Gary King

I had a subway in a city of only 60,000. The traffic got so bad that I decided to put a subway stop at every single intersection, and commute time dropped from 45 minutes to 35 minutes. A decent drop, but still not good enough. I already have bus stops at every intersection, too. Nearly no one drives in my city. Maybe I should also put in a Monorail as it should be quicker than Subways?

I don't have problem with jobs, either, but I just find it wasteful to have empty buildings.

I'm curious, what is your lowest commute time on heavily populated cities (population of, say, 50,000 and up)? I've managed to get about 35 minutes of commute time for a city of 65,000 or so, but it gets difficult after that.

Alright thanks. As I said, I'd rather aim for the lowest commute time than a large city, as a low commute time helps grow a large city anyways, and it helps in general in the long run.

That is a very nice city, and thanks for posting the intermediate screenshots. Could you post the Commute Time graph for the city? That's really the graph that I have the most problem with, and I'm sure it's the same for others, too, as a city grows. It's also the root of the abandonment of buildings, which is a shame; one of my primary goals when playing is to keep the number of abandoned buildings to a minimum, but it's one of the hardest things to do with a growing city.

Originally posted by: Tarkus Hi Gary King- Welcome! To answer your questions, the NAM's Traffic Plugin options have changed quite a bit with the April 2008 release. We found out after some testing and investigations by mott and jplumbley that many of the existing options were actually causing more issues than they were solving, and they were removed. Now we have the A-B-C-D system, with each of those options having different "flavors" if you will. I would recommend using one of the A or B options (non-Park and Ride), selecting the "difficulty" depending on your city size. I'd stay away from the C and D options. There's more info that can be found here. Hope that helps! -Tarkusquote> The link does not work.

The Commute Time in my city was around 60 minutes and it was killing residential buildings because they were being abandoned due to long commute times. I installed the Network Addon Mod, but it did not improve commute times (in fact, after a year of installing the mod, the Commute Time spiked to 70 minutes, then dropped back down to 60 minutes and after a few years, it still averages around 60 minutes). I've got plenty of mass transit, and I know my sims use them because about 90% of traffic is via mass transit. Also, I read somewhere that when installing NAM, it's supposed to ask you if you want "Perfect" or "Best" calculations, but I was never asked these questions. Does the newest version not ask this anymore, or what? Thanks in advance!