KLB

As a follow up to this post I spent a lot of effort defraging my C drive, which houses my primary SimCity Application files, and this tremendously speeded up SimCity (My region and plugin files are stored on a different drive)

I have several cities where there are subway routes that are over crowded with sims passing through the city on their way to another city. In fact in one case sims from an island city come in by ferry to the "pass through" city, then catch a subway and continue on to a larger city on the other side of the "pass through" city. There was so much pass through traffic that several of my ferry terminals had greatly exceeded capacity as had my subway lines. I finally had to double and triple up ferry terminals and create parallel "express" subway lines that only had a subway station at a ferry terminal and then exited the other side of my city. I was literally having traffic volumes in excess of 30,000 pedestrians coming into a single ferry terminal and then catching the subway "express" subway lines to the next city. I used to have a lot of problems in some cities with roads becoming congested with this pass through traffic until I started erecting tollbooths on all border roads in all of my cities. If a specific border road is getting "thrashed" by pass through traffic I will often times build multiple back to back tollbooths to make the route more expensive to use as a pass through route.

I suspect, but have no proof that SimCity is programmed with some kind of curve for the affect tax rates have on demand. At both ends of the scale there are (or at least should be) points of diminishing returns. For me the sweet spot for CS zones seems to be around 9%-9.5%. For CO zones I will start off at around 9% - 10% while I'm desperate for tax revenues, but will eventually drop to around 5.5%. I've have found very little change in demand for CO tax rates below 5%. In the beginning of a city I will keep residential tax rates around 10% and then as a city becomes stronger I will slowly lower these rates to around 7.5% - 8.5%. With industry I run HT at around 9%-9.5%, anything higher will drive high tech away really fast. I run manufacturing at around 10%. I will sometimes drop manufacturing tax rates to around 9.5% if I need to spur development. Like others, I used to run dirty industry at around 20% to keep them out, but I've discovered dirty industry actually seems to have a higher job density than other industry types. One of my small grid cities actually maxed out at around 36,000 sims under a super clean high tech only industry mix. As an experiment I raised the HT tax rate to 14% and lowered the dirty industry tax rate to 9%. There was a few years of turbulence as the city shifted from a high wealth population to having more lower wealth sims, but the population did break the 36,000 sim barrier and climbed to over 50,000 sims although it was a very dirty and polluted city. I have now started to try and encourage a better mix of industries in my cities.

Thanks for the advice. This never occurred to me as the cause of some of my performance issues.