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FrostPegasus

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Aug 17, 2007
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Is it just me, or is there just way too much traffic on the roads? My buses (and trams) are pretty much useless and there's angry people at the dozens at every stop.

To illustrate, the picture below is from the Amsterdam map. One bus line, 7 buses all neatly following eachother, and hopelessly stuck in gridlock.

http://img218.imageshack.us/i/traffico.png/
Note: I did not put the image in a direct link because it's simply too big.
 
The traffic is pretty busy, especially in Amsterdam, since the bridges make bottlenecks for the traffic. When you get better coverage, the traffic starts to diminish, since people will rather take take public transport option. If you can afford it, metro helps a lot.
 
I would agree. Even playing the first campaign part, Berlin in the 20s, the city is full of cars. My busses are stuck, my trams are stuck, I can't afford new equipment, took me a year to get that mission "transport 50 tram customers" completed because my trams got constantly stuck eventhough I tried to avoid major choke points when laying the track. Same thing when I tried Tutorial City in Sandbox mode. The city hall area becomes gridlocked and nobody gets anywhere and there's no way I can afford a metro-system at the beginning of the game.

Edit: So the problem is that you can't get enough money to increase your coverage to lower the amount of traffic flowing through the city because all the vehicles you buy get stuck in the traffic for weeks, or at least a novice like me can't.
 
I'm playing the campaign though, so I have a set amount of funds and I'm following the tasks given to me. Problem is that, because my buses and trams get stuck in traffic, I lose more money than I make.
 
I'm going to echo this concern: In a lot of cases, traffic irrevocably snarls to the point that running bus and tram service is pointless. I even ran into this in the tutorial town quite a bit: I'd have 90% coverage in the city, and yet the two main streets would gridlock to the point that my bus service would get permanently bottlenecked. Now, I'm going to grant that some of it might be related to pedestrians crossing the street, but the game also makes it impractical to run a "New York"-style metro with stops on opposing corners (there's often not enough space on a corner, for example, and most of my metro stops have started winding up in the middle of a city block).
 
I think the traffic is a very nice element to force you to plan where you build stops. I think the problem is more, how much it costs to upkeep busses and trams. The staff and vehicle maintance are very expensive.
 
I didn't spend much time playing Berlin... just goofing around on the Tutorial Town sandbox before I left for work this morning... but in the short time I did play, I realized the metro is really the only way to go. I had to take two high dollar loans to get a subway established, but it takes most of the strain off the roads and makes trams/busses somewhat bearable. I ran the metro between the college, city hall, railway, and stadium... then branched off small bus routes from those hubs.
 
Playing the Helsinki map right now, 1945. It's completely impossible to play because of the small roads. I got a city-wide traffic jam, and only 3-4 of my tram stops are orange, rest are red.

I'm going to let it run for a couple of months, see if the saturation of trams are enough to help ease off the traffic, or if it's a self perpetuating problem (unhappiness because of trams stuck in traffic leads to more people going by car, leads to more stuck trams...).

Edit: It didn't resolve itself, leading me to conclude that trams and buses are unusable as a first choice on the Helsinki map.
 
Last edited:
SaOk,
The problem is that the snarls are almost universal when you can't slip a metro stop in because there's no room. I was able to fix most of the Amsterdam problem when I gave myself a large starting budget and simply started with the metro, but found myself overwhelmed by one station's popularity when I put in a second line to interchange with it (which brings up the idea of larger stations to allow more trains to use the platforms).

With that said, you raise an important point: Though I know the game isn't striving for detailed realism, how many public transport systems outside the US actually turn a profit? I know that within the US today, absent subsidies you'd only have public transportation in a few big cities such as New York, and in some scenarios an annual service quality-based subsidy might not be a bad idea in some scenarios/situations.

Edit: Really, I think the answer is going to be "Metro or bust" as things stand now. Once you get that going, you add in the bus lines and whatnot to supplement it...but even there, running realistic line interchanges is simply impossible now.
 
