City buses, or a single large station?

[Postlimit]

The intro to this post is quote from another another thread (http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=8932.0). I'm going a bit off topic, so a new thread might be better.

To clarify - don't build multiple tiles of platform on the ones that you're removing -- build, for example, one tile on each of the five tracks, connected. Then you can expand the ones you want, and remove the single tile from the ones you don't.

The general principle is:

- Any station tile placed next to an existing station expands the station

- Any removed station tiles do not separate a station, so you could theoretically use this to make the entire map one station, although that would make the game useless. Still, you can have widely separated station tiles all in one station.

Reading this quote, I pushed this method to the max, and turned cities (25,000+ pop.) into a single station. I built a regular train station, but then connected a bus stop, and another bus stop, and another bus stop, and another bus stop... until the entire city was practically covered in bus stops. Then I removed the unnecessary stops, so the bus stops were spread out 4-6 tiles afterwards. They remained a part of my main train station, and generate passengers.

It completely removed the need for those pesky city-buses. No more gridlock in the city. I have the same bus stops as before, except that they are now all part of the same trainstation, whereas earlier I had them all connected with bus lines over short distances to bring people from the outskirts/city hall/business centre/etc to my station (which was really hard impossible to optimize, btw, because opening a single new bus line screwed up the balance of all the rest of them).

Any comments? Is this how you all do it? Is this how it's supposed to be (if so, I can assure you that newbies would like to read about this somewhere in a tutorial!)?
Or do you all bother with city buses that stop almost literally at every corner (every 4-6 tiles) to pick up people and bring them to the stations?

And what is the maximum distance that stops can still be a single station (if any)?

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Anticipating a question (if it's relevant): I'm playing 111.0, pak128.

[Combuijs]

Any comments? Is this how you all do it?

Nope, never!

Is this how it's supposed to be (if so, I can assure you that newbies would like to read about this somewhere in a tutorial!)?

No, it's not supposed to be so, although you can do it if you want, of course. In fact it is not as good as you think because there won't be any travelling in the city itself, so no money from it

Or do you all bother with city buses that stop almost literally at every corner (every 4-6 tiles) to pick up people and bring them to the stations?

Yes, I bother with that! And I like it too!

And what is the maximum distance that stops can still be a single station (if any)?

I don't think there is a maximum.

By the way, I love being able to have these gaps in the stations. It just makes station lay-out easier, especially when mixing up transport types. But of course there always people that go to extremes ... 

[VS]

It's certainly not supposed to be used like this. I think this somewhat violates the spirit of this game, turning one of the aspects into a non-challenge. You're free to do so, though... Not much else to say, really. It's up to you

Fixing this? IMHO there would be needed some compactness metric that would determine if a station is too spread out. Based on that, things could be allowed / forbidden / forcibly changed, lots of options there... Assuming the metric would be recalculated every time a part is added/removed and saved, thus known beforehand, you could approach this both as an event and as a query. But I'm already too much in the hypothesizing area

[Fabio]

I often do it for villages < 8-10 k or so. Those are utterly boring to serve. In bigger cities instead I like to play with trams, trolleys, an subway sometimes.

You could also raise station coverage to 8-10 tiles per side, one of my games I liked the most was set up like that. The setting is in world creation settings dialog.

If you play pak128, you can use parking lots on the kerb instead of stops: I designed them for this purpose a few years ago.

Finally I once filed an extension request to be able to join stops a few tiles apart paying a penalty (e.g. The manhattan distance between them * the cost of a level 1 stop) but it wasn't implemented since.

[wlindley]

In Experimental, passengers will walk between stations which are sufficiently close -- even from one company's station to another. 

[Postlimit]

I often do it for villages < 8-10 k or so. Those are utterly boring to serve.

In the default start (in 1930), 8-10k are the cities. Villages are only 800 population, but are often so spread out that you still can't serve them with a single station or bus stop. But if you create some local line to get people from 6 tiles away to your station, that bus is gonna be mostly empty, and expensive.

I still haven't really figured out how to cost-effectively get passengers from outskirts and also from sideroads in small villages to a main line (like a train, or bus hub). Buses are always half-empty in the outskirts... Guess it becomes easier once the cities reach higher population density. Until then, this works for me.

[Roads]

I did not know about this "feature."  Also did not know about raising the station coverage or the kerb.  Part of the fun of any complex game is discovery.  Sometimes it is a happy incident while playing, sometimes such as this.

I don't mind having some lines I run that lose money.  That's just the way it is in real life.  That said, all these things are good to know especially the spaces between the stations.  I'll probably plant a tree on one.

[Markohs]

I never do that, and it's not impossible to make bus lines serving the city, I do:

- On small villages, 2-6 bus stops and make a circular bus line with a cheap and low running costs bus. One of the stations is upgraded to a bigger bus station, that's where passangers  leaving/arriving to the town will be, and where inter-town lines link.
- If the circular line is losing money, you might want to add a minimum percentage charge to one of the stops (not the main stop, cause it will block inter-city traffic) , so the bus travels less often, saving you money (while the bus is stopped, it doesn't lose that much money).
- when the city turns bigger, I often turn the bus lines into tram lines, when the traffic is enough to support it, or electrified buses lines (trolley).
- when the city is big or huge, making various TRAM/METRO lines is mandatory, arrange them in a layout that has various interconnects, for example you can make a line for north, another for south and some transfer stations where trams can exchange passengers. You still need a central hub, where you will have your central rail station, or airport, where inter-city traffic will go and wait.

Allways have in mind that your enemy in profit uses to be balance of direction traffic, if you got a line where all passengers travel in one direction and almost none in the other, you will prolly lose money, allways find the way to make lines profitable in all directions.

Also, overcrowded stations stop passenger generation, so add more vehicles, allways design your lines in a way that allow scaling with the number of vehicles serving it. of course a line can't scale forever, but design it so it can run from 1-2 vehicles to 8-10, depending of what are you making, and reuse ifrastructure, a tram line or a station has maintenance costs, if you use if for various lines/vehicles/convois/directions, you make more profit of it.

But in general, have in mind that intra-city traffic won't give you gains until the city is big enough, your main income will come from inter-city trains/planes.

EDIT: I took some screenshots of my games to illustrate my idea, I just (ab)use trams, you can use buses, trams, trolley buses, rail, whatever suiits your style.

SMALL (I made 2-way roads here, but with public money, it was a waste of money, I didn't needed 2 stations per stop, I had extra money and wanted to plant nice streets for the future, but it shows the idea):



MEDIUM:



MEDIUM-BIG:



LARGE:



HUGE:

[ojii]

I usually play pak128.japan, which is heavily pax oriented. And I play with big cities.


What I do is all big cities have metro lines, no busses. Cities are connected with separate intercity trains. Small cities are connected with trains too, and they have several stations to cover most/all of the city (some stations might be underground). Only really tiny cities get bus connections and citybusses are very rare for me too, and usually get upgraded to a metro line at some point.


I should however note that pak128.japan has a bigger station coverage area by default and I use that, so it's easier to cover villages/cities.

[Roads]

fabio or anyone, where might one find this "world creation settings dialog?"

[rsdworker]

fabio or anyone, where might one find this "world creation settings dialog?"

easy - its in simtrans config - usually found in main menu before starting world

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

Do what you like, but you lose the passengers that wanted to travel inside your city...

[Roads]

Aww Isaac, I fully intend on having several stops in a larger city.  The way I play the game though, beginning with a clear map and zero cities and starting the cities out as villages, just the city hall in fact, a larger station area will work better for me when I'm having to watch every penny.


And thanks rsdworker!  Thought I had looked there but must have missed it.