Line, Vehicle and Stop graphs

[Mariculous]

Hey there,

I recently had a more detailled view at the graphs and found some stats to be quite uninformative the way they are currently implemented.

Note that I made these observations in extended, so there may be some differences to standard, however for some of these I know for sure they affect standard just as much as extended, so i posted it here.
Further note that for simplicity I will be talking about pasengers but concepts are the same for mail and cargo.

Vehicle and Line stats:
Let's start with the first one, or more preciesely the first pair of stat items:
One may expect "free capacity" can be compared to "transported" to get an average load of the vehicle. However, the way to count these is inconsistent, thus the relation of these two values is not quite informative.
"Free" capacity" will count unused seats each time it departs from a stop. Whereas "Transported" will count passengers whenever they leave the vehicle.

The "free capacity" on it's own, without a relation to anything is not quite useful imho. Highly demanded lines with many stos can easily have a much larger "free capacity" count than an entirely unused line with only a few stops.
I am wondering if anybody is using this stat for decision making and for what kind of decision making the current "free capacity" stat is useful.

"Transported" on it's own is also not quite useful for decision making.
Imagine lines L1, L2, both running from City C1 to C2.
Many passengers of L1 enter and leave the line within the city, not many are using it from city to city.
Passengers of L2, however, most often enter in C1 and leave in C2.
L1 will have a quite huge "transported" count, whereas that count of L2 will be much smaller.
Decision making based on this data would result in abadoning L2 in favor for L1 because the number of "transported" without any relation can quickly be quite missleading.
If one would additionally take the "Free capacity" in acount, we may come to roughly the same conclusion: L2 is loading and unloading mos of its passengers at the city borders, so the "Free capacity" number is quite huge compared to L1.

The same goes for "Transported" stats in the finance window. To be honest, I don't even know why it is in the finances window but without relating the value to anything it's quite meaningless.

I would suggest "Personenkilometer" (I guess it translates to Passenger-distance) stat as a replacement for the "Transported" count. That means adding the current number of passengers in a vehicle whenever the "Distance" increases.
Additionally, I suggest the "free capacity" to also be counted whenever the "Distance" increases.
That way we will get an immediate relation in between "Passenger-distance", "Free-capacity-distance" and "Distance"
"Passenger-distance" + "Free-capacity-distance" = (seats*distance)
Most often one will be interessted in comparing "Passenger-distance" to "Free-capacity-distance"

Stop Stats:
Currently, it is quite hard to impossible judging how important a stop is to the network.
What kind of stats do we have?
Happy/Unhappy(Turned away/Gave up waiting/Too slow/No route in extended), which will tell us how many passengers attempted to originate from that stop.
Waiting, which will tell us how many passengers where waiting at the end of the month?
Arrived/Departed, which will tell us how many passengers arrived and departed at that stop, which does not neccessarily mean they ever left the bus at that stop. It only means these passengers were sitting in a vehicle that arrived/departed from that stop.

The Happy/unhappy thing seems to be fine. If everybody is happy this means the service is fine and if that number is huge there are quite a lot passengers attracted for whatever the reason.

The Waiting stat, however seems to be the currently waiting number for the current month and the number of waiting passengers at the end of the month for any other month.
As-is this is not quite useful. A peak captured at the end of one or two months can quickly be missleading.

Finally, we got the Arrived/Departed stats. These could give us an idea of the importance for of a stop for the transport network but instead, they will give us an idea how many pasengers passed by.
That means even if the stop is entirely unused by passengers, i.e. none of the passengers ever left or entered a vehicle at that stop, it will still show a huge number if the stop is served by lines with a huge "Transported" stat.
The only thing we can read from this stat is how many passengers passed by and how symmetrical the overall passenger flow is.
I don't think that kind of information is quite useful.
What we are really interessted in is how many passengers did actually use the stop as this kind of information is quite important for interlinking of the network.
A stop in the middle of nowhere may be worth if passengers use it a lot to transfer to another line. The only information we will currently see at such a stop is "nobody is happy nor unhappy" and "a lot of passengers are passing by", which is absolutely not helpful.

The suggestion here is obvious I guess. Count passengers whenever they enter of leave a vehicle but don't count passengers that are just passing by.

For completeness we got the "Convoys" counter. I don't know in which case that one would be useful for decision making especially for stops that combine multiple means of transport like a train station with bus service the number will be quite meaningless.
However, I don't have any suggestion here. Maybe that one is used by players for station trump like "my station got 407 vehicles last month" "Hah! Mine got 413!" I really don't know which further meaning that number has. Apart from roads one can better read that information from the way stats. In case of roads both is quite meaningless.

