In real life, your punishment for letting goods overflow, is that you no longer get any goods at all, and therefore don't get paid either. The customer might require compensation for the failure to timely deliver something that is greater than what you would have gotten for actually delivering it. Whether the goods has to be rushed by alternative delivery, or if you can just deliver it later, depends on the goods. I'm not sure what difference it makes whether you have actually loaded the goods onto one of your vehicles, only for the goods to get stuck underway, or only have promised to ship the goods.
Pretty sure the details heavily depend on legislature and contract; if you want to make sure something gets delivered, you'd try to get a different contract where the delivery has to arrive no matter what or the transportation company would have to pay a heavy fee, but in order to get that you'd have to pay more in the first place. I mention legislature, since thats what it comes down to if nothing is agreed on in the contract. In Austria, if someone does not deliver in time, they would first have to get a warning with a new deadline, and only after that passes there are consequences - if the contract does not say otherwise or the delivered item becomes 'useless', like a wedding cake after the wedding is over.
With passengers, it is not that simple. Most of the travel by bus, train and boat (ferries) are not pre-booked. There seems to be no obligation to actually transport everyone that wants to. The punishment for failure to do so is bad reputation and failure to make money transporting them. Bad reputation in turn causes a (possibly relatively slight) reduction in the number of potential passengers. Once passengers have boarded and paid, the company seems responsible for getting them towards their goal, unless emergency services become responsible. Air travel is mostly, or even exclusively, pre-booked, which seems to mean that the company has to make a greater effort getting passengers to where they want to go even if they don't even board the vehicle.
It's actually quite as simple as for goods, since the same still holds true: The contract matters. A plane ticket is very specific - it's a contract for a specific plane, going from one location to another at specific times. City busses are completely different, usually tickets neither specify a route nor a time. If the plane does not fly, it's a breach of contract, so it can be punished. If one of the city busses doesn't go one day, there is no breach of contract, so you probably don't even get a refund. Perhaps I should mention promissory estoppel here, since even without a ticket, the timetable could be seen as a promise the pax depend on, and breaking it causes them loss. But that becomes really complicated, and the point is pretty much that reality is too complicated to be accurately represented in Simutrans. Hence gameplay elements that catch the general idea must suffice.
Simutrans' unhappy passengers do represent the missed opportunity of more paying passengers, and it is a pretty decent reputation meter for that stop. And in my opinion, reputation affecting passenger "generation" in real life is localized closer to that level than being city wide, like Transport Tycoon. A city wide reputation would rather reflect the local governments willingness to let a sloppy company have their way with the shaping of the infrastructure and the city itself (which is also what Transport Tycoon does).
I agree. Unhappy pax are a decent reputation meter for a specific stop, and a city can be too large an area.
However, that's simplification for gameplay reasons. "city" is just the next best level to apply a reputation meter to, since just the station is way too localized (an overcrowded station likely means overcrowded vehicles. Those are not represented in Simutrans, but would reduce reputation down the line, etc.). Plus, since the point is to build up reputation over a long period of time, you wouldn't want to connect it to stations or lines the player could just delete and rebuild/reschedule. You could apply reputation directly to each tile, but that would be an awful waste of resources.
Granted, if you have a giant map plastered with just one city, it becomes a bit odd, but that only opens up new design space; eg. once a city reaches a certain area, it could spawn new cities around itself instead of expanding further, representing districts or suburbs. This would also help with cities always having rectangular borders, and it would mean that on a larger scale, cities composed of multiple ingame-cities will grow more in areas where you actually deal with traffic.
Also, If Simutrans ever gets a system where cities would forbid the player to build within their borders - yeah, that could definitelly be a side effect of city happiness, among others, at a later point. It's just not relevant to this discussion, but a seperate feature.
In real life the only reason you transport anyone on time or in comfort is not to be fined (financial penalty)... That is why in the UK it makes more sense for transport companies to cancel trains/busses than it does for them to run many trains late since each stop late is a fine but a cancelled is only a single lump fine.
Well, as I explained above, if somebody bought a ticket, causing a contract, you are legally obliged to transport them. You would want them to buy tickets if you are somewhat part of a free market and need to make profit. You'd try to be comfortable to get more customers. I'm sure you know, and "only reason" was just an overstatement.
Isn't it in the UK that any train service has a contract with the government for it's lines, which both allows them to have trains on that line, but also requires them to service all stations defined in the contract? This would easily explain why the government fines them - they don't fulfill their contract. It's also why ghost lines nobody uses exist in the UK - because they are part of the contract. Any country that does not have a franchising system for train routes will have very different rules[/quote]
Hence overcrowding causing a fine and some "alternative transport" cost penalty seems pretty realistic to me.
Even if we assume it would be realistic outside a british railway scenario, it would still be strange as to what really happens, and probably hard to communicate to a player, especially the alternative transport part, and even more so if the explaination is that the player unknowingly paid for an invisible vehicle that didn't need any kind of way to deliver them to the next station. I could see "pax pay less on arrival in overcrowded station" and "every month, pay a fine for each severely overcrowded station" and "if there are way too many pax in a station, delete some" as seperate options, but teleporting seems oddly specific - at least for standard.
