Little annoying problem on road traffic

[Sholong]

I am playing the latest Experimental with the 128pak.Britain while having my timeline on.


I am on my 1921, there are a lot of those horses carriage down the cities and inter-city country road. I understand that possibly, in 20s, there are still quite an amount of horses on road in the 20s, but in real situation they will run on the side of the road and the buses behind which can run at up to 30 something km/h will be able to easily overtake them without being affected! However in game, restricted by in-game physics, these horses are serious congesting my big towns, and even the country road between cities, vehicle's travelling time is simply uncontrollable.


My temporary solution is to remove the carriage from the road using the Destroy/remove tool, but it is just so annoying and I am not even sure if there will be new horses being generated on road. It become more and more troublesome especially when buses of higher speed are available like the S-Type. Is that possible to reduce the amount of these horses to appear, especially when time advances? Or else it will just become an redundant trouble for players.


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And by the way a little problem, not worth to open another topic for it:


When having a vehicle with schedule, say, A->B->C->D AND WITH ITS MIRROR SCHEDULE TURNED ON; will the average trip time be the time of A->D or A->D->A?

[jamespetts]

Sholong,

thank you for your feedback - that is most helpful. The ideal solution woul be a better overtaking algorithm, but this would be very difficult to code, I suspect. This is not straightforward to solve, as there were indeed horses and carriages (in large towns, in quite large numbers) on the roads in the 1920s. There is no mechanism for reducing ht frequency of a particular vehicle as time progresses:  it simply has an obsolescence date. The only solution of which I can think is progressively to retire more different sorts of horse vehicles as the 20th century progresses so that only those with a low probability value persist by the 1930s. I am not sure how much room that there is to do this at present, as I am on holiday and away from my main computer. In the meantime - does htis seem in principle to be a good idea?

Edit: In respect of your other question - I must confess, I cannot remember off the top of my head, and I cannot check the code from my mobile device, I'm afraid.

[Sholong]

Thanks a lot for your information . I think your idea should the best way round before any amendment to the overtaking mechanism being developed (not soon I believe), at least it minimize the problem caused. Anyway this is relatively a small problem so it is not urgent to give it a fix, if the effort needed is big.


I have another rather unrealistic idea though: Is it possible to make a city car simply "not occupying the road"? What I mean is, setting some of the smaller size road car like the horses carriage to be normally shown on roads, but they will not block any car behind from moving, that is, direct pass through the car. This can easily solve the whole problem, just that the passing through wont look realistic.

[jamespetts]

Hmm - I'm afraid that I don't think that that's workable. That would probably require quite substantial changes to the code, would not be realistic (part of the purpose of city cars is to get in the way, realistically, of player road vehicles) and would very probably confuse players, who would be unlikely intuitively to grasp why some cars are intangiable whereas others are not, and would be forgiven for thinking such a feature to be a bug.

[ӔO]

what I did was just tunnel under the city to make the 'ideal' bus stop layout. It's self enclosed, so there's no worry about public cars infesting it.

[jamespetts]

I should note that this will not be possible in the future, as only designated stops will be able to be built underground, and the only designated stop will be the underground railway station. Tunnels will also be much more expensive to build (20x he cost of an ordinary orad tile). 'Buses in future will have to deal with transport congestion in a realistic way.

[ӔO]

no problems there, it's always fun to figure out something new

[Carl]

That's interesting. I can think of several underground bus stations (under shopping centres, for instance).

Is there already a topic for discussion of underground station designation? I have a few questions...(mainly about how it will impact on paksets which have no parameters enabling or disabling a particular station underground).

[jamespetts]

Hmm - I'm not aware of any underground 'bus stations; can you link to references/pictures of any? If there were to be underground 'bus stations in the game, they would have to be drawn especially and have a vastly higher cost than ordinary 'bus stops to allow the game to balance properly.

As for the behaviour, if I recall the code correctly (I am writing this on a mobile device), paksets compiled without versions of Makeobj will retain existing behaviour (the objects may be built underground or overground), but the behaviour in default of specification for new paksets compiled with the latest Makeobj (on the -devel branch currently) will be to allow only overground unless otherwise specified.