Hi All,
I didn't test the full game yet, I'm still in the office and will test it in the evening.
But I have spent some hours with the beta. And I want to tell you that this is interesting thing with that game. If you just place your line where you want and there is no traffic jams, it won't be too interesting to play.
In my opinion before building any line you have first to be well aware with the city and the most jammed streets and so on.
I also build my lines without taking this into consideration. I build them where the most interesting places are located and I am trying to cover every building in the line's range.
But maybe this is not the case, maybe you have to plan the lines very carefully and choose the best route.
I didn't test the final game yet and this is just my suggestion and my opinion :)
 
Got it from steam so can´t play it right now. But when the game "leaked" in the beginning of the preorder I couldn´t play the first mission on Berlin because of this. So I started a sandbox in Amsterdan and saw the traffic jams were just as bad. But after building a subway from the airport to downtown the gridlock gradually reduced until things were moving again and buses and trams were possible. At the time I tought this was a problem with the early code since it made starting with buses and trams impossible...
 
After playing the first campaign scenario for a few hours, and starting over a couple of times, I tend to agree that there's too much traffic. Building the lines on less busy streets is a no-brainer, but it's pretty much impossible to completely avoid using the main roads, which means that you will get caught in a gridlock anyway.

I still haven't tried the metro, though, but I dislike the idea of having to rely on a metro.
 
the idea is to create your own connections from one line to another.

If you setup a tram line, Do not build too many stops ! on the other hand, make sure some of those TRAM stops have Bus Stops close by, going toward another direction.

Your citizens WILL commute from one stop to another with no problem.

Using this method, you will clearly see that your circulation is now clearer.

Also, when starting a new scenario, try looking for the major building... For example a simple line of bus with 2 stops going from the hotel to the train station will generate a LOT of money, From there, you can add 1 more stop close to your tram line, therefore you will setup a new commute stop and make more money.
 
When steam leaked, I tried that Helsinki mission with elevated rail & tram combination, Making some busiest routes with elevated rail was enough to cut the traffic for trams to work properly.
 
the idea is to create your own connections from one line to another.

If you setup a tram line, Do not build too many stops ! on the other hand, make sure some of those TRAM stops have Bus Stops close by, going toward another direction.

Your citizens WILL commute from one stop to another with no problem.

Using this method, you will clearly see that your circulation is now clearer.

Also, when starting a new scenario, try looking for the major building... For example a simple line of bus with 2 stops going from the hotel to the train station will generate a LOT of money, From there, you can add 1 more stop close to your tram line, therefore you will setup a new commute stop and make more money.

Money is not the problem. The problem is traffic.

I've just tried Berlin map, and I managed to keep down traffic a bit by building a main vein of tram tracks, supported by smaller arteries of bus routes. I was going for something like a fish-bone plan, with the tram line being the spine. Then the traffic jams from the parts of the city that wasn't covered by my network spilled over onto my bus routes, blocking them up and making the passengers angry. This made more people take their cars instead, now creating traffic jams on my bus routes! These new traffic jams even influenced my tram lines a little, making it a huge, unprofitable, angry mess.
 
Tried giving myself enough money for a metro line at the start of my new Berlin sandbox. Played about 10 years, steady profit all the way and a slowly expanding metro network. But my buslines always turn out to be nearly useless because of the heavily congested roads. So, buses and trams are irrelevant. That takes out quite a large part of the gameplay, and I think I'll wait for a patch or two to continue playing.
 
Tried giving myself enough money for a metro line at the start of my new Berlin sandbox. Played about 10 years, steady profit all the way and a slowly expanding metro network. But my buslines always turn out to be nearly useless because of the heavily congested roads. So, buses and trams are irrelevant. That takes out quite a large part of the gameplay, and I think I'll wait for a patch or two to continue playing.

I got the same problem, establish a metro line with bus stop nearby so people can travel further. 200 people waiting impossible to get away already 15 busses on the line but the traffic jam from my own busses makes the lines useless
 
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