[brian51]

Pierre,

thanks for your posting here ..

And it is nice we have both resumed our postings in our Cj's..

i think you always do good work with your RHW upgrades, as is the case with this most recent upgrades..

Also i see some of the short comings that you mention in regards with some of the negative effects on other networks as a result of this new RHW system ..
But of course hopefully the positives of having such an new and efficient highway system will out weight some of the negative effects that you mention here..

[pierreh]

Here is the current status of the area of Lessy that was 'perturbed' by the rework of the highway junction.

Normal view:



Zone view:



I didn't try to rebuild the crossings of the highway, so that the roads and the avenue remain interrupted, but they don't end as stubs, I adde a street on the left side, a road on the right side, to create proper links to the global city network of roadways.

1 - Since a entrance/exit ramp was no longer possible on the right side of the north-south highway, a new ramp was created on the east-west highway. The asymetry between the positions of the ramps is not ideal, but 'road traffic simply has to adjust', as the mayor said when inaugurating the new ramp.

2 - Since it was not possible to keep the railway tracks (a tunnel was out of question, and I am not familiar enough with underground railway), a new railway station was built close to the highway junction. The problem at this time is that the Sims who were used to board trains at the main railway station don't appear to have 'discovered' the location of that new station, which does not have any traffic sofar, but I hope that in time this will happen. The old unused tracks were removed, and pedestrian paths put in their place. The new station is duly served by the subway network.


The next 'construction site' in Lessy will be the rework of the last parclo highway junction:



Since the area on the north side of the junction is scarcely built, the effect of the rework should be less important than for the other junction. However, there is one challenge: the short distance between the junction and the briges on the left (eastern) side. For some odd reason, when building those highway bridges originally, I had to put 2 tiles of space between them; normally one tile is sufficient but in this case the second highway bridge couldn't be built with that spacing.

[brian51]

Pierre,

thanks for your latest update on your city

2 - Since it was not possible to keep the railway tracks (a tunnel was out of question, and I am not familiar enough with underground railway), a new railway station was built close to the highway junction. The problem at this time is that the Sims who were used to board trains at the main railway station don't appear to have 'discovered' the location of that new station, which does not have any traffic sofar, but I hope that in time this will happen. The old unused tracks were removed, and pedestrian paths put in their place. The new station is duly served by the subway network.

I was wondering on the railroad track construction ( although i realize this is after the fact and the new changes you have already implemented  ) ..
I have not used underground rail for awhile now, yet I am also curious if it would have been possible to continue that network under the RHW.

Also , I was wondering you considered using a rail viaduct or rail bridge over the RHW to continue with the rail network there ?

[Darth-Apple]

Love that you have room for the rail yard in there. Nicely designed. Love the road and transit networks that you have set up.

[pierreh]

Thanks for your posts, Brian and 'Darth-Apple'.

To Brian: my experiences with underground rail were quite limited. I remember testing some underground rail features for Steve, a long time ago. I also remember trying once to implement a section of underground rail in a city, and finding out that it didn't carry any traffic, whereas, after I changed it back to regular surface rail, it promptly showed a lot of traffic. This is why I didn't even try to replace the severed rail section by underground rail in the current case.

"Also , I was wondering you considered using a rail viaduct or rail bridge over the RHW to continue with the rail network there ? ". Where the railway tracks used to be placed, if you look at the RHW, you can see that there is a Level 0 to Level 2 height transition on the MIS ramp. There is no piece allowing railway tracks to pass over such a height transition. Therefore, a viaduct was - as far as I can determine - not possible there, and, short of massive tearing down of commercial buildings, there was no other path possible for the railway tracks across the highway. Hence my decision to build a new station for those tracks. Now if the Sims can start using that station I'll be very pleased.

[pierreh]

Meanwhile, since I work alternatively on my two clusters, I returned to the city of Prandergal in the 9-cities cluster. That city features one the busiest subway networks I ever created in the game. Making use of a very convenient feature of RTMT (all tiles of a station are functional), I have a bus-and-subway (combo) avenue station where 4 subway lines converge, using the station's 4 tiles. Here is the layout in subway view. I took traffic measurements on the various subway tunnels and I show the numbers:



I am quite pleased with the high usage of most subway branches converging at the station. And the station itself shows a usage of only about 9500 commuters - that figure, I surmise, represents Sims boarding or leaving subway trains and buses serving the station; Sims passing thru the station, or even changing from one subway line to another, are not tallied. This is actually fortunate, because otherwise the station would clearly be saturated.

[brian51]

Pierre, thanks for your (2) most recent postings in your CJ..

So concerning your first postings about the rail situation in your working city-

...as i mentioned to you over on Skype this morning,  the use of ESURE would have of course been an option  to maintain the integrity / continuity of the rail line under the RHW. We have posted about ESURE before , but since its been awhile, .. so i do not mind re opening that topic again here if you desire ?
Otherwise if your satisfied with the solutions you have provided , we can pass on this for now
ESURE certainly has both advantages and disadvantages , to be sure..

In your second posting i was quite impressed / proud of your subway set up !
that is quite amazing on your (eastern side), i totaled up about 92,000 subway traffic with the 2 line branch over there.
I think maybe just a few times i have had that much subway traffic flow thru some of my multiple line/ network systems ..
and it would be fun for me to check some time if this is the case. or if i have ever surpassed 100 K from any singular direction / traffic flow ..

