MayorFumble

I'm back. Was tied up with some personal things for a while. Not at all. The time penalty for cars is balanced out by the slightly lower speed for buses. So it mostly depends on where the bus stops are, along with the Sims' preferences. And in the NAM, the maximum allowed commute time is essentially infinite, so you don't have to worry about trying to shave off a few seconds here and there from your commute; it's no longer Death Race 2000. Instead, you can concentrate on building the proper transportation systems for your city. I see. So buses are more for preferences, bus 'lines', and travel options at destination drop-off. PEG refers to the Pegasus Web Site (free registration) with their exchange (PLEX). TE is Transit Enabled which means can connect to the transit network. Some rail fundamentals: Main Line ================================================Station====================================================== ][ Spur =====================================Station (Terminal) ========================================================================================================= ][.........................................................................................................][ ==============================Station=============================== Siding Now, most of the stations in the game are designed to have the tracks run through or beside them and continue. If you put a station on a main line or a siding, you get what I refer to as a Station. If you put a station on a spur, then you get a Terminal because the tracks terminate there. Note, the dots are just spaces. This editor eats spaces unless you use special codes. That makes sense. Do you have multiple main lines going to the same places in the event your track is being over saturated? I don't have the concept of a terminal in my city but I had to end up adding 3 tracks shared by all stations to avoid saturating any one of them. Even two tracks weren't enough. Thanks for the input. This mimics my experience of having to go bulldozer happy on my city and it being rather painful. I guess there really is no option but to plan out your general transporation scheme ahead of time. I haven't quite nailed the game's built-in transit options. Once I learn to get the most out of them and grow my cities to the point where they aren't enough, I'll look into third-party options. But thanks for the heads up. Looks like I have to be careful if/when I get around to using them.

Also, look into city ordinances that help with pollution.

By rail I'm only referring to regular ground rail and elevated rail (the stuff that ships with the unmodded game). I have NAM but haven't messed with its light rail options. I dont know what the acronyms PEG and TE are, if you don't mind explaining? I'm also not 100% certain what you mean by terminal? Is there a terminal building as opposed to station. Or do you mean a terminal conceptually (End-of-line then find another mode of transportation)? If it is the second, is your terminal made up of multiple stations? I had my ground rail getting nearly 19K use on one track (more than 200% use with NAM at the Medium controller settings) and ended up adding two more tracks with the track switch loops (don't know what they are called irl) across every station. This allowed trains to take any track in any direction at every station. Ended up nearly evenly distributing the traffic across all 3 tracks. Was kinda proud of that since I was able to discover the 3-track switching on my own :-P However, it didn't fix the big picture. But, one step at a time I guess.

Thanks a lot for those numbers on stops and spacing. That gives me even more concrete data to work with. Not necessarily to duplicate blindly but to give me an indicator of whether I'm doing too much or too little. And the answer is too little. I only have 5 EL stations across 3 lines on one of the residential cities. That's nowhere near 1 every ~4 blocks. I'll try adding a few more and spacing them out more intelligently. To answer your question, I'm using NAM at Medium capacity. I know I could just up the capacity count to the highest setting and worry about it later but I'd rather learn now. I don't mind having traffic problems and I do want to work towards solving them. Just trying to get an idea of how the more experienced of you solve these problems and whether I'm going in the right direction. As far as custom content goes, I'm not using any custom buildings. In part because I want to understand how to play the base game and in part because I don't know some of the differences between content. For example, I don't know what the differences are between LOTs and BATs. The only custom content I'm using, other than NAM, are for aesthetic uses (Hole Digging Lots, Rain Tool, Highway Walls) and custom maps uploaded on this site. I would like to use some of the aesthetic mods for trees, roads, etc. and I've seen some amazing screenshots of custom industrial buildings but I'm still figuring out what is what. I never did give much thought to using buses as a means of traffic control, only as a means of facilitating R$ transportation. I figured since any one bus can go to any other bus station, there is very little control. But now that you've brought up the point I'll put that into consideration. That's the kind of stuff I haven't (and probably never would have) figured out on my own. And it is exactly why I started this thread. Thanks again. Oh, and I assume that buses lets R$ travel farther because apparently NAM gives R$ a time penalty for using a car over a bus. I figured that since the penalty does not exist for buses and time=distance, then they can travel farther in buses over cars.

Hmm, not sure. Have you checked if the file is flagged as Read-Only? That gets me sometimes. Also, try making a copy of the file into your desktop or My Documents, editing it there, and then do a copy-paste-overwrite. See if that works.

Here's my transportation view. My colors are different than yours or Chimp's. I take it you guys use mods for those views? The colors are the game default (Red = highway, purple = EL, black = ground rail, off-white = roads) I don't know how to get subway to show on the map. My focus are on the 3 left-most regions. The other that are zoned in are just me messing with agriculture and a small suburb. The city below the yellow square is mostly R$ and R$$ and is now at 97K, the city left of that one is strictly commercial jobs at 87K jobs, and the city below it is mostly R$ with some R$$ and ID/IM at 101K residents.

Interesting. Good suggestion on the alternate stops for different tracks. I am using a lot of buses, but since they count towards congestion with NAM, all they are doing is allowing for R$ to take longer trips. Some of my rail stations in the residential area have garages, but not all of them. I should probably add garages to the rest. My EL rail is a bit all over the place. I'm gonna take a stab at focusing it's intent and cleaning it up a bit. My subway is a mess. It is getting heavy use but it was kinda arbitrarily laid about. My high gets some use but I'd wish more sims would use it, especially considering it is a mostly R$$ and R$$$ city. I should probably have a convergence of my transit systems at some location as well. They don't readily meet in any location. What mods can you recommend? Also, do you use the vanilla train station for ground rail or a modded one. I don't mind using the vanilla one but it always feels a bit clumsy to work with.

