I stopped playing SC4 4 or 5 years ago, because of the commute time. I started again thinking that, well now with the NAM and other things that I just discovered, the commute time wouldn't stop my cities from growing. 5 years ago I did a test with a friend of mine running on PC (no update at the time, well he didn't had it). We built identical cities. He was getting 10 000 people coming in every year without any commute time problem, as I was getting a poor 2 000. The game was also lagging so much on my macbook 13'' 2 gig of ram but with the damn GMA950 graphic card.
Now, I installed the NAM, the road widening, increase subways and bus capacity, I even have the big dig from Boston made by NDEX I think, I had the tram (stop using it because of some of its contraints). Later on, I installed the less abandonment thing that is only suppose to limited devellopment of R$$$ and R$$ where they would later leave. I installed the x2 industries job, the x2 services jobs, ....
Still, with an average commute time of 0.2 (which I think would mean 12mins or 20 whatever it's still way low), I have long commute in some of my best spotted R$$$ hi-rise. I even saw this once : Palm plaza (download from the stex) 2500 R$$$ grew 20-25 tiles from the LG Building (I think 3000 or 4000 C$$$ jobs) that I plopped my-self in order to make a test, with one direct subway and one almost direct bus line. All the R$$$ from the palm were at the time working in that building. The result? They left the palm plaza. It was on the same boulevard, what is wrong with that. I know my industries are a little farter away, but they are easily reachable by subways and highways including the NDEX big dig.
What is wrong with that? I would post pictures but it would be useless. 20 tiles was the gap. The city have only around 40-45 000, but with 25 000 commercial jobs and 10 000 industries. I know it's a really small city but why does a palm plaza pop out just to leave it 2 years later. When I was playing, 5 years ago, I had a couple of half a million people cities, but the only way I had found at the time to control a little bit the cummute time issue was to put a line of residential from one side of the map to the other, then a slightly wider line of commercial and top it with an even wider line of industries......pretty boring I have to say.
Please tell me there is something I can do or I will just have to stop playing again.
