Further to my attempts to work as well as I can with this aspect of the simulation.
I have been bulldozing offices and such - and when a new supermarket is generated with a gazillion farms the bulldozer comes out. This does seem to be having some impact in that the numbers of workers visiting my refineries is creeping up but still - and I have been quite.... enthusiastic... with the buldozer - still the refineries (for example) have nowhere near enough staff even after a couple of years.
I have been looking at the Passengers generated/Departed/Arrived graphs in the Production/Boost tab in the Industry Information screen and I am having difficulty correlating it to what this actually represents and how it might be affected by my efforts. These numbers are very low (20/20/93) - even though I may have 1252(882) Jobs available although they have improved - they were 1252(>1240) before bulldozing.
The connected/nearby stops have over 300 arrived each in the graph. I am not sure how to interpret these numbers, and they don't seem to have changed since my buldozing antics started.
Also trying to tie this to building information for residences - most of the buildings I check around the map have Passenger Success(Commuting): at 100% so this would seem to indicate that people who want to commute are managing to go somewhere.
Simply in terms of troubleshooting this what are good strategies for finding/correlating information using the in-game graphs and available information?
Thanks for the patience - It seems that the information is out there on the forums and these questions have been asked before but for some reason it is not clicking for me.
*edit*
I have been frantically destroying offices and warehouses which I think may be having some effect but it isn't really where I want to be going with my game. In search of a solution I found the "minimum_staffing_percentage_full_production_producer_industry" in simuconf.tab. If I change this would it mean that the refineries would produce even though there are few staff? I could rationalise this to myself with hand-wavey explanations about automation.....
*edit again*
It seems to have gotten my production based freight flows working, it still says staff shortage but setting minimum_staffing_percentage_full_production_producer_industry = 30 seems to have done the trick for now.
My map is an enlightened society where workers can go to work if they want but due to the robotics only 30% need do so for production not to suffer.
