Sprottenham

Some screenshots of station placement in city A: View towards south (city M). The train station closest to the border ('upper left') was placed there after reading CorinaMaries post. There are two paralell railway lines here, partly tunnel, on each side of the main road... they temporarily end abruptly, waiting for me to return to this city when it becomes its turn later. View towards south (city M), this would be the umm... the southeastern corner of city A. The four lane road exit next to the power plant is the entrance that becomes an avenue and ends up in the roundabout on Screenshot 6 in my first post. The railway extends a little bit more outside the picture in the bottom left to end at a station close to some commercial tiles, as well as the residential area that also extends downwards outside the picture. About bus stops: I may have overlooked adding bus stops in some areas of City M, I will take note to look into that. I usually start every city without any kind of public transport, their initial most rural stage with some homes and farmland. Then as they grow and get more traffic I eventually add bus stops every alternate block in a chessboard like pattern. Yes, I do have a tendency to build very much on a grid... it kind of makes the most sense as long as the terrain is not to hilly... thanks for the input.

Thanks for the quick reply. I think I get it. So figure out some way to make the road/avenues in City A less attractive than the railway stations. Supposedly by placing railway stations closer to the residential areas than the road exits. The problem then lies in City A and not in City M. Though, I do also suspect that if I go in to city A and play it for a while, the sims there will eventually start using the railway stations there, because I did that as a test and they did start to use them. However, I did not save seeing as how there is a certain order in which I play through every city on the regional map, and it won't be City A's turn for a long time yet... I only went in there quickly and plopped down some railway and a few stations for them to use, without actually running the simulation, before returning to City M. So maybe it will partially solve itself come next round, and then with some more careful consideration of station placement, I might be onto something. One issue could be though, that city A is on a small tile and it is already quite filled up, hence making a perfect station placement a little tricky. I don't like to demolish already built up areas unless it is more or less absolutely necessary...and removing the road exits is not desirable. Moving them to a different spot on the map is also going to be tricky to do without some serious rearrangement of the town layout... this is what happens when cities are being built without to much of a coherent plan for the future. Interesting insight also in how the sims think when looking for a job. Ideally I would like to keep the intercity commuting to a minimum, so from here on I might also need to work a little harder to give everyone a job within each city...

So, the situation is this. I have a city with approx. 14 000 sims that sits inbetween two other cities that sims want to commute inbetween. Let's call this 'City M' (for middle). I learnt this when I connected the roads that enter City M on it's north side (from City A) to the road network of City M that was already connected to City B on it's eastern side. So it looks like this: A | M <=> B None of these cities are very big, city A has a population of some 20 000 sims, and city B is somewhere inbetween A and M (I think). Nonetheless, the roads became heavily congested... first step was to upgrade everything to avenues, but it was still heavily congested. So I built a railway connecting the cities A, M and B, with passenger and freight stations in all three cities. This worked somewhat... except for between cities A and M. For whatever reason, the commuters from city A do not use the railway stations in their own city, but prefer to drive along the avenue to the nearest station in city M before travelling on by train to city B... which still causes congestion on the road from city A and to that station. I have NAM installed, but still.. I suppose they do think this is the fastest route, even though the rail would be more efficient, though not necessarily shorter, as it would get rid of the congestion.. I'm not expecting the game to take into account placement of stations in city A when I'm playing in city M (though it actually does kind of seem like it). It should be enough to have a rail connection and passenger stations in city A, right...? And the station placement in city B is not that much better, but the problem does not exist on the border between M and B.. However, the final station in city M before entering city B is placed next to a street in a residential neighbourhood (further away from the avenue), whereas the first station in city M (when entering from city A) is, well, also placed next to a street in a small industrial area, however, it is close to the avenue, and also has a longer stretch of this avenue before getting to the station. Sorry I didn't get screenshots, but I can get them as soon as I return to the game. Screenshot 1: One of the railway entry/exit points to the north. It's usage of four stems from people commuting from City M to city A. The road usage is mostlyl people commuting from City A to City B (through City M). Screenshot 2: The railway station in the tiny industrial area. Railway usage jumps up from 4 to 2530 after passing the station. Screenshot 3: The railway station on the eastern side closest to City B. Rail usage is now up to 3061. Well, I don't know.. I suppose if I wanted to make them use the railway all the way from city A to B, I would need to make the closest railway station to city A harder to get to.. or just give up and build a highway connection between cities A and M (which I do not want at this stage)... not that building a highway between A and M would be to difficult. City M is not particularly developed on its northern side, though it would require a little bit of demoliton in City A. Screenshot 4: Overview picture 1, southeastern corner. Screenshot 5: Overview picture 2, northern border with City A. There are three railway entrances/exits on the border with City A along this edge... afterwards I added another entrance/exit to City A2, which is another city to the east of city A, and that railway did get used as intended... Screenshot 6: Traffic along the avenue towards the railway station. Anyway.. anyone else encountered something like this, and if so, (how)did you solve it?

Hi, so I just recently got SimCity 3000 on Steam from the sale and have been playing it for a while now, also replacing a few buildings of my own here and there made with the building architect tool. Then I made a replacement for the water pumping station, since there is a lot of them in certain sections of my town and their appearance started to annoy me... however, this is where I encountered a bump in the road.. For some reason or other there is no button to replace the water pumping station with a custom buidling, and it's the same for the water tower.. Yet other utilites such as power stations has a replace button... so... is there really no way to replace the water utilities? Well, I would guess so, but I'm making this post with the slight hope that someone clever may know about some workaround.. I don't see any logical reason why water utilities in particular can't be replaced...