What to do about heavily-trafficked bus stops?

[faiuwle]

I have a city with several bus lines, and three of them all service one particular stop.  I wanted to link them all at that one stop so that there would be fewer transfers.  However, that stop is always overcrowded and red; I clicked on it at and watched it for a while, and it's not that passengers going to any particular location are getting stuck there, it's just that every bus that stops there will pick up a lot of people and then deposit a lot of people who are transferring to other buses that visit that stop, so the number of people at the stop remains more or less constant.  It seems to be working as expected in terms of getting people to their destinations, but 5 out of every 6 people are unhappy (probably because of the overcrowding).  The bus stop is in one of those circles they build around monuments, so I can't put additional bus stops next to it to expand its capacity.  How do you deal with things like this?  It's convenient to have these kinds of transfer points at train stations, because they have a much larger capacity, but the train stations are generally at the edge of the city and typically they will connect one bus line that goes into the city and a few bus lines that go to neighboring cities, and I need to have transfer points inside the city as well.



Also, unrelated question, but I sometimes see passengers listed at stops with destinations that aren't directly connected from there (like, they're in another city on the other side of the map) with no "via" listed.  Is that a bug?  They don't seem to get left behind by busses and pile up at the stops.

[Václav]

It would deserve some pictures - at least stop and routes plan for better help.

Overcrowded (bus) stops are not rare, I would dare to say that they are very frequent. Solution is in more vehicles or extending stop by another type of transportation - that will allow people to go where they want, for example trams, monorails, underground or so. I don't know what pakset you play and so I cannot help you more at this time.

At least central stations will be overcrowded sooner or later, unless you would play with option avoid_overcrowded. There is no else way.

[DrSuperGood]

It entirely depends on what pakset you are using.

The big problem is the poor sense of road scale simutrans has. Bus lines eventually stop being practical not due to the busses as transport failing but due to the number of busses starting to block up the city roads. Each road tile can only have 1 convoy per direction on it and cities have a lot of either 2 or 3 long strips between intersections. Once you get 50 or so busses it becomes hard for the road networks to hold that capacity in a city, let alone feed it though a single bus stop.

Due to the small capacity of bus stops they should never be used to transfer passengers to other bus lines. You should always push them to a single large transfer point such as a station or bus terminal with extra buildings or away from houses so no unhappiness occurs.

In pak64 you are pretty much forced to drop inner city bus lines when the city hits around 10k people due to the traffic starting to become unmanageable. A big problem is the 2 long road strips that are common in cities really limits maximum traffic. Instead you need to move to subway systems which are large loops of train tunnels. Not only do these make a little profit but they can deliver an entire city load of people to a train station for further movement.

In pak128 subways are generally not economical unless a city is really big and well developed. Buses are more viable due to the 3 long road strips being used for cities as well as many useful bus variants with more capacity. A good idea would be to break a city into sections which are serviced by train stations. Once bus capacity starts to be unable to cope you can create new train stops in the direction the city is expanding and use those to ship passengers to hubs. Although underground train lines are not economical for general passenger pickup, they are for moving passengers and mail gathered from 2-3 surface bus lines as that is enough traffic to cover the expensive tunnel maintenance.

The best way to avoid unhappy passengers is to push people to bigger and bigger hubs which are far away from any passenger pickup. You want very efficient and regularly served lines to pull people from houses or industry to a local inner city hub. People from there are then shipped by trains waiting for 100% load to exchange hubs far away from any city where overcrowding is no concern. What these remote hubs do with the passengers is up to you however generally you want to connect them either to a global hub or to all other such hubs directly. Since passenger traffic is fully symmetric you will generally find few people waiting at the hubs as they will quickly depart on the return trips of the trains bringing people to the hubs.

