Bus not efficient

[Digitalkoch]

What can I do to make my bus routes get more money than costs?

Ive got e.g. 9 buses on a route and all are fully occupied. But it always costs me more than income.

around 150 in / 600 costs.

The only efficient is metro in/out.

 

[Turjan]

Don't worry about public transport costs. The indirect positive effects on your income, mostly by upgrading buildings which means much higher tax income, pretty much always outweigh the costs.

 

[deanwebb]

Any transit system that connects residential to commercial is going to do well. See if you need routes like that. Connecting like zone to like zone will make for an unpopular route.

 

[Digitalkoch]

Oh I see.

Yes buses are the one thing. My realy bigger issue is the monorail costs me around 4000 but brings around 500. Train is similar. so around 8000. I am not sure if it is worth the costs.

 

[Turjan]

Oh I see.

Yes buses are the one thing. My realy bigger issue is the monorail costs me around 4000 but brings around 500. Train is similar. so around 8000. I am not sure if it is worth the costs.

Same answer as before. Especially train budgets can look very scary, but it's nothing to be scared about. Tax income in this game comes from land value. Most buildings that you plop already increase your tax income by a substantial margin of their own costs. However, then you have vast area benefits. Look how buildings in the vicinity upgrade when you place a train station. Getting traffic off the roads (especially goods) can also be a substantial benefit. Trains will always lose many multiples of the income you get out of them, but it doesn't matter. Their fringe benefits are pretty much always worth it, as long as they serve at least some purpose.

 

[Digitalkoch]

Great thanks for help.

I added some more stations and already see the benefit in general income.

My metro is on the limit. And I increased budget to the max. What can I do to get more subway vehicles?

 

[Turjan]

In my experience, you can raise the metro budget (both the general metro one and the individual line one) beyond the limit where it makes sense. If your metro trains have to wait for ages to get to the platform, it's not pretty. Just build another metro line. As soon as you have a network, traffic usually distributes well enough.

 

[Promethian]

You should never need to increase your budget. You can increase the vehicles on individual lines without increasing your costs. Do that. In fact most of the time I reduce the overall budget because of the ability to set individual lines up.

Also buses are the mass transit that is easiest to make profitable. That small amount you are paying stays that way forever. You never need to make another depot.

 

[Turjan]

Also buses are the mass transit that is easiest to make profitable. That small amount you are paying stays that way forever. You never need to make another depot.

It had always been that way, but when I looked at my public transport budget recently, this seems to have changed. Well, not the part with "you need only one depot", but the costs.

 

[scpool1986]

I’ve never measured efficiency on the amount of income a transit line brings in but rather on the percentage of car trips saved. This can be found in the line overview. Another example of if your transit system is getting cims to and from where they want to go is by looking at the crowds at the stops. I’ve attached an example of a stop that is being over utilized and could potentially cause problems on its line. It’s on a tram line that already is running with the ratio of 1:1 (1 tram to 1 stop). This stop always has 200-300 cims waiting even though I’ve used the Improved Public Transit mod to increase their capacity to the max (195).

 

[deanwebb]

I like to have metro lines laid out in circles, with clockwise and counter-clockwise routes. I find that I can have trains equal to up to 2x the number of stations on a route before I have waits for trains to clear, provided I also have enough distance between stations, roughly 80 squares or so.

Having commercial zones on either side of a major tourist entry point will help to keep tourists from overloading one route.

 

[Steve B.]

Is there anywhere in the world where public transit of any type pays for itself? This is certainly not the case where I live. All governments that I know of subsidize mass transit.

 

[Turjan]

Is there anywhere in the world where public transit of any type pays for itself? This is certainly not the case where I live. All governments that I know of subsidize mass transit.

Japan, I think. Probably due to the immense population density in cities.

 

[deanwebb]

The city of Curitiba in Brazil, I know.

And, again, in the game, if you use mass transit to link residential to other zones or to feed into other mass transit, you will have some very profitable metro and bus lines, indeed.