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Slow passenger generation when a new line is made

Started by fam621, October 16, 2017, 06:52:47 PM

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fam621

Hello James and/or the developers of the Simutrans Forum, I'm sure that I've made James aware of this problem but I'm gonna post this so he does not forget. Whenever I make a new line on Simutrans Extended using the pak128.Britain-Ex pakset, the passenger generation is quite slow and it takes a long time or even more lines to generate passengers to use a particularly bad money making line such as the railway network which does not generate as quick as the pak.ngb pakset by Carl Baker. Can you look into this when you have the time, space and the availability to look into this long standing issue please? Thank you, fam622. Member of the Simutrans Forum.

jamespetts

As I believe that I have explained before, there is work in progress on the passenger-and-mail-classes branch to recalibrate the population density of buildings to produce more realistic values of, amongst other things, passenger generation. The recalibration work that I have done so far indicates that this should, at least for the buildings so far completed, result in an increase in the rate of passenger generation as a result of the increased building occupancy/population density.
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fam621

Okay, when can I get a rough date of when passenger generation will be fixed?

jamespetts

Quote from: fam621 on October 18, 2017, 02:57:03 PM
Okay, when can I get a rough date of when passenger generation will be fixed?

There is no sensible way of predicting that, I am afraid.
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Jando

Personally I don't really think that passenger generation is too low even with the current balance. However, it's easy to oversize the network and at times - just as in real life - one has to accept that providing passenger service to a little village or small town will be a money-losing project, just like a local bus line in a small town will run at a loss in reality. Thus it's either not connecting the small place or to accept the loss from connecting it.

A particular "trap" is that the most important metric to get passengers on your network is the frequency of the service - in Simutrans Extended frequency beats everything, speed and comfort don't really matter that much unless you have really large maps with long distance travel. Generally - and certainly with smaller towns - it's much better to run frequent but slow service with small buses than to have a fast but infrequent train service. Reason for this is that the sum of waiting time and travel time counts for passenger creation - and that sum can be lower with frequent slow service than for infrequent fast service.

On one of my maps I'm making good profit with a regional bus network in 1940.

jamespetts

Quote from: Jando on October 19, 2017, 08:41:12 AM
Personally I don't really think that passenger generation is too low even with the current balance. However, it's easy to oversize the network and at times - just as in real life - one has to accept that providing passenger service to a little village or small town will be a money-losing project, just like a local bus line in a small town will run at a loss in reality. Thus it's either not connecting the small place or to accept the loss from connecting it.

The population density of a lot of buildings is too low currently and is in the process of being increased - but you are correct that smaller towns will not have a need for a dense transport network even after the changes.

QuoteA particular "trap" is that the most important metric to get passengers on your network is the frequency of the service - in Simutrans Extended frequency beats everything, speed and comfort don't really matter that much unless you have really large maps with long distance travel. Generally - and certainly with smaller towns - it's much better to run frequent but slow service with small buses than to have a fast but infrequent train service. Reason for this is that the sum of waiting time and travel time counts for passenger creation - and that sum can be lower with frequent slow service than for infrequent fast service.

And exactly this has been found to be the case in real life, at least for short distance transport where waiting time is a high proportion of the total journey time: see here for a history of the Exeter minibuses, a paradigm demonstration of this concept.
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