Mail traffic is another problem since mail is not symmetric with industry and monuments producing considerably more mail than they consume. As such you will need to design remote hubs such that you can invert the flow of mail depending on overall mail buildup. If mail is building up at a remote hub you need to make the trains wait for 100% at the remote hub and allow return flow from the inner city hubs. If mail is building up at an inner city hub you need to wait for 100% load at the inner city hub and allow return flow from the remote hub. This requires some macro management since when creating large networks it is impossible to predict the direction mail will flow.

[Ters]

I have a city with several bus lines, and three of them all service one particular stop.  I wanted to link them all at that one stop so that there would be fewer transfers.  However, that stop is always overcrowded and red; I clicked on it at and watched it for a while, and it's not that passengers going to any particular location are getting stuck there, it's just that every bus that stops there will pick up a lot of people and then deposit a lot of people who are transferring to other buses that visit that stop, so the number of people at the stop remains more or less constant.  It seems to be working as expected in terms of getting people to their destinations, but 5 out of every 6 people are unhappy (probably because of the overcrowding).  The bus stop is in one of those circles they build around monuments, so I can't put additional bus stops next to it to expand its capacity.  How do you deal with things like this?  It's convenient to have these kinds of transfer points at train stations, because they have a much larger capacity, but the train stations are generally at the edge of the city and typically they will connect one bus line that goes into the city and a few bus lines that go to neighboring cities, and I need to have transfer points inside the city as well.

The unhappy people are not the people at the bus stop, it's the people that want to start their journey from the bus stop, but can't because it is already overflowing of passengers transferring from one bus to another. You can try to expand the bus stops capacity by adding station buildings, but in general, I try to only have bus lines meet at major hubs.

Also, unrelated question, but I sometimes see passengers listed at stops with destinations that aren't directly connected from there (like, they're in another city on the other side of the map) with no "via" listed.  Is that a bug?  They don't seem to get left behind by busses and pile up at the stops.

It does sound so, but I need to see it in action to be sure. It is possible you have just done some things inadvertently.

cities have a lot of either 2 or 3 long strips between intersections.

Seems to me like it is more like 0 or 1 tiles between intersections. The game's city builder really loves T-intersections.

[faiuwle]

This is the city: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8644666/Miscellaneous/simscr00.bmp

Route 1: city stop, inner stop, Monument stop, downtown stop, hub stop, train station
Route 2: Pollingwick stop, central stop, main stop, Town hall stop, business stop
Route 3 (connecting 1 and 2): main stop and Monument stop
Route 4 (to cover uncovered areas between 1 and 2): axis stop, West stop, Greenfields West stop, Monument stop

The problem is at Monument stop and secondarily at main stop because those are the two transfer points (Town hall stop and downtown stop aren't normally this crowded, I don't think, though it could be a result of traffic going through main stop and Monument stop).  The city has 14,000 people, but the busses don't seem to cause many traffic jams (they pile up a bit, but that always happens IME).

This is pak64.  Should I just switch everything to subways, or get rid of Route 3 and make the others terminate at the train station, or both?

Edit:  Also, is it really a good idea to make passenger lines wait for 100%?  Won't they spend forever waiting, then?

[Ters]

I would advise you to link all bus routes directly to the station. That might involve moving the station to a more central location to avoid long routes. Alternatively, you could add some higher capacity transport, like trams or trains to connect the bus lines.

In a city as big as this, I no longer have my buses waiting for a load. I only ever have my buses waiting for some minimum load, usually 50%, when there are so few passengers that the single bus serving the line alone will pick up less half a load on a round. It might be useful to have buses wait for a full load with a short maximum wait time just to try to keep the buses evenly spaced.

[faiuwle]

Ok, I'll try that.  Extending them to the station wouldn't make them much longer (except for 4, and even then it would only make it as long as the others but without as many stops).

How does the wait time work?  What does the #/# mean?  I was wondering about people talking about the train waiting for a full load, though.  It seems like a high-capacity train waiting to be full would keep passengers waiting for a long time and slow the rest of the system down.

