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Speed bonus/penalties and city roads

Started by isidoro, December 22, 2013, 11:18:47 PM

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isidoro

I guess that the goal of the speed bonus/penalty system is to force the player to update their networks to keep pace with the times.  With the advent of new vehicles, the speed penalty of the old ones make them unprofitable compared with their running costs and the player must therefore upgrade the vehicles and/or the ways.

But here comes the problem with road vehicles and city roads.  Since you can't upgrade city roads, the speed limit of all road city vehicles is 50km/h and, with the pass of time they get very unprofitable, even the modern ones.  You end up with a lot of difficulties to make a profit from local delivery inside the city, even for passengers, not to mention mail and goods.

If you tweak "bonus_basefactor" in settings, you can alleviate the problem somewhat up to the point that if you set it to 1000, no speed penalty is given at all.  But it is difficult to set, since it affects all kinds of goods.  You get milk right, for instance, but then you get a huge profit from coal...

I don't know the solution (if there is one).  Some of you surely will point that that is a pakset dependent problem...

Maybe there is the possibility to mark certain vehicles as "local delivery ones", with a maximum speed always lower than 50km/h and that are kept away from the bonus/penalty system.  To make them obsolete with time and not lose the upgrading incentive, the modern ones can have greater capacities, which would be good for later congested city roads.

Finally, the bonus/penalty system also doesn't work when you play without a time line, even for a  well balanced pakset.  Profitable vehicles usually have greater capacities and aren't suited for the low business in the early stages of the game...


kierongreen

Paksets can have buses (and other vehicles) with a speed of 50km/h which have low running costs. Heavy goods vehicles generally don't have maximum speeds much above this anyway, and buses offering intracity transport are usually distinct from coaches which offer intercity transport.

Ters

pak64 has this problem. New buses get bigger and faster, which are both completely useless for many of my bus lines. Even worse is that their acceleration is poorer, so they have problems reaching even 50 km/h before the next stop or between intersections. Thankfully, the introduction of higher capacity bus stops some time ago helped a lot on the problem that the buses were too big. Fortunately, in pak64, the old buses don't become (too) unprofitable, so I usually keep using them in small towns and on suburban routes.

It's a difficult thing to get right this. If you have a factory outside a city, and a consumer in the city center, you want the trucks to go faster than 50 km/h when possible. And if there is a fast road penetrating into the core of the city, it should be beneficial to use that one rather than have the truck use the slow (and narrow) city streets. Using a city bus with a maximum speed of 50 km/h for intercity traffic on 100 km/h roads should also have a penalty. Such things are easy for a human to understand, but to try and make a set of clear rules that a computer can understand is not so easy.

kierongreen

Ah but long distance road transport most effectively competes with rail when journey times are similar. That means a route mainly on motorways - whether that's because it serves terminals on the outskirts of towns or whether the motorways extend into urban centres. Where coaches have to travel for a long time at low speeds through towns that dramatically decreases the price you expect to pay for tickets.

The penalty for using slow buses on fast roads is the congestion that results surely?

Ters

Quote from: kierongreen on December 23, 2013, 12:49:31 PM
The penalty for using slow buses on fast roads is the congestion that results surely?

That depends on the number of vehicles per road. At some point, there is also a pressure to switch from road to rail or boat just to reduce the number of vehicles per line, not because of economy, but to make it easier to control.

However, fast roads are not just for connecting two big cities with a huge number of passengers going between them, but also to connect transportation hubs with remote attractions, or (depending on pak set) swarms of low capcity factories producing (or consuming) products that quickly degrade (like unprocessed food). Neither of these may require huge numbers of vehicles, or a smaller numbers of high-capacity vehicles, but they should be fast.

Isaac Eiland-Hall

I think it goes back to an EU vs. US perspective, and is an old argument, so I hesitate to bring it up too much: but if we had a way of protecting high-speed roads going into a city, it would help this situation. I'd be hard-pressed to find a large city in the US that didn't have at least one interstate freeway running through it. They're expensive, but necessary because of the way the US developed.

