[pierreh]

In this post I’ll deal with two issues.

First the simplest one : the issue of the airport that has no passengers at all (posts # 92 and following ones). For some reason, when plopping the airport, the arrow is on one of the smaller sides, and not, as one would expect, on the large side where the terminal is. In the city where the airport had no passengers I had neglected to put a road along the small side with the arrow. After I did so, very soon the airport had passengers. Checking my cities I saw that I had a few other similar cases, I dealt with them in the same way and now all airports have passengers. Issue closed.

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The other issue has already been described earlier in this CJ : the intense inter-city traffic and its effects on the various means of transportation. This is the bane of regional playing. At present, what bothers me the most is not so much the difficulty of dealing with the traffic volumes, but rather, that the way the inter-city flows develop and evolve over time is, for all intents and purposes, unpredictable – at least this is how I experience it.

Between some cities the flows are relatively minor, while between other cities those flows are very large. Moreover, the ‘mix’ of means of transportation varies a lot : between some cities there is an enormous flow on highways and a minimal use of railway, with subway somewhere in between ; between other cities there is little traffic on the highways and an excessive usage of subways. And so on.

Since the game is exclusively driven by algorithms there cannot be any randomness in its behavior. Everything happens according to a large number of specific and precise rules set by the game’s creators. The point is that the quite complex interplay of these many rules yields very varied results. It would take an incredible amount of time and patience to start understanding why a certain set of actions (zoning, plopping, placing of highways, ramps, streets, parks. etc) produces this effect rather than that one, and so on.

Here is an example. The 2 cities involved are Salveille and Polsay. Salveille, being in a corner of the cluster, is only connected to Polsay. The links are highway, railway and subway. The pics show the situation on the Salveille side.

The highway link is an 8-lanes highway (RHW-8S), that is quite saturated in the direction from Salveille to Polsay. I tallied the 2 traffic queries (one per tile).

The numbers for cars and buses are rather high. I have already argued earlier that the number for buses means ‘Sims traveling by bus’, and not the total number of buses on the highway ; for cars I am not so sure, possibly there is only one Sim per car, I don’t count much on car sharing…

Also, I could upgrade the highway from RHW-8S to RHW-10S, but imho the differential in highway capacity between 8 and 10 lanes is not sufficient to justify that upgrade.

The only railway link is moderately used :

Here too I think that we have to interpret the number as ‘Sims travelling by train’.

There are 4 subway links, shown in the next 2 pictures

Two links are properly used with a good balance, the two others are quite moderately, and even very lightly, used. It is possible that the underused link doesn’t go, in Polsay, where Sims want to go. I’ll try to reroute it, to get a better usage.

This situation has been going on for a while. I am not quite sure how I can reduce the usage of the highway and increase that of the 2 other transportation means, but of course I’ll continue to fiddle with the issue.

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Finally I should mention that the issue of diverging numbers between the building query and the route query for commercial buildings (discussed in posts # 84 and following) is still open. I had a discussion about it with Brian in Skype a while ago. I’ll return to it soon.