City cars

[jameskuyper]

I've gotten into the habit, whenever I make a road that crosses another road, but doesn't do so at grade, to put in connectors between the roads, thinking that doing so would make it easier for city cars to reach their destinations.

Then I started thinking - what made me think that it was beneficial to help city cars reach their destination? I went looking for information on the wiki and in this forum, and didn't find any such benefits. In fact, I've tentatively reached the conclusion that it's best to make things difficult for city cars. That's because passengers that might use either public transit or a private car are influenced in their decisions by how fast the trip will be using either method. Therefore, by making it difficult for city cars to reach their destination, I would make them more likely to choose public transit. That not only increases my own revenues, but also lowers traffic congestion (on the other hand, if they end up deciding to drive anyway, making it difficult for them will leave them on the road longer, increasing traffic congestion).

This would justify the following strategies when deciding how to connect two points on the map, especially if they're separated by a long distance: If it's a close decision between using a road and using some other way type, favor the other one. When you do build roads, avoid connecting them physically. Avoid crossing them, and if they must cross, avoid crossing at grade. Instead of building a connection that would allow the same convoy to travel two different roads, favor using a transfer station, if it doesn't add too much to maintenance costs. Once you've created your own passenger service between two cities, that does not involve fully connecting a road between them, deliberately break any competing road connection.

Is that correct? In reality, I would expect that deliberately making things difficult for city car drivers would get them angry at you, but I'm not sure whether that effect is modeled in this game.

[Ters]

City cars don't have a destination. Which is why they tend to mess around inside my cargo terminals, clogging them up if I'm not careful.

[kierongreen]

City cars don't have destinations in Standard. They are created when people can't use public transport to get to their destinations, and then move around the map randomly for a set length of time. Therefore there's way to make life difficult for them (and equally there's no way to make life easy either - other than providing a transport service so they aren't created).

In Experimental they do have destinations (optionally I think) - this has quite a large impact on performance because of the route calculation for many vehicles.

[greenling]

Hello kierongreen

In Experimental they do have destinations (optionally I think) - this has quite a large impact on performance because of the route calculation for many vehicles.

Then i in Simutrans Exp place a gate on a public road, than can in part switch out the travelling from pax per City cars ?

[Ters]

As for making road connections I don't need, I do that just to make it look right.

[jameskuyper]

I just checked, and the discussion I had been reading which mentioned determining the trip times for city cars was in fact about Experimental. I normally avoid Experimental, I'm still learning how Standard works - but didn't happen to notice that this search result was from an Experimental board.

I won't bother anymore putting in road connections that I don't need. However, I'm glad to see that there's no incentive for going out of my way to avoid creating connected roads, much less actively breaking connections - that just felt wrong.

[jamespetts]

City cars don't have destinations in Standard. They are created when people can't use public transport to get to their destinations, and then move around the map randomly for a set length of time. Therefore there's way to make life difficult for them (and equally there's no way to make life easy either - other than providing a transport service so they aren't created).

In Experimental they do have destinations (optionally I think) - this has quite a large impact on performance because of the route calculation for many vehicles.

This is not quite right - the topic is actually quite a complicated one. In neither Experimental nor Standard do city cars follow a route: they move around more or less at random. A long time ago, Prissi wrote some code that would sort of give city cars a destination (for Standard) by still moving about randomly, but by being more likely to turn towards their destination. This was put behind conditional compilation directives in Standard and never used (and suffered substantial "bit rot" as a result), but Prissi kindly renovated it for Experimental a few years ago, and it is now implemented and working in Experimental, although its effect is marginal. It does, however, have no noticeable impact on performance, so that does not much matter.

There is a separate system in Experimental that allows for passengers to find a journey using private cars. This does not actually interact with the private car graphics that we see in the game, except that they are generated whenever passengers go to their destination using their private car, and their "destination" (using the very approximate system described above) is set to the passengers' actual destination, although, as noted, this has little effect.

Private car route finding did once suffer from very poor performance to the extent that it was unusable on larger maps. However, as of version 11.0 and later, performance has been much improved, and it is now usable on even very large maps.