To simulate the expense of building freeways in cities, protecting the roads should be expensive to build - not as expensive as tunnels, perhaps, but of that general idea. After all, nowadays, we can build road tunnels under cities, too. Which I suppose is a workaround for now.

IgorEliezer

Quote from: Isaac.Eiland-Hall on December 23, 2013, 02:51:56 PMI'd be hard-pressed to find a large city in the US that didn't have at least one interstate freeway running through it. They're expensive, but necessary because of the way the US developed.
Something I clearly notice in EU-urban design is that there is a clear boundary between the urban area and rural area, the towns and cities are quite compact with almost no empty areas and are then more public-transport friendly. It's "easier" to design high-speed roads that avoid urban areas when you have clear boundaries of what to avoid. This is not possible when you have cities that have large urban sprawls and people live in suburban residential districts kilometers away from jobs and public services which leads to a more individual-transport approach in urban design, hence the need of high-speed roads in/through the cities and suburbs. This is a reality too.

(As urbanist and person, I prefer EU urban design)

Ters

Quote from: Isaac.Eiland-Hall on December 23, 2013, 02:51:56 PM
but if we had a way of protecting high-speed roads going into a city, it would help this situation.

I think it would rather complicate thing, because when all roads into a the city center are slow, all vehicles operating inside city limits should simply get speed bonus as if the speed bonus base speed was 50 km/h. But when it is possible to reach the city center along high speed roads, using low speed city streets should be penalized.

Fabio

You can still use elevated roads for urban highways. At least in pak128 they are quite expensive, but less than tunnels.


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prissi

Two short comments: When the speedbonus dependence on way infrastructure was introduced, I added two buses with 50 and 55 km/h speedlimt/balance speed to the pak (for isntance the double decker).

And the speedbonus is not to force you to upgrade. It was one one the many measures to reduce the network effect, i.e. that after crossconnecting many stops you income explodes. It still explodes, but the effect is a little damped. That is all.

The speedbonus itself does not affect starting a game, since then you choose either right or went bankrupt. It is entirely for later game. It does not mean you have to update; in fact most game stay proffitable forr decades, just the total income decreases slightly.

Overcrowding of stations is a much much stronger incentive to upgrade anyway. Same for building heigh-speed lines. Otherwise people playing pak64.german would never update, because this pak does not use a speedbonus. Still people upgrade all the time.

Ters

The rail speed bonus in pak64 does actually force you to upgrade around 2030. Not to the rail vehicles of 2030, though, because they aren't profitable no matter what according to my calculations. But apart from that, I agree that congestion is the prime reason for upgrading, with retirement of old vehicles in second place.

(As for the double decker in pak64, I find it too underpowered to be usable in the city. It takes forever to get up to speed after stopping at stops and intersections, which is about every two tiles on average.)

jamespetts

This is an interesting discussion. In the longer term, one might want to reflect on what economic reality that the speed bonus is trying to simulate. I have often wondered about having the speed bonus based, not on a global constant, but on relative speeds between the same points; but, whilst in principle that is much more realistic, that introduces massive amounts of complexity (in the form of lots of additional things that must be simulated), so the question is not an easy one. A simpler answer is to scale the effect of the speed bonus with the distance of the journey: the longer the journey, the more effect that the speed bonus has.
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isidoro

Another possibility I can think of is not to consider city road tiles when doing speed bonus statistics for a vehicle...


Ters

Quote from: isidoro on December 25, 2013, 11:34:42 PM
Another possibility I can think of is not to consider city road tiles when doing speed bonus statistics for a vehicle...

That's what I've touched upon several times, but it has the weakness that it doesn't encourage construction/use of high speed roads into/through cities. At some point, congestion will do that, but why should it be acceptable to go slow only in low traffic cities. But there is the question what speed bonus is supposed to do.

mph1977

the only way i've seen to be able to fix a 'high speed'  road into a city  area is to build it  as an elevated  highway using  very long 'bridge' sections  and  then raise land at  junctions to make grade seperated junctions - even then the  'through' part of the junction can still end up as city road ...

