Idea: double-lane road (normal street) should be wide as doubletrack railroad

[hApo]

In reality one lane of road has width about 3m and one track of rail needs the same.
But in Simutrans the track is about 2 times wider. Why?
I think it is caused by the need of singletrack railroad in the early Simutrans and it stayed here until nowadays.
But, this is completely unfair for railway because if you are going through mountains or city, you must modify much more terrain. Furthermore, the crossing are getting bigger which makes collapses on streets when there is much traffic on street.
Maybe we just don't realize, but we already have a graphic set for this change. Only thing needed is to take all the things from pak 128 to pak64 (so the base building would be 2x2 tiles) not including the streets and the sizes leave as they are. Rail and tram track will be cut (the only thing left will be the rail. We don't need a track with 1,5m of fields) We'll need to do one-lane street and include this change into the simutrans-engine and to the citylist like "only a half of city's streets bidirectional". The harder thing will be to allow vehicles overtaking (because bidirectional street will be covering two tiles instead of one today)-changing engine for this.
Finally, we'll get a much realistic model of the city that allows narrow singleway streets, normal streets as we have today in simutrans and avenues. Also crossings will be much more realistic and ring-road will be also possible. And don't forget the trams. Now, it's not possible to build a classic tramway network in the city because the streets are just too narrow, so you just have to build bus or trolleybus network in the city what is unrealistic (or you must build a tram circle). 

Some sketches:
one lane/track: r=road,t=tram, rt=both; || = next tile
Now:
classic street: r|r; narrow street: impossible; avenue: r|r||r|r; tramtrack+street: r|t|r; avenue+tramtrack: r|r||t||t||r|r or r|t|r||r|t|r
With this change:
classic street: r||r; narow street: r; avenue: r||r||r||r; tramtrack+street: rt|tr; avenue+tramtrack: r||r||t||t||r||r or tr||r||r||rt

If you don't understand, question...

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

This is covered by the sticky in this board:

Denied for complexity reasons (these changes would take so long to implement -and would break so many parts of the program- that the reward would not be worth the time invested)

- Double tracks (on one tile)

- Highways

Changes to the base methodology for tracks/roads are not trivial - they go to the heart of the code.

To do what you're requesting requires rewriting of Simutrans, which is why it hasn't been done.

[hApo]

Well, it was misunderstand then, i meant road on two tiles..., but yes rewriting would be needed and I'm not a programmer. Seems like "Ssssht inovation what we can't do is needed" :(

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

It's still the same thing, though. Road cannot be changed so that it is one-lane—one-way, for the same reason that it cannot be changed to both-lanes—one-way, or that dual-track cannot exist.

The only way you could possibly simulate one-way—one-lane roads would be to paint tracks that looked like roads, and trains that looked like trucks; however, it would still be track and operate like track (and track would still be two-way, so you'd have to carefully use signals to force it to work).

Seems like "Ssssht inovation what we can't do is needed" :(

I don't understand what you mean by this, in case it's important to communicate. Sorry.

[gauthier]

Even if it's not realistic, it's fair because you can transport much more things by train than by truck/bus, it tracks get double, everyone will replace its streets with tracks :p

However having double-tramway should be great.

[Lord Vetinari]

Well, in rl trams that runs through a street can be stuck in traffic and must obey road rules, so making roads that looks like tracks is actually realistic, not an half functioning workaround.

I'm just speculating: if we could make a new kind of road vehicle, "streetcars", and a set of ways made of a complete set of tracks on top of the road that allows any kind of road traffic plus a complete set of tracks only that allows only streetcars (never tried it, but it's like the old bus lane addon for pak 128, I suppose...?), and make sure, if possible, that cities won't take over and replace those roads, than we could have a realistic double track tramways.
Those will be less functional than current tram tracks because of traffic, but advantages, aside from the lower cost of contruction because of the two direction on the same tile, could be that streetcars, being potentially longer than a bus, could carry more passengers and being electric have lower running costs.
Current tram tracks could still be used for something like premetro/light rails.

[paco_m]

The double-track trams could work like the electric buses, just add to the powerline-graphic the rail at the bottom and that's it.
Define them as the electric buses and the trams will behave like street vehicles, there was already an addon somewhere doing exactly this.

Regarding to the trains, at least the optical point with the extremely large space between the two tracks (especially in diagonal view) can be solved by modifying the pakset - move the tracks more together and make the offsets for the trains.
The space at the side could be used to make larger platforms or telegraph-lines and so on - would still need two tiles but look much more realistic, without any need of code changes...

[DirrrtyDirk]

Regarding to the trains, at least the optical point with the extremely large space between the two tracks (especially in diagonal view) can be solved by modifying the pakset - move the tracks more together and make the offsets for the trains.
The space at the side could be used to make larger platforms or telegraph-lines and so on - would still need two tiles but look much more realistic, without any need of code changes...

I don't think it's really doable that way. First you'd always need two separate tracks, a left and a right one (as both have to be moved to the center, i.e. in opposite directions) and then you'd have holes in the tracks where the diagonals connect to the regular straights... At least I cannot think of how you'd solve this... unless you want a set of regular tracks, plus two versions for the diagonals only (but that's hardly worth the effort since it is too complicated IMO). And in regular curves the new offset of the trains would... no, I think all this would look even worse than what we have now.

And anyway, it's the nature of isometric grids that each tile is twice as wide as it is high - that's where this "distortion" in the view comes from.

[paco_m]

Good point, ok, I think we can skip this idea