[DrSuperGood]

I cannot see the image but for pak64 I am a devoted subway user. Especially with the recent balance fixes (rail tunnels, instead of road+tram and better late game speed bonuses) they are a great way to deal with providing high quality mail and passenger services to large cities 10k+. In a recent server game early this year I achieved what is probably a 98% total passenger and mail pickup from the areas I serviced thanks to them and massive snakes of 12 long stations (general maximum train length for pak) with constant train services.

[faiuwle]

When do subways become available?  It is only 1939, and that city started out at 11k+, and another one started with 9k+.

[Ters]

pak64 does not have dedicated subways, so you just build normal railroad tunnels underground, and use normal trains (or even trams).

[DrSuperGood]

The maintenance cost per month of the tunnels might seem excessive however the profit a good passenger network brings in is several orders of magnitude larger. It is important to use the wait for 100% feature with a maximum wait delay (eg 1/8 of a month, depends on month length and required service) to space the convoys and prevent them running excessively empty. A good sized city subway should be self-funding and even bring in profit however most of the money will come from the above ground high-speed services connecting the cities to hubs and hubs to other hubs.

Do not move from busses too quickly. Only when busses are noticeably struggling with the passenger load should you move to subways. Once you have several cities connected together the amount of passengers between them becomes so large that you can connect even small cities with subways that run at a loss at the start.

This download link (linked to Fifty's Google drive so might be removed in future or even not be the right save) to a save from Moblet's server from earlier this year should demonstrate such a construction.

Specifically the South East part of the map should be the focus of attention. I constructed that area. All passengers were being shipped to a public hub to connect all the player networks together. The result was a staggering >70% global pickup on passengers and far more money than I could ever use. Mail congestion was a problem but only due to me being unaware of the asymmetric flow of mail at the time I built the network. The final save (which unfortunately I believe has been lost) was really a sight to behold as I expended many of the cities several times.

[el_slapper]

in PAK128, I'm a big fan of Tramways(in loops, otherwise, signalisation is hell), complemented by trolleybusses when they are not enough. But PAK64 has a different dynamic, I'm not sure what is better.

And for really big towns : monorails(but it's horribly costly, it's worth it only when you NEED a huge capacity on a local route at all costs).

[Václav]

in PAK128, I'm a big fan of Tramways(in loops, otherwise, signalisation is hell), complemented by trolleybusses when they are not enough.

Signalisation could be better - but it is problem in all paksets.

And for really big towns : monorails(but it's horribly costly, it's worth it only when you NEED a huge capacity on a local route at all costs).

Yes, they need very overcrowded stops that are connected by interest of people to travel there. And also they should not be too far from each other.

[faiuwle]

Thanks guys - I took your advice about connecting everything to the train stations and redid my network a bit to be more hub-oriented, and it made a big difference.  It used to be that the larger passenger cars were not economical and I would barely get 100 people on the train, but now I've got so many passengers I had to refit some of the trains with the larger passenger cars and now there's 500-700 people on average on the oldest train line I have.  I even had to put extra buildings at some of the train stations.  I haven't done anything with underground trains yet, because the buses still seem to be functioning.

[DrSuperGood]

Been messing around with passenger pickup on the one pak64 server game. Since I was poor, have a small network and the game is after pak timeline (final content available and poor passenger/mail locality) I decided to try the almost cheating approach of disjoined station components to increase station coverage. By doing this a single station can service an entire city which makes servicing all buildings super easy and cheap to maintain while also not running a risk of not profitable inner city lines. The disadvantages are that it is costly to setup due to poor support for disjoined station components and also you will lose out on any potential profit from inner city lines (which can make a pretty penny for big cities).

Or that is what I thought. It appears that both Passengers and Mail that walk to their destination (origin stop also being the destination stop) do not actually count as Passengers Departed or Mail Sent according to the city. This means that it is impossible to ship 100% of either since any reasonable stop in a decent city will have a good chance of having at least a few people walk every month. It also means that achieving maximum city growth is not possible since you are statistically never going to ship 100% of Passengers and Mail as at least a few units will walk.