. Although you have the avenues heading right to your C and I sections, there exist road connections running the full length parallel to those that commuters can use. That will significantly increase traffic congestion, increase traffic noise (limiting R$$$) and increase commute times.

The issue of "the grid" whereby lots are limited to NSEW orientation with roads only have the 45deg angle option could be solved if the grid that everything snaps to were treated like an overlay texture. This is to say the ground has no inherant grid. To build anything, we have to plop down the grid first, choosing the size of the buildable area much like we click-drag RCI areas. We choose a location, click-drag to the size we want, then orientate the resulting grid in 45deg increments. Thus, you could have a grid section orientated NSEW and then place another section, say, on it's West side that's orientated 45deg off. The line between the 2 sections that would cut across the grid squares would "round off" much like angled roads do currently..stairstepping the edge. This doesn't totally get us away from the grid restriction, but does allow us to realistically create the appearance of non-grid cities without the huge loss of real estate we currently see when building off of angled roads. Building roads from one grid orientation to another would be a matter of the game inserting the appropriate auto-angled section at the intersecting line. An intersection angle greater than 90deg might require additional corners for some transits that cant' make sharp corners. For example, you wouldn't want a highway to suddenly make a 135deg turn.

Originally posted by: Barbarossa Make sure you are setting up an intelligent mass transit system. quote> That really is the key and so far I do pretty well, although there is just one frustrating part: All forms of mass transit minus Bus and Subway take up far too much valuable real estate. I grew up in Chicago and came to know the true Elevated Rail system. And yes, we have El Rail in SC4, but there are pieces missing. You have 2 El Rail lines running perpendicular to each other ontop of a road. Everything is fine until the everything intersects. I can't find a piece that allows both the road AND the El Rail lines to intersect at the same location. Chicago has that stuff in spades. Having to run El Rail lines on non-road tiles just to get intersections defeats the purpose of using El Rail...that of saving space. I prefer the use of El Rail mostly for the visual aspect of it. Sure, I could use Subways and save alot of hassle, but there really is that lack of visibility when it comes to subways.

Originally posted by: Spinmaster ...Even the ones that stubbornly stick to cars will at least wisely go a little out of the way to use the higher speed & capacity roads/avenues/highways rather than bee-line it through the low-capacity, low-speed streets.quote> I am using the NAM and even with that there seems to be a lot of "monkey see, monkey do" amongst the citizenry. Thus, sometimes, if enough sims start using a particular route, they ALL start using a particular route. Case in point: I have a medium density residential part of town near a medium density commercial section. An avenue connects the two sections together. The drive is literally a straight line and all the sims were using the avenue. As I expanded, a road ended up running parallel to the avenue that also connected the R and C sections. Within a month, the avenue was literally abandonded and the road was a 24/7 parking lot. Commute times went from 30 mins to 2 hours. No-Job Zots popped up faster than dandelions in summer. The two routes were physically equi-distant in length but the road was just slightly more central to the R section. Demolishing the road solved the issue naturally as the avenue was the only means to access the C area. Any other surface connection from the R to C causes the Ave to be abandonded. To finally solve the problem and make the Ave the primary access route, I had to repath the Ave so that it's portion that was in the R area bisected the R area equally. Placing it off center meant any other route became preferable.

Some of those are ploppable lots, others are standard. What you see there might not be the entire city for that zone.

I'm going to look into how many jobs are taken up by the Bus Stations then check out the SC4Tool. Thanks Pnorrell.

I guess I could sum this up the gist of this post by stating one of Newton's Laws: For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction....except in SimCity4. What I've noticed is that there appear to be some variables that seem, at least on the surface, to be directly related but the numbers just dont add up. There is no reaction to the intial action. A few of these work perfectly: You put in a fire station who's operational radius covers 100% of the city and you have no fires with which to contend. That relationship works. The action of placing the fire station produces the reaction of having no fires. Others, however, do not appear as such. Education, as best as I can tell, doesn't function as one would expect when it comes to the relationship between the sims wanting an education vs their actually utilizing the educational system. I built a R$ town neighboring a I-D/power town. There were minimal amenities and the population approached 8,000. The EQ was hovering so low the sims needed to be reminded to breathe. Of those 8000 sims, 1000 of them were of the age to attend an elementary school. I expected to see the attendance at the school (who's bus radius encompassed 100% of the town and funding was at the default level) to be at least near that 1000 mark. Yet at most, over a span of 3 game-years, attedance never went above double digits. The rise in EQ, however, was dramatic. How could less than 100 sims attending the elementary school at any given time over a 3 year span have produce such a lobsided result? I continued the experiment with a Highschool and eventually a College. Tracking the number of potential students by the Population by Age window and comparing that to the actual number of students attending were never remotely similar yet the EQ continued to climb. As of right now, my town of 10,000 sims that has 1 elementary, 1 HS and 1 college have an average EQ of 190. Double checking various education posts on the forums, I did make sure to place the schools in strictly residential areas with good transportation access. Lastly, Residential Demand vs Job Availablity. This one continues to confound me. In my city of 10k sims, my R$ demand is off the charts, my R$$ is mid way and my R$$$ is at 0. No sims currently show as unemployed. C$, C$$ and C$$$ all show at 0 as well. My industrial demand, however could not possibly get any worse. All 4 industrials (all with default 9% tax rates) show maximum negative demand. Why would sims desire to move into an area that has zero demand for job growth? I added up all the jobs from the 3 Commercials and the 4 Industrials and compared them to the maximum number of employable Sims assuming a working age between 18 and 60. Those numbers were, at my best estimate, quite similar. I-D and I-M were in their own seperate city connected by bus, subway and avenue. I-HT was in it's own city also connected by bus, subway and avenue. I-HT had plenty of parks, trees, zero water polution, zero air polution and all lots reported short commute/freight times...as did I-D and I-M. The demand for all 3 were still as maximum negative demand. I then chose to pause the game and just spread out this HUGE parcel of light residential until i got the "this zone is too large" error...and unpaused the game. In less than 3 months, ever lot was full..and the RCI demand remained unchanged. Unemployment is non-existant. EQ is still at 190. Transportation shows no bottlenecks and commute times are all under 60 min yet more people want to move in and the demand for jobs is not going up. What could possible cause this?