RedImperator

Originally posted by: CaptCity Actually, a characteristic of the z-simulator is a greater 'tolerance' for walking if it's a more efficient route. This is, of course, dependent upon the layout of the city. quote> Yeah, that was one of the reasons I switched to z. But unless you're using a really radical version, they still have their limits. I think the furthest mine will walk is down the long side of three 6x4 blocks. Originally posted by: Quiksilver4250 My sytem is working pretty well now. I made a neighbor connection of GLR and added a few parking garages. Now during morning rush hour, the fare profits increase to over $800. It made me happy to see trains like these on my network (see pic). Sure, I know the trains I'm using arent GLR specific, but I wanted something that wouldnt look stupid on my el rail. I think it looks kinda cool. Note: my pics are being downsized for some reason, so they are smaller than they should be quote> Glad to see things are working out. I guess I've become something of an evangelist for GLR, partly because I'm a trolley geek and partly because it just works so well in my own city. Incidentally, I went the opposite direction from you when selecting automata: I picked a one-car streetcar that would look good running the streets and I've accepted how silly that looks on an elevated line. I wish we could have separate automata for GLR and El-rail, but that would involve hacking the .EXE.

Originally posted by: Cougar2004 Originally posted by: Blue Lightning Stations are downloaded seperatly. Search "Tram in road station" or something like that on the ST Exchangequote> Who's idea was that? Whats the big problem with including one default Tram in road station, so its good to go out of the box, so to speak? Maybe this needs needs to be re-thought. People can always download more. quote> The NAM team decided not to include any lots in the NAM downloads. I'm not entirely sure what their reasons are, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, as far as tram-in-road stations are concerned, there are two options, both available at SC4Devotion: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1986 <--RTMT Interim T-Ram Stations, by z. https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2024 <--SFBT Tram-in-Road Tram Stop The first set looks better and offers a lot of customization options, and will fit in with z's other RTMT stations, but installation is cumbersome and personally, I found the instructions more confusing than edifying. The SFBT stations come in three sizes (1x1, 1x2, and 1x3) and are easy to install, but they can be hard to spot because the props are so minimal. Incidentally, even without stations, the T-RAM pieces are useful as connectors between trams-in-avenue or GLR lines. That's how I used them during the period between when the T-RAM was released and when the stations appeared.

Originally posted by: CaptCity Originally posted by: Quiksilver4250 @RedImperator:...Last time I checked, a couple thousand sims enter and leave the city during rush hour.quote> So you have a couple thousand leaving the neighbor city, but none coming into this city? Might try to redo he connections. Or perhaps, the sims would just rather drive. If you use the Route Query tool to query your stations, what do you get? Does it show the stations being used? Sims should be able to walk from stations even if no parking is available. quote> Sims won't walk very far; if there aren't stations in walking distance of residential zones, they MUST have parking available or the sims won't use them. Even if they do have parking, if all the stations are in or near the commercial core, most sims will just ignore them and continue driving to their destination. In real life, of course, sims at work might still use an all-downtown GLR system, to, say, run errands, or go get lunch, but SC4 doesn't model any of this behavior. In SC4-land, sims only ever leave their houses to go to work, and then they come straight home. Which, come to think of it, was exactly the way the sims lived in the first Sims game.

Is it good for commuting between cities?quote> The draggable GLR makes neighbor connections and can be used for city-to-city commuting. quote> You can also plop a tram-in/on-road or tram-in-avenue piece over a tile with a road or avenue neighbor connection, and the neighbor connection will work for GLR. I use it extensively in my region and get thousands of commuters moving between cities on GLR.

Originally posted by: mayor_brando I believe the draggable GLR is able to connect to neighbor cities, and for the parking lot, you could just use the regular parking garage that comes with the game. If not, there are many good parking lots on the STEX.quote> I discovered by experient that you don't even need the draggable GLR. Placing a tram-in-avenue or tram-on-road puzzle piece directly on an avenue or road tile with a neighbor connection will create a working GLR connection to a neighbor. It's very nice; if you're so inclined, you can now build seamless streetcar networks across multiple city tiles.

A rail yard is where trains are assembled at the beginning of a run and disassembled at the end of one. They also have tracks for storing unused cars, some maintenance facilities (including a place to refuel locomotives), and crew facilities.

Does the GLR connect to the residential city? And if not, do you have park-and-ride parking lots available? If the sims are driving in from elsewhere and there's noplace to park their cars, they'll just drive straight to work and ignore the trams.