[Ranran(retired)]

About "Transported",
I think there is ambiguity in the currently recorded statistical data. The ambiguity reduces the value of statistics.
For example, there are various categories of cargo, but "Transported" does not know which cargo was transported.
There may be a mixture of passenger and mail in the line. Units may vary greatly depending on the type of cargo.

Station Arrived and Departed are meaningless in the extended travel system because they show similar numbers in passenger and mail. However, there is a difference here because the cargo does not travel round-trip.
But it is not possible to see from the graph whether it is passenger, mail or freight. How can I look at the chart and use it?
Perhaps we just look at the increase and decrease and use them to determine if there are any errors.

Such a chart may be good if want to show the difference of cargo in a chart

(passenger/mail/goods)



What I need to add to Freahk's opinion is still the class information.
As you know, the extended's passenger has a class. player may want to know which classes were transported and how much, and if there is demand.
For example, if there are 1000 low class users and 1000 high class users per month, I will assemble convoy so that the ratio of low class to high class is 1: 1.

It would be very useful if the chart had class information.
For example, such appearance

[Leartin]

For completeness we got the "Convoys" counter. I don't know in which case that one would be useful for decision making especially for stops that combine multiple means of transport like a train station with bus service the number will be quite meaningless.
However, I don't have any suggestion here. Maybe that one is used by players for station trump like "my station got 407 vehicles last month" "Hah! Mine got 413!" I really don't know which further meaning that number has.

It could give a hint at how many platforms are needed. Even more so if the total time of vehicles spent waiting on platforms was given. You could take that platform time, add a fixed value per convoi (time for entering and exiting a platform during which time it's occupied) and divide that by month length to get the minimum amount of platforms. The combination would also tell you the average time a vehicle spends on a platform, so if it's just one of these goods stations next to a factory waiting for 100%, you'd know how long each train waits to be filled. Mixed stations would need to give stats per waytype though.

[Mariculous]

Such a chart may be good if want to show the difference of cargo in a chart

Indeed another important point.
I had not included this as it would require a new type of graph. If anyone could add that type of graph it would be awesome.
Passenger classes is a solely extended related feature, so this should be in the extended implementation of the graphs but is not reevant for standard.

It could give a hint at how many platforms are needed.

Not more than ways vehicle counters give a hint at how many platforms are needed.
Separating this by means of transport the same way as Ranrans above suggested diagrams may help a little but even in that case, the only advantage of that stat in the stop window compared to ways vehicle counter is that the graph would show a history, whilst the counter will only show the current month.

[Vladki]

I agree that the transported/free/total capacity graphs are not very useful now. Now the show tons*stops, which is not very useful. It really should be tons*km (or pax*km, mail*km). I like the idea of column graphs as suggested by ranran (classes for pax/mail, and perhaps also different cargo types too). Also any station passenger counter should be triple: those who start journey there, those who end journey there and those who transfer there. Not those who just pass by. Vehicle/convoy counter is OK. Especially in line management to see if adding/removing vehicles had any effect on profit.

[Mariculous]

Also any station passenger counter should be triple: those who start journey there, those who end journey there and those who transfer there.

I see the point in that but I don't agree this should be shown as a triple.
We will already have a bar for Pax, Mail and cargo, so three splitting each of these into three will result in up to nine bars for each month. That won't fit in the graph and it will be very hard to understand which information each of these is showing.
Stacking this information in a single graph won't work for passengers as stacks are already used for pasenger classes.

Instead we could split the Arrived/Departed information into Originated/Transfered/Destinated, where "Originated" Will only count passengers which walked from their origin to this stop, "Destinated" will only count passengers that will walk to their destination from this stop and transfered will list any passengers that enetered this stop to transfer to another line or walk to another stop.

However, it won't be possible to show two or three of these options at the same time but it might be desired to compare these or get an idea of the overall usage of a stop (transfers+originating+destinating)

Opposing to this, comparing the pax/mail/pax usage of a cargo stop to each other is not quite useful.
So we should maybe set it up differently:
Instead of "Arrived"/"Departed" add "Pax usage" "Mail usage" and "Cargo usage" buttons.
Each of these will show an "Originating", "Transfering", "Destinating" and "Overall" bar, which are in case of "Passenger stats" stacked by passenger classes.