[Carl]

Thanks -- that helps to clarify.

As for underground bus stations, OTOMH both Helsinki and Tallinn have main bus stations underground:
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamppi
http://helsinkippusa.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/expressbus.jpg

[jamespetts]

Ahh, are there no UK examples? If not, they might well belong in a different pakset (such as Pak64.Experimental, for example)..

[Carl]

Ah, good point. I can't think of any UK examples.

[kierongreen]

Edinburgh Bus Station is under a  shopping centre - I'm pretty sure there  are a few others also like this. Fully underground I think not though.

http://www.photo-transport.co.uk/buses/edinburgh-bus-station/edinburgh-bus-station.htm

[wlindley]

London's Kingsway tramway subway (Wikipedia article) was slated for trolleybus service, although tests proved unsuccessful due to the tunnel having insufficient clearances for electric power delivery through the catenary.  At Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as with others in the Boston area, a similar tunnel built for streetcars was indeed converted for trolleybus use; today, a modern replacement tunnel there is used by both trolleybuses and regular roadway buses.  Perhaps if the Kingsway clearances had been a bit taller, the same might be true there today.

[FS1819]

I should note that this will not be possible in the future, as only designated stops will be able to be built underground, and the only designated stop will be the underground railway station. Tunnels will also be much more expensive to build (20x he cost of an ordinary orad tile). 'Buses in future will have to deal with transport congestion in a realistic way.

Seattle, USA has a very successful underground bus tunnel, shared with a light rail system. Bus-only tunnels are actually possible. However, such solutions might not always be financially viable. Making tunnels much more expensive could just solve the problem. Please don't restrict tunnel usage to trains. I beg you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunnel

[jamespetts]

It is possible for a pakset author to design underground 'bus stops and encode them with allow_underground=1; the same goes for trams. There was not enough of this in the UK to make it worthwhile putting in the British pakset, but there's no reason in principle why it cannot be done in another pakset.

Of course, if it was to balance economically, then the cost of these underground 'bus stops ought be much higher than ordinary 'bus stops, by a factor of at least 20 if not 200 or 2,000, but that is a matter for individual pakset designers.

[rsdworker]

Edinburgh Bus Station is under a  shopping centre - I'm pretty sure there  are a few others also like this. Fully underground I think not though.

http://www.photo-transport.co.uk/buses/edinburgh-bus-station/edinburgh-bus-station.htm

that is not full underground - its undercroft But i wished UK had full underground bus station with tunnels connected to streets

[merry]

Now this does raise an issue: there are quite a lot of 'undercroft' bus stations (trains too) in the UK - you can ad examples in Nottingham & Birmingham.
Undercroft is essentially a building on a raised base. In ST this essentially means 'elevated ground', like elevated rail or road, but with no way on top, and the strength to carry the static load of a building not the dynamic load of vehicles on a way (probably similar cost but different technique, so in ST no differentiation would be needed).
I've raised this concept before, but was told that it has no use in ST - I'd suggest the above shows otherwise. In fact, 'raised ground' is a very common city construction technique. It's really a development of 'cut & cover' construction. So, given the uses discussed above, and the other uses of similar techniques, should such a thing be included in ST? Would it be a very hard addition, given that tunnels and raised ways exist already?

[jamespetts]

Hmm, it's an interesting point. It'd require rather major code works, which are probably beyond my capability, and the current priority in any case for my coding work is balancing. There might be something to be said for submitting an extension request in the Standard board if you are keen on this idea, however.

[wlindley]

Would you imagine building itself to look like this (plus niceties lke windows and doors of course)? ... And how exactly would buses approach it in the game?  Judging by the Edinburgh terminal, perhaps a few tiles of 'street' as forecourt, protected by Player-vehicles-only signs would be sufficient?

[jamespetts]

Hm, interesting. It's difficult to work out how that sort of thing might usefully be treated by the game...

[rsdworker]

easy if road is leads in hill - with buildings next to its should work