Originally posted by: Merlin of Flyote There's a better way,(in my opinion). Dig the two areas oposite each other for entrance and exit then run the roadway into one end. Keep going until you reach the other end, the line will turn green indicating a tunnel. Let go of the mouse button and the working tunnel will be built. If you want an underwater tunnel then first create a land connection between the two pieces of land. Dig the two areas as above creating the tunnel across the land connection. Afterwards destroy the land connection using the flat levelling terraforming button from water to water sideways. You are left with an underwater tunnel that works. You can test it by zoning industry one side and residential the other, letting both grow then use the transport query, you will find that the sims drive through the tunnel to get to work. There is a tutorial for this at simcitycentral, in the knowledge bin. http://www.simcitycentral.net/knowledge/item.php?subaction=showfull&id=1082022 Thanks goes to Monkey's Uncle for this.quote> Yeah, but: 1) As others have said, the Big Dig tunnels give you much more flexibility, and 2) That's a pain in the butt. And I should know, because I don't have the Big Dig mod and I still do all my underground highways the hard way. As for crossing subway lines, I have a lot which does a similar thing to railroad traffic and I can confirm if it crosses a subway line, traffic will freely move back and forth between lines. I don't mind it in my particular case because the only place they cross is near my main railroad station/central subway hub, where it's actually believable passengers would change modes of transportation, but unless you want to rationalize a huge underground park-and-ride, that doesn't work for highways.

Depending on how you look at it, it's a way to fudge a realistic airport into your regions, or a dirty cheat for dirty stinking cheaters. Allow me to elaborate: in real life, an entire region will be served by one, maybe two major international airports (New York is an outlier with three). SimCity 4, however, forces you to build an airport for every city tile, which is not only unrealistic, but a ridiculous waste of space. So a modder named joreg created the Modular Airport Pack, which let you create huge international airports in one city tile, and provided something called the Airport Tram for the rest of your cities. The airport tram appeared to be a large parking lot with a small airport-ish building, but it functioned like an airport with 1 million passenger capacity (without the attendant pollution and NIMBY effect). The idea is that you have the big airport in one city tile and then the tram to take passengers there from all the other tiles--and there you go, a regional airport. This lot seems to have further modded the concept so that now instead of a big parking lot, you have a single plaza tile that does the same thing. On the one hand, this may be more realistic than the old tram, seeing as most cities don't have airport shuttle terminals with huge parking lots all over the place. On the other, you're really on the honor system here. You can easily and unobtrusively give yourself all the benefits of having an airport in every city, without paying any of the costs in any of them (neither the old tram nor this lot actually NEED a big airport somewhere in the region to function; in fact, in joreg's kit, the vast majority of the airport lots are pure eye candy).

I have entire cities where ALL the residential structures are rowhouses. The alternating medium/high density trick works flawlessly. Getting one specific type of rowhouse is trickier, though.

What lot sizes are you planning on using? Most rowhouse sets I've seen grow on 1x2 or 1x3 medium or high density lots, so it's possible, by alternating 1x2 medium and high density residential, to force rowhouse neighborhoods to grow. The other solution I've seen (I think Simgoober used it) is to model several rowhouses as a single 5x2 or 6x2 building (from the preview, it looks like you're leaning that way). Also, a suggestion: there are very few R$$$ rowhouses available. If you wanted to, you could model a few Society Hill townhouses for R$$$. The nice thing about them is that they'd fit in unobtrusively in a rowhouse city. You wouldn't notice until you got up close and saw how much nicer the props were.

Originally posted by: Muck308 Yeah, and when I lived in Philly, Rendell wanted to tear down all of Chinatown to build a new park. It was never gonna happen. BUt then they ended up expanding the convention center anyway didn't they? I agree that a stadium would have been great in downtown Philly, but it was unrealistic proposal. Philly is too dense, especially around center city. Pittsburgh had the room to build PNC Park with minimal demolition of nearby buildings. There was a snior citizen assisted living center that was torn down, and I think less than 50 people were relocated. In Philly that number would have been much much higher. Nice park though.quote> The Chinatown proposal was dumb, but there are abandoned industrial sites along the waterfront just north of Center City which were large enough and would have had both highway and pedestrian access. Or if we're talking pie-in-the-sky, they could have decked over the open parts of I-95 in the Penn's Landing area and built it right over top of the highway and reconnected Old City to the waterfront at the same time. Speaking of interesting Philadelphia projects and the convention center, I wonder if anyone is thinking about a possible High Line park on the Reading Viaduct. It could be an interesting way to get foot traffic over the Vine Street Expressway into north Center City.

