Possibly stupid question...

[donpost]

I'm new to the game, and just having a go at the first campaign city. In the bottom right there are two distinct neighbourhoods of housing and jobs, so my first though was to connect those up with a loop of tram, and then use bus lines to extend coverage over the whole of both neighbourhoods. So the idea is passengers will use the tram to travel between the neighbourhoods and then swap to a bus to reach their specific destination if its outside the range of the tram stations.

However, I've been watching a tram station next to a bus station, and not once have I seen a passenger transfer from one service to the other. Am I doing something wrong?

Here is a pic of the area I have been observing:

 

[Senap]

They most likely want to go to other areas (read: islands) in the city. People in this game don't necessarily live close to their workplaces.

 

[douglasrac]

Welcome to the forum donpost!

Only not asked questions are stupid.
Industrial areas are not the best place to start with. You get very empty lines. I would start at downtown where you see a lot of commercial places. There you get shoppers plus workers.

I would recommend the CiM Interactive Guide for starters.

 

[wada314]

Welcome to CiM2, and welcome to the first trap of the game.
The blue collar people are very poor and they don't like to use multiple kinds of lines. If you change the tram line to bus line, then the total ticket price will become much more cheap (They can use a single zone bus ticket, which is almost half price of the sum of the bus ticket and the tram ticket), so they will start to use it, but then you can get very less income.
I strongly recommend you to forget about that poor south-east area, and start developing much more rich people's area. A good starting point will be connecting the east or west side residential area with the central islands by ferries, and connect buses/trolleys/trams with the ferry landings, which will promise you much better income.