Game:

SimCity (2013)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 20:05

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2,737

So I tend to make a city, get it as high population as i can with no transit, then plop down transit and it shoots up to half million ppl...
L shape intersections explained: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuSiYxfSI-U
This time I wanted to see how far I could get with no public transportation at all, it's a self-imposed challenge which helps me see more immediately where traffic bottlenecks happen and why. I stopped at 400k, I could easily have gotten far more people in, but It was late at night and I was tired. :) At the poitn when I stopped I still had the entire center of the city zoned for medium rather than high density, and I had a huge freight deficite, so everyone was trying to leave the city to shop somewhere else, in order to get more freight per day I could have zoned a new city, put some factories in it, and tada... but that's cheating, cities should be self sufficient! (just... you know... cuz i said so..)

Here's some stuff that might not be obvious (cut n paste):

The decision whether to use one's car is made when one leaves his home, if you drove your car to work, you will drive your car home regardless of mass transit options... a max density residential holds 400 work commuters and 200 shoppers, if you put a single bus stop in range of only a single house ,than 125 people will chose to leave their cars home... if you put a single bus stop in range of an entire block of 10 houses, 125 people will chose to leave their cars at home while 3825 people will drive to work.
The only way to get people to not take their cars out of the house, is to give them enough mass transit options within range of their house... if you don't want to do that, the next option is park n rides, where ppl drive out of their house, to the nearest non-full park n ride, then take the mass trnasit from there, this obviously sacrifices ground space for higher mass transit usage, so if we're already giving up ground space it seems more efficient to simply space our houses out more, giving them access to more nearby bus stops, and causing them all to sue mass transit.
Streetcar stops can hold 300 ppl, so if each block of 4 houses (1600 people) has 4 street car stops (1200 passengers) and 4 bus stops (500 more) then noone will drive their cars.
We've seen this countless times in posts about 'i have 93% public transit usage!' etc.
Another key to reducing auto traffic, is people commuting INTO your city... again, people decide whether to ride the bus or drive their car long before they enter your city, so if you have over-employment, and your neighbor has unemployment, he's gonna send you cars, unless he has enough busses and bus stops near his residents, and since you have no control over that, you need to deal with this.
The best way to deal with it, is to never have over-employment nor an overabundance of available 'goods' for sale at shops... then noone will come to your city... bam, done.
The second best way, if you have resigned yourself to being inefficient, is to throw up park n rides at the entrance to your city. But be careful, the last patch sortof broke the game, in that once people leave their cars at a park n ride, they will walk / take mass transit everywhere... This used to mean they'd all wait at a bus stop, but in the last patch pathing was changed so that if it's faster to walk to the next stop rather than waiting for a bus, people will walk... but this cumulatively means that visitors to your city will end up walking from stop to stop all day long... never leaving the city..
This gives you the 'infinite loop of visitors' bug, in which 1000 ppl commute in to look for work, then walk slowly around the city, unable to go home before the next shift, 1000 more people arrive, etc etc until you have half a million people roaming your streets, despite the neighboring city only having 1000 unemployed citizens.
pretty sweet bug. Again, it can be easily avoided by not having overemployment or an abundance of unsold goods. I'm sure it'll be fixed soon.


(P.S. you see in this video, I turn on my train depot, and suddenly i get a roaving pile of pedestrians running around, so I immediately shut off the train depot)


More Halby SimCity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuSiYxfSI-U&list=SP0bbriyMfw8RZBRzOkhVjqUauY7EOizzU&index=4

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