The NJ 55 expressway (running from Deptford, NJ, a few miles from Philadelphia, to a junction with NJ 47 about 20 miles from the shore) has an extremely wide median from Deptford to Glassboro intended for a never-built branch line of the PATCO High-Speed Line (the existing line runs from Philadelphia through Camden city and then several towns in Camden County, while the branch would run through Gloucester County to the south). There's finally serious talk about building the branch line, as Gloucester County has experienced exponential growth in the last 20 years and STILL has no passenger rail service of any kind. I'd prefer actually that they'd revise another proposal, which is to grade-separate and electrify the Conrail branch line from Camden down through Gloucester City, Westville, Woodbury, and several other towns before arriving in the middle of Glassboro, but between Conrail's opposition and the bleeping NIMBYs, the NJ 55 option might be the more realistic.

Speaking of ballparks, Philadelphia really blew a golden opportunity by building Citizens Bank Park (the Phillies' home stadium) in the Sports Complex in South Philly rather than downtown. The South Philly location has highway access and parking, but the stadium sits in a sea of parking lots in a neighborhood of industrial warehouses--an hour after the game, the area is stone dead. If they'd put it in Center City, you'd have 40,000 potential customers for bars and restaurants 82 nights a year. The Phillies wanted to be downtown, too. But the Street administration screwed everything up, like they did almost everything else.

As far as I know, the "No Road" zots are a bug--probably the most annoying bug in the entire game, at that.

Originally posted by: chris0101 Is there any way to finish the ones that EA never finished or supplant them?quote> Nobody can add new ordinances because doing so would require editing the .EXE itself, which is forbidden by the EULA (and might not even be possible, for all I know). You could implement them by replacing existing ordiances, but you'd have to make up your own values for them. Like, say, you could decide a smoking ban gives +5% to the city's health rating, or something.

This happened a while ago to me: my main city, sitting on a big tile, had about a quarter of its developed area filled with R$$$, mostly medium-density midrise apartments. They were all commuting to a neighboring I-HT city for their fancy $$$ jobs. Well, I was running the industrial city, and I guess I didn't notice that a few I-D factories had popped up in the middle of the HT zone. The pollution crushed the nearby desirability, causing the HT to abandon and more I-D to grow in its place. By the time I noticed the problem, the HT industry had mostly gone. Well, I had just spent about two hours doing some fiddly terraforming work and I hadn't saved any of it, so I said, "What's the worst that can happen?" and saved the city with all the I-D. I then switched over to play the main city. In a month, I had a sea of no job zots over the R$$$ area. In two months, I had a population crash, my revenue cratered, and an entire section of the city was totally abandoned. Fortunately, the empty R$$$ buildings refilled with R$$ and R$, bringing my population back up and eventually my revenues, but when the crash was in full swing, I was down about a third of my population and deep in the red every month. I had to take out a bunch of loans to keep the city operating and I was a hair's breadth from losing it completely.

My subways are getting lousy usage, too. But I'm getting over 30,000 a day on some parts of my streetcar network, so I'm not sweating it too much. My city's transportation department is turning a profit based entirely on mass transit fares.

Originally posted by: Bones1 Originally posted by: RedImperator As far as simulator mechanics go, the parking lot on the train station is functional (and also much too small to handle the capacity it supposedly does, but we'll ignore that). quote> Yes, the train station comes with parking for 1000 cars, so it's a great station to use for "park and ride" capability. Place a bus stop right next to the train station, and sims will use the train station to park and then get on the bus. They don't need to use the rail in order to take advantage of the parking ability of the train station. Or plop a parking lot next to a bus stop, and sims will be able to use that as a park & ride lot. Basically, if your transit lots are touching each other, they act as a sort-of super-lot. For example, if you place a parking lot, a bus station, a monorail station, and a subway station together, sims will be able to drive to the "super lot" and jump on either the bus, subway, or monorail. Or transfer between mass-transit.quote> That I didn't know. I always place bus or tram stops by train stations to enable transfers anyway, so I guess I was getting the benefits, but that's an interesting fact to keep in mind for the future.

