simneal

any opinions on the best way to handle garbage? i have a couple of cities starting to get up into the 100,000+ population range and garbage is becoming an issue. the waste-to-power plant is overloaded, recycling plants don't eliminate the problem, and neighborhood deals are ineffective. are landfills the only effective way to deal with garbage in a larger city? i've never really had a successful landfill. they always seem to take up too much area for how much garbage they can hold. i feel like in this size city i'd need a 10x10 block for all the garbage. and i'm not a fan of losing that real estate for obvious reasons. also, can someone explain the "neighbor deal" screen? the export rate goes up to 125 or something like that, but it isn't really specific what that means. is that tons/month? when enacting or cancelling the deal it doesn't seem to affect either the usage or capacity by 125 tons.

as this is my first post ever here, i feel obligated to write a brief CV: i've been playing simcity for a long time. played SC4 when it first came out and didn't do very well. then picked it up again about a year ago, and had a problem where it kept crashing so i got frustrated and stopped playing (seriously, try playing SC4 for 30 minutes and then having the game crash without saving!) i finally figured out the problem. has to do with multi-threaded processors and is a simple fix. now i'm hooked again. i'm playing SC4 STOCK. no mods. i have the deluxe version which includes all the patches as well as rush hour. on to my topic of discussion: as i grow more experienced in city layout i would like to start adding rail to my cities. in real life i am a very big fan of rail for INTERcity travel. of course i am also a proponent of INTRAcity commuter rail, but that will be a future project. right now i have three cities that are connected by rail and all three have passenger rail stations. as you could probably guess, i see 0% usage on the info screens for these stations. however in one city i DO have passenger rail traffic on the rail (despite the 0% usage). i would like to encourage my sims (or make it easier for them) to travel to other cities by rail. any tips? i have done some reading but i don't see anything that is very helpful. for instance, does a passenger rail station require a parking garage? or can sims park their cars at the station? (the station is not near the residential sector) will sims use passenger rail for INTRAcity commuting if it's convenient to them? in a small town it seems more convenient to everyone to use roads for the time being. but as i'm not that good at SC4 (yet), INTRAcity mass transit is something that i will have to eventually figure out if i want my cities to grow. right now i usually level out at the ~100,000pop area. anyway, some advice or insight on how passenger rails work would be appreciated. thanks!