Spenk009

If you want to avoid the unsightly bridge effect, you can delete what occupies the tiles for the road, lower the land by one tile and place the elevated road there. The city can connect roads to it, but not replace them. This is extremely costly, but also very effective while retaining integrity with the looks of the city.

I agree that there is no need for a change in speed limits, because most bus routes aren't that profitable anyway. And usually the ones that are, are generally quite crowded, directly connecting busy stops and use fast routes. I tend to ignore bus line profits, because they only serve to connect the cities to the hub(s) for the network.

Experimental seems to have a key to solve this issue, with separate Torque and Power values for different types of vehicle characteristics (I am aware of the gearing value for Standard), which allows for buses geared more for city transport.

The speed bonus system works well, we just might need a better variety of vehicles and more consideration for the application/purpose of each one.

Ters

Quote from: Spenk009 on August 18, 2014, 08:15:40 AM
The speed bonus system works well, we just might need a better variety of vehicles and more consideration for the application/purpose of each one.

Not in pak64 near 2000 and beyond. Buses are almost impossible to get profitable inside cities, and most trains can't even make a profit in theory. This is perhaps not a problem with speed bonus in itself, it just doesn't yield good results when configured with bad numbers. And is the unprofitability of city buses just a modern phenomenon?

Fabio

Isn't the revenue calculated stop by stop? I would simply not apply the speed bonus/penalty between any two stops/stations within the limits of the same city.


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IgorEliezer

Just reviving this topic.... *smells* eww.... anyway. I've just stumble upon this article about "Before-and-after maps show how freeways transformed America's cities"

http://www.vox.com/2014/12/29/7460557/urban-freeway-slider-maps

I think it's worth posting.

EDIT:

This too "Hamburg is burying the Autobahn and putting parks on top" http://www.vox.com/2015/1/9/7520805/hamburg-highway

Ters

Quote from: IgorEliezer on January 10, 2015, 01:53:33 PM
I've just stumble upon this article about "Before-and-after maps show how freeways transformed America's cities"

http://www.vox.com/2014/12/29/7460557/urban-freeway-slider-maps

The article focuses on how the new roads led to the removal of many houses, but I notice that the density of buildings decrease elsewhere as well. For Detroit, this might have to do with the fact that the city is becoming depopulated because major employers have closed down. For the other two, and more so for Minneapolis, it seems that the increase in open spaces is intentional, or at least put into good use.

el_slapper

Quote from: IgorEliezer on January 10, 2015, 01:53:33 PM(.../...)
This too "Hamburg is burying the Autobahn and putting parks on top" http://www.vox.com/2015/1/9/7520805/hamburg-highway

It's been made in my current town, Taverny. The A115 is buried for 500m, and they made parks & playgrounds for children instead. Rather nice. Not a revolution, but nice to see. Inhabitants of the neighbouring blocks are really happy to have no more noise.

Ters

Quote from: el_slapper on January 14, 2015, 08:25:11 AM
[...] they made [...] playgrounds for children [...] Inhabitants of the neighbouring blocks are really happy to have no more noise.

Huh? Is that because children don't go out anymore?

el_slapper

Quote from: Ters on January 14, 2015, 05:58:17 PM
Huh? Is that because children don't go out anymore?

Sorry for not being clear.

I mean, they don't have the noise of the motorway anymore. It helps to sleep. Of course, the children can go out easier, as they have a playing ground down their block, instead of a motorway. But it's far enough not to be annoying in terms of noise(20 meters from the block, I think).

jamespetts

I think that even children are quieter than motorways.
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Ters

Quote from: jamespetts on January 15, 2015, 09:52:13 PM
I think that even children are quieter than motorways.

I was trying to make fun at "no noise" (at all), not "less noise". Or maybe the traffic has made the local inhabitants near deaf.