Very informative. Both your example Gurning_Chimp's leave me scratching my head though. I guess you both understand where to optimally place your stations, lay your transit lines and highways. My cities pale in size yet, despite a bunch of subway pipes with heavy use as well as EL, I'm still having traffic problems. In your example, I noticed your red and blue rail lines are not connected. Did you make it so as a conscious decision or is there some game-mechanic-reasoning behind the separation? I understand what you mean with landmarks. After my first catastrophic failure with a large city, I opted to make my latest city in a new, completely flat region so I have no landmarks so-to-speak. Wanted to focus on the technical aspects of transit as I don't feel ready to tackle the challenges non-conforming terrain will provide. My latest city is doing better but still not quite right. Your example brings a good contrast to tha tof Gurning_Chimp's as your transit lines are also cleanly defined but very different. It also looks like I might be packing too many high density buildings together as opposed to the core of the city having the bulk of them and then tapering off. Thanks a lot. This gives me more to consider.

Are you running Windows Vista/7? You need admin rights to modify files in the Program Files directory. Right click notepad and run it as administrator. You should be able to open the file, edit and save it.

Wow, 2.1M? Highest I've gotten has been ~160K in a medium tile and it kinda blew up due to traffic. I really need to plan it in advance. It's also hard to get a sense of scale until you build your first couple of large cities. For example, I had no idea that high density residential buildings had 2K+ people living in them with 600+ workers. And that's just the early ones. A couple of those buildings is enough to saturate any road with traffic. I, unaware of this, had just started blindly zoning high density over my medium density and letting them develop as they will. Demand and environmental conditions were good so the big buildings started rising like wild fire. In the span of a couple of minutes I had climbed from ~100K to 160K residents. I had absolutely not planned for any of it as my expectations were well below reality. Panic set in as frantically tried to replace streets with roads and tack on a subway system to no avail. I scrapped that city. Lesson learned: don't zone high density until you are ready to handle high density. And if you are new to the game, you are not ready for high density.

I'm using RHW for my highways (or if you mean in the centre tile, it's avenues, something to do with the coding), the loop is actually 10 lanes and the straight line is 8. The whole city is one large tile (in the middle), 6 medium tiles and 10 small tiles (interspersed around the edges). Thanks for the information. Did you plan the layout of the city in general before growing it to a large pop or did you improvise as you went along?

Great. Stuff like this is what I want to see. A couple of questions: the transport map shows your city surrounded by highway with one straight line through a third of it. Yet it looks like avenues on the screenshot. Am I misinterpreting that or are you using some kind of skin for the highway? Second, how many tiles make up that city and what size are the tiles?

Thanks for this. I tried it out and it was a very noticeable increase in scrolling performance. Was managing a city that was borderline unbearable to scroll in. This fix made it playable again. FYI, I found those parameters under "Standard Hardware" not "Standard Rule".

I'm curious what the more experienced simmers out there do to incorporate rail into your mass transit network. Do you place rails parallel to major avenues, on the outskirts of towns, behind buildings, or anything else? How frequent are your stops? Do you structure your rail lines like real cities that typically have N-S, W-E lines that allow for transfers at certain points (with deviations due to terrain and demand)? If you grow your city organically from small town to large metropolis, do you find yourself bulldozing large areas to make way for the new transit lines? Do you grow your city in sections adjacent to each other, or in disparate communities that leave space between each other for mass transit once it is required? Do you pass your bulkier mass transit lines (rail, highways) through the smaller region tiles or do you make the inhabitants of those tiles travel to the larger tiles that have the room for them? Or do you just keep their jobs local? To add context to these questions, I've created 3 medium sized cities: one that is only commercial jobs, below it is a city that provides lots of R$ and to the right of the commercial city is another city that is mostly R$$ and R$$$. Both residential cities have ~80K-~100K residents. The commercial city offers 87K commercial jobs. I'm having huge traffic problems at the moment and I never planned for this much growth. I've added some rail, EL and mono as well as a highway but they've been kinda clumsily laid about. They are getting tons of use, with my ground rail having as many as 16K passengers (my poor stations). 3 EL lines that leave the R$$$ area are carrying anywhere from 9K to 13K people. A center avenue and a couple of other roads are carrying 3-4K each into the city. The commercial city makes use subway stations and I even found myself having to bring in some of those into the residential cities to give more ways of bringin in residents, though I was really hoping to keep rail/EL in the residential and subways in the commercial city. I find myself demolishing a lot of the town to bring in mass transit lines. And I'm OK with that. But it just feels like the final placement of the transit and the new buildings are clumsy at best. Realistically, it's best to plan this out from the very beginning but it kinda kills the fun of growing organically. Or I just suck at city design :-P. I'll admit I'm not much of an urban planning and architecture connoisseur so I'm fishing for some ideas for the big picture, transit wise. I read the transit guide here and lurked through some of the "show us your..." posts but most of them zoom in on specific areas. I'd love to see a complex region that uses all forms of mass transit at a high level so I can analyze it and see what lines intersect which region tiles for that types of transit, etc. Any thoughts on any of these questions and any other insight anyone can offer will be greatly appreciated.

Tried out the rain tool and it fit the bill quite nicely. Coupled with the Hole Digging Lots and it has made making small alterations to accomodate bridges much better.