altheaphia

I had a similar problem... everything was in order, just the delivery trucks wouldn't move... any of them. I bulldozed one of the delivery trucks in my mine and placed it again and everything started moving... morale of this story is: give your delivery truck drivers the fear of god, then those lazy teamsters will get back to work.

I have spent days on this issue. I discovered the extreme profitability of recycling centers on the day of release (lucky I got to play on release day? /shrug) Although I didn't really write down exactly how much it was, it was something in the order of hitting 1 million simoleans before hitting any significant population. As most people know, the specific play strategy was to build the recycling center, hook-up a trade depot, make sure none of them run out of storage space, and clear/manageable road traffic. One day they changed it (same day they removed cheetah speed). Recycling centers no longer functioned properly. Maybe because they attempted to nerf the abonormal amounts of money you can gain from recycling alone? My notes: Processing plants no longer process as fast: Currently, 4 collection trucks with clear traffic and plenty to collect can overwhelm a recycling center running 4 processing lines. At first I thought that maybe you needed a specific set of lines (e.g. some 4-combination of plastic, alloy, metal) but that's doesn't seem to matter. So the question is, why even have the ability to send out 16 collection trucks? This feels like they tweaked the processing of recycling materials and slowed it down to stem the tide of simoleans that can be accomplished. Alternative speculation; at release I used nothing but cheetah, so maybe llama speed imposed under cheetah selection is causing the proportions to be all wrong? Collection trucks conflict with each other and go all over the place: When you have a lot of collection trucks out there; Sometimes a few of them are all going to the same building, and depending on road layout, they skip around a lot, drive right by the next apparent closest collection and go somewhere else for the next stop. I have seen them all follow each other around and with clear traffic, create a traffic jam among themselves. I did however, at one point, see two trucks leap-frogging collection points down the street... it was at least amusing to watch. It's SimCity's nature to not have any collection of sims to have a collective plan and because of this, it cripples systems like recycling once a city's population becomes large. "Waiting for collection shift to start": First it should be noted that at no time a shift was imposed early on, at a low enough population but high enough to have plenty of bins out there, I had 2 trucks in constant, around-the-clock collection... but that changes when the city gets big. I could see that the collection shift is defined by some variables, but I couldn't determine all of them. The collection shift always started at around 5AM. I was able to have one or more of my 4 recycling stores open with at least 0.3 tons of space which kept the processing going on all centers and collection trucks out as long as possible... but at some point they stop collecting and return to a garage at end of the collection shift. On my particular test city I had 4 centers. With 6 trucks they ended their shift at about 2AM but left a lot more to be collected the next day. With 16 the shift ended at around 5PM but didn't really keep up with the daily new bins. With 58 (fifty-eight) the shift ended at around 8-10AM... so more trucks just ended the shift earlier and had a minimal effect of how complete your collection was. Once a collection shift is imposed, a large enough city will almost always put out more bins than your shift can collect. While I was able to get a beat on this and slowly reduce my overage, it was micro-management to the max... which brings me to my next observation... Paying for time not working! Once the collection shift is over the production lines work for a little longer... about the same time they take to spool up. So If my collection shift was over by noon, I was still paying hourly expenses for centers, their collection trucks and delivery trucks for the next ~15 hours with them doing nothing! So of course I turned them off, which saves me ~10,000 simoleans an hour for 4 centers... but I gotta say... doing that every day is more annoying than entertaining. FYI if you turn off your recycling centers to save simoleans, you must turn them back on way before 5AM to allow them to, "hire workers" again... in my city this took about 1.5 hours... I was turning them back on at 3AM. "Producing Plastic, Alloy, and Metal" but no processing is actually occurring: Yes I have run across this... while bulldozing the entire center may work, I was able to get it working again by placing a 2nd one. There may be other things you could try, such as bulldozing 1 delivery truck (while editing the center) and replacing it. Since a large accumulation of recycling bins makes places germy, recycling can't just be ignored/not implemented. At the current game's code version recycling is quickly becoming a very not fun and rather annoying part of the game.