Buses: a word of warning

[novapaddy]

I have been reading the other posts and taking the advice of more experienced players.

A couple mentioned warnings about using mods. I had been using mostly buildings and some tourist attractions mostly with a few intersections etc.

Note: In my last game, I had a small area with a dedicated bus station. I had 91 buses and I had already set the Budget at only 50% to try to minimise the amount of them. At times I had whole streets with buses bumper to bumper....

I removed all my buildings mods, intersections, anything that was built. I went back to an earlier savegame. Now I notice a similar area in size, has a bus station, has 13 buses and the budget is at 100%. I would say 13 buses is about right for the size of the area.

How the the previous bus station managed to compute 91 buses I have no idea....

 

[ivmichael]

AFAIK the number of buses is based on the length of routes and number of stops ...

 

[palemale53]

I had my bus routes going from suburbs to my main industrial area. This got saturated with the damn things. When I checked, each route had about 24 buses and only carried about 10 passengers a week. I decided that allowing the cars was the lesser evil. Sadly it is very hard to adjust bus routes once you have upgraded to high density areas.

I am thinking of a spoke and hub approach, with one route per suburb collecting passengers. A circular route would visit one of the stops on each route and going out to the industrial area. I had actually thought of doing this with the metro.

Probably not going to work. The number of passengers is disappointing considering the number of buses.

 

[ItalianGuy]

A screenshot would be useful. I use tons of mods and they don't damage the bus network.

 

[novapaddy]

UPDATE: I must say I think it is great that I am lying in bed, reading posts etc on my nexus, I mean I do not have to be sitting in front of my PC anymore to interact with paradox!

Anyway, I was playing my game, decided to remove all building mods, I still have mods like the one that automatically destroys burnt buildings or gives more info etc. First I noticed the bus issue.NOW... I noticed that when a building goes on fire, fire brigade attends as normal,BUT the building looks destroyed and just goes back to normal again . I mean I have everlasting buildings...

 

[palemale53]

It is hard to see the road when placing the bus stops, and avoiding the tendency of the route going all over the map. I will admit to playing only 38 hours so far with a peak population of about 30 k. I am still experimenting with strategies that avoid problems. My layout is square and my road systems are ugly and ad-hoc. The traffic flow is better, except for those wretched buses!

 

[Arthasus]

Yeah, we definitely need a way to adjust number of buses on the lines.

 

[Stargatemunky]

find the choke points for traffic and avoid putting stops there. then you can tacitly get the stops to areas near there to reduce the traffic.

buses are not like sim city4 people wil walk a way to get to them so their area of effect is somewhat larger. just make sure there are enough stops for the job points and people will travel to theminstead of using cars.

ultimately a metro is your better option for dealing with public transport

buses are useful for rresidential to commercial i've found

not an expert opinion

 

[Puuh]

I noticed that when a building goes on fire, fire brigade attends as normal,BUT the building looks destroyed and just goes back to normal again . I mean I have everlasting buildings...

Normal behaviour without using mods ... The building recovers after the firemen successfully fought the fire. If they're to late or don't show up at all, the house will end up as a pile of ashes and not recover.

 

[JerkyJerry]

#1 Bus trouble issue:
Mayors overlapping routes

It is done in real life; don't do it here. One road one route. Place more than one bus route on the same road and watch your problems multiply. Change it to one road one route and watch your bus issues disappear!

Or you can think it is something far more complicated and bang your heads against the wall.

 

[Person012345]

find the choke points for traffic and avoid putting stops there. then you can tacitly get the stops to areas near there to reduce the traffic.

buses are not like sim city4 people wil walk a way to get to them so their area of effect is somewhat larger. just make sure there are enough stops for the job points and people will travel to theminstead of using cars.

ultimately a metro is your better option for dealing with public transport

buses are useful for rresidential to commercial i've found

not an expert opinion

This is correct. Bus stops don't need to be clustered in a gamey way, people will walk realistic distances to get to public transport I generally use them for connecting up metro stations with less popular destinations that don't warrant their own metro link.

 

[palemale53]

For what it's worth, I build my suburbs with a single winding road with a single entry point to minimize the number of intersections. I leave the other end two grid squares from another road so that I can put a metro station between them. I usually put a path or park in the corner to help pedestrians - they seem to want to approach from a particular direction. I then put a short road near the entrance for the buses to turn around. I then define a single bus route from there to the end of the road and back again, using all the bus stops. early in the game I define another bus route joining all the end points to my industrial area. Once I have my metro up, I delete that route. This works well, and avoids my earlier problems. I sometimes have two metro stations for a suburb, especially if the endpoints are far apart.

 

[palemale53]

I'm still learning. It occurred to me while I was writing the last post, that I should define similar routes around my industrial areas.

 

[ItalianGuy]

That's the most important thing, palemale, because industry and offices need mass transit to level up.

 

[palemale53]

Well, I do have the metro running there... not that I have much coverage. That is for the buses!

 

[palemale53]

I did notice that some factories want more city services, so I added the clinic and police station.

 

[Arthasus]

you can also add school (which for some reason also makes industries happy)

 

[palemale53]

Weird!

 

[Blais]

AFAIK the number of buses is based on the length of routes and number of stops ...

And the budget.

 

[Stargatemunky]

the easiest way to cut ut traffic is cut out the ability for it to function. i.e. design a pure dependence on public transport.

i have a 2-3000 pop district that has about 2-3 cars at any one time on it thanks to paths and metro links

you wil have to evolve your city to do this as to create demand but it means no major congestion on your industries either and utter perfection for residential and commercial