[pierreh]

Brian was quite correct in mentioning that I could have solved the issue of the railway line crossing the highway interchange by using ESURE. Since the new layout, with the curtailed railway line and the new station at the outskirt of the commercial zone, didn't seem to work well - the railway station and the shortened railway line had no traffic - I decided to implement an ESURE setup, and to restore the tracks going to the city's main railway station.

This is documented with the following pictures. In the first picture we can see that the new railway station has been removed. However, due to the many tall buildings we don't really see the ESURE setup:



The second picture shows the zone view of the ESURE setup. This includes, from left to right, a surface rail to underground rail transition, an ESURE piece, the short section of subway below the lanes of the highway interchange, the second ESURE piece, and the other transition bringing the u-railway to the surface again; the u-rail sections were kept deliberately short:



The third picture shows the traffic on the railway line, with the short section of subway. (The other subway path on the upper part of the picture goes to the main railway station where Sims board the trains that pass thru the ESURE link):



I am quite pleased with that implementation, which gives me some ideas for other cases.

[brian51]

yes thanks for the beautiful post here , pierre

and full function and restoration of both the railway stations + the rail network here thru the use of the ESURE system .

i would also like to add thats a healthy amount of rail traffic this line is already carrying..

yes i would look forward to other esure systems implemented  in your city which bring other rail stations and rain traffic networks back to life again

[pierreh]

In my previous post #56 I showed an old parclo in Lessy that required a rework. This has been done, and the side effects were very minimal, the other existing roadways didn't require any change, and there were no railway tracks in the area that would necessitate an ESURE-type setup. For the record, here is the area right after the rework of the highway junction. Entrance/exit ramps on the northern branch were also modified. Commercial redevelopment has not yet taken place, this will happen next.

[brian51]

Pierre you do such excellent RHW work really..

the highlights this time for me are the avenue flups underpass + the roundabouts you show in this image..

it will be interesting to see what kinda traffic you get on this highway system once development starts to become more dense in the area-

[pierreh]

Thanks for your post, Brian.

I have found the next ESURE implementation. In the city of Deramey, a railway line had to cross a RHW in a quite constrained situation. The solution I came up with originally didn't please me but at the time I saw no other way or solving the issue. Here is how it currently looks:



That loopy routing of the railway line wastes a lot of valuable commercial space, and does not look nice.

It will be replaced by an ESURE implementation that will allow the railway line (turned into a stretch of subway) to pass directly under the highway.

[brian51]

Yes, this looks to be another ideal situation for ESURE
Keep us all updated of course how that implementation works out for you , Pierre ?

[pierreh]

I implemented an ESURE setup. I did it twice. The first implementation did not produce any traffic, but I had botched it somehow, and fixed, possibly in an incomplete way. I deleted it and did it a second time, differently in that the subway segment was longer and there was more rework of the Maxis roadways and commercial areas. It looks like this:



The main point is that this setup does not work better than the first one, after several years of running the city there is zero traffic on the link. I have decided to ignore this and leave it as is. Maybe the rail link is no longer attractive in the city because there are other ways of going around including using the subway network.

[brian51]

Pierre,

yes.. I would let it run awhile longer. And maybe you can periodically check it , to see if your getting any rail traffic

[pierreh]

It always pays to revisit old documentation - when it exists and is available. In the particular case, a visit to the SimCity Devotion site. and a little bit of searching about 'ESURE' led me to the original documentation, where I could read, in bold face, about the SURC pieces: "when you place them, the arrow should always point toward the underground rail line". Aha,  insight!

I tested this in another city, in which I found a case where I could implement an ESURE setup, and of course it worked. Then I returned to Deramey and inverted the direction of the two SURC pieces (I had them pointing to the subway side). Sure enough, very soon after that change the ESURE setup was functional. It can be seen in orange in the center of this picture:



Actually, after I had taken that picture, the link got saturated, the rail line and its ESURE subway segment reached the dreaded 65635 limit. Now I have a new issue to solve, the excessive traffic on that railwa line - it is more than before I implemented the ESURE setup. But I do not mind having to solve that type of problem.

[brian51]

Actually, after I had taken that picture, the link got saturated, the rail line and its ESURE subway segment reached the dreaded 65635 limit. Now I have a new issue to solve, the excessive traffic on that railwa line - it is more than before I implemented the ESURE setup. But I do not mind having to solve that type of problem.


thanks for another wonderful Cj post, Pierre !


One thing you could try with the saturated rail line :
( and I know we have discussed this aspect in the past )

Sometimes if you let the game run for awhile.. ( I should think 15-20 game years should be enough ...)
The rail traffic may balance out. ( drop off a bit).. Although I am not sure to what degree this may occur .. or if you will be satisfied with the amount of rail traffic this ends up at..

Keep us all posted on this..

[pierreh]

I didn't return to the railway saturation issue yet, but I am keeping it in the back of my mind.

Meanwhile I had another rather strange issue to deal with. In one of the cities, a residential area suddenly showed abandonment of several buildings, with the message that commute time was excessive (messages appear in French in my game so I don't know the exact wording in English). However, I had not severed any of the links (roads, railways, subways) in that area or anywhere else in the city. On the contrary, I generally keep updating those transportation networks in a continuous manner.

I bulldozed the abandoned buildings. The drop in population was several thousands Sims. In the picture below we can the zoning for 9 buildings, which had all been erected and were occupied, before the sudden abandonment.



Abandonment ceased after that episode, and the area is being slowly rebuilt. I changed nothing to the transportation networks because I consider that they were adequate. The reason of the sudden abandonment of the buildings in that area seems to have been a quirk of the game.