Originally posted by: DreamSong Holy heck that Census Repository is one of the most obnoxious things to try to find a download for ever. Can somebody just post a hyperlink to the download?quote> As I said, it's on SC4Devotion, and you need to be a member to download it, so I can't provide a direct link. Registration is free and painless, and it's worth being a member anyway because SC4Devotion has nothing but high-quality stuff for download (it's a joint venture between several of the best modding teams in the community).

Originally posted by: geminitiger As a person who is having a lot of difficulty myself in building a city that has all of those really nice building and getting past 500k citizens I find it annoying and funny at the same time that everyone's advice on here seems to be "download cheat XYZ". quote> 500k is when it starts getting more difficult; you're starting to saturate parts of your transportation system even if it is well-designed, it gets seriously expensive to provide services for everyone, garbage is a major pain in the ass. But no, you don't need to cheat to get past that point. I can't give you any specific advice unless you tell me what's happening, but there are ways past problems without cheating (which I agree is a really lame solution).

Originally posted by: Tyro972 Originally posted by: Bones1 Regular rail is working for you because the rail transit station includes a parking lot... ...El-Rail and monorail station do NOT include parking. quote> Are you sure these parking lots in the buildings arn't just cosmetic? Does a parking lot on a building actually behaves like a parking lot, in game mechanics terms? quote> The simulator essentially behaves as if Sims drive their cars straight into their offices, so in one sense, the parking lots that sometimes grow around C and I buildings are eye candy. In another sense, you could say they're functional--since SimDilbert parking his SimHonda in his SimCubicle crushes suspension of disbelief, the eye candy parking lots function as a fudge that lets us pretend he's actually parking like real people do. Erm, we'll just ignore the fact there are nowhere near enough spaces for that to actually be plausible. As far as simulator mechanics go, the parking lot on the train station is functional (and also much too small to handle the capacity it supposedly does, but we'll ignore that). I am afraid to use Z since I read that it prioritizes car usage. True or false?quote> My experience with Z is that I get a good mix of car vs. transit use. Sims like to use their cars, but if transit is convenient and driving is not, they'll take transit (I get real good use out of my ground light rail and heavy rail, but my highways also see a lot of traffic). I prefer Z-Medium myself because it leaves capacities low enough to make transportation planning a genuine challenge.

If your demand is zeroing out at ~160,000, you're probably hitting a demand cap somewhere. The mod you need is the Census Repository Facility, Version 3. It doesn't seem to be on Simtropolis, so register at SC4Devotion.com and download it there. The mod gives you a building that tells you 1) how close every RCI sector is to its demand cap, 2) what buildings will increase the cap, and by how much, 3) a ton of other data about which to geek out. After the Network Addon Mod, it's probably the most essential mod in the game. It will make your life much easier.

I also installed the Nam mods and have a question about the tram in road tiles. Are they purely aesthetic, or do they actually work? There are no stops or tram cars, so how do i know if its working? Any other helpful hints for the nam mod?quote>Yes, they are functional. You need to download some stations or use the GLR to El-rail connector, as no stations are included in the NAM. I'd reccomend the Road-Top Mass Transit pack, which includes tansit stations that go on top of networks, including Tram-in-avenue.quote>I had trouble getting those working, so I used Andreas's stations instead (available on the SC4Devotion LEX). As it turns out, the reason they didn't work was because I buggered up the installation, but I like Andreas's so much that I kept them. I also am using them as temporary stops for my tram-in-street lines. As for how well the tram system works...in my cites, they work like gangbusters. The busiest intersection in the system handles 26,000 commuters a day in a region with a population of only half a million. They take up no extra space and the Sims seem to love to use them. And aesthetically, they're very fun to watch if you replace the default subway with a good light rail model (I prefer single streetcars, but there are good modern light rail trains available, too). Their only drawback is that, being a puzzle-piece based network, they can get tedious to place. EDIT: I just noticed you're wondering how they'd work without tram cars. Since the tram system is essentially a hack of the elevated rail/subway system, by default it will show the Maxis subway train. As you can imagine, this looks horrible, but it doesn't actually impact how the system works. The automata in the game (that is, the cars, trucks, trains, planes, and people you see moving around your city) are just eye candy--think of them as visual representations of the little bits of code called Sims which are actually "moving" around your networks. They're helpful for letting you see at a glance how well-utelized (or over-utelized) a given stretch of road or track is, but they have no impact on the simulator itself. You can actually turn them off entirely and the city will still function; it will just look boring.