[pierreh]

Well, your latest comments about underground rail. Brian, convince me that its use is rather limited, and that it cannot really help much for intercity traffic.

Speaking of which... here is more about the Marlande-Desognes intercity traffic, where we saw in my previous post that the single subway link was saturated. A second link was implemented and put to use by running the cities. Here is the view of that new link from the Desognes side:



... and the surprise there - at least for me - is that the link is used for outgoing traffic! Sims residing in Desognes are going out, either to Marlande, or even to Arcens and further, to find work. I followed back to the origin of that outgoing flow: it comes from residences on the opposite side of the city! (Sims can't find work in their city of residence, and have to 'migrate' to other cities? Questionnable...)


Then I looked at the 'old' subway link, that had shown saturation on the Marlande side:



It is not, or no longer, saturated, although it remains close to the 64K limit. And there again, the flow is outgoing!

However, I only ran each of the 2 cities involved in this traffic for a few game months. It is a known fact that it can take a much longer time (a few game years at least) for the traffic simulator to adjust, stabilize and produce properly balanced flows and figures. Therefore I'll let some game time pass, before taking new measurements. Meanwhile I'll look at other issues in the global cluster.

EDIT, a while later

I ran Desognes for some more months. The 2 pictures above have to be discounted, they don't show the whole picture. Traffic on the subway links goes in both directions. I'll report about this later.