Multi-tile commutes and region play

[aragornjdl]

I've been playing SC4 off and on since it came out and have recently rediscovered and become addicted to SC4D but this is my first post. I must say I am amazed at the amount of effort and simply incredible results the community has achieved. First and foremost with NAM, but now with other major mods like CAM the game has really morphed into far more than it once was.

But after reading through and searching the forum, I haven't been able to find a clear answer to a question that I really want to understand before I start my first-in-a-while region. My basic goal is to have a semi-realistic metro area with somewhat sprawling suburbs. Ideally I'd like to have 2 or 3 "suburban" large city tiles (mostly R with some CS shopping thrown in) with commuters crossing those 2-3 large tiles to get to the downtown tile.

With a new vanilla RH and the latest NAM installed, I can't seem to get commuters in a blank test region to commute (via highway) farther than into the immediate neighbor without no job zots and no development. So only from A to B works, where I really want A - B - C - D (where those are all in a line). The traffic sim config tool is using the defaults. I did one test where the path within A and B was a small spiral to see if I could max out commute time that way but it made no difference. That made me think the max trip time in a given city was irrelevant and something else was going on. I saw one report of someone getting commutes across up to 4 tiles but haven't seen a clear answer to what the max commute across a region can be.

Adding to this is my recent discovery of what was identified as the Eternal Commuters problem. I'm willing to bet I ran into this in my previous regions without knowing it and I'd like to avoid it. It sounds like the only way to avoid it is to essentially not link neighboring "suburb" tiles at all. In other words your neighbor connections are restricted to hub/spoke patterns, but not more of a grid/network pattern that you see in RL. The warning in the CAM manual about it making that problem worse makes me cautious to dive into what seems like a new essential mod.

If anyone can give me some pointers on how to get a properly functioning region with far outlying suburbs I'd be most appreciative! I can post a pic of my desired region layout if that would clarify things.

Thanks again for such a great site and making this a great game, even 8 years later!!

[noahclem]

To my knowledge there is not a solution to multi-tile commuting although many things that had been thought impossible have been later proved otherwise by talented developers.

This is unfortunate as a metro area with a diameter of 3 large tiles (12km/ ~7 miles) is pretty small compared to larger urban agglomerations, especially in America. However, I don't think that the vast majority of people in any large urban area commute to a cluster of CO jobs clustered into a small space in the center. Those suburban CS jobs you mentioned would be very numerous in RL, and most industrial of all varieties, and a large amount of office jobs would be spread throughout the urban area. If you spread out your jobs more in that fashion you should be able to make a much larger region without being too unrealistic 

And welcome to SC4D!

[mightygoose]

while spreading out decentralised jobs into neighbourhood hubs is a sound principle when working within the constrains of simcity, you must leave a large CO demand and allow it to build up working in a circle of you suburbs and developing your CBD tiles last, to capitalise on the maximum regional demand.

[travismking]

While its true that a chunk of the Office jobs are in the anchor city IRL, where I live (outside Baltimore, MD, USA) most larger suburbs also have CO clusters. Places like Owings Mills, Towson, Hunt Valley etc... while being suburban, probably hold 50-65% of the offices for the area and the rest being in the city, because thats where most of the office workers live

[aragornjdl]

Thanks for all the replies. I suspected the strategy of playing suburbs in a circle around the CBD was a good one. Would it work to found the central city after a number of suburbs have been created?

I also live between Baltimore and DC, and am certainly aware that there are many smaller office hubs. My region plan is  meant to include some. But part of my goal is to get something approaching suburban sprawl with many tiles of mostly residential neighborhoods. Maybe they can all be supported with whatever shopping or small office areas I put in. So if I can't get commuting across many tiles I can live with that.

My biggest worry now is about how to structure my transportation network so that the eternal commuters problem doesn't come up too terribly. Should I go to the extreme of simply not connecting certain neighboring city tiles at all? That seems like it would have problems too.

Thanks again.

[travismking]

Its best to put the neighbor connections not near the edges of the tiles, but towards the middle to help avoid the external commuter loop issue, as basically what that is, is sims coming in to a tile, and they look for a job or an exit to another tile that has open jobs, and they pick whatever is closest.  If you have neighbor connections close to the corners in all 4 cities that share a common corner, there you will most certainly have an external commuter loop problem

[Lowkee33]

I haven't looked into this issue too much, but I believe that Travismking is correct with this.  I cant really speak on it, just to say that any time you load a city you should let it run for a couple months before you exit.

For your commuting issue, there are three factors at play.

The first is understanding commute time.  Sims do not like to travel for over 90 minutes.  Different types of networks have different travel speeds (I believe rail is fastest, although bus on highway might be).  A simple road can have sims cross an entire medium tile (mmm, vanilla SC4), but not much more.

Once you know the fastest travel type you need to understand extrapolated demand.  Neighboring cities effect the demand of the city you are playing.  However, this is only from the cities that are neighboring it, and it takes a month or two of simulation to kick in.  If you had a res city right next to a com city you could go back and forth and things would be fine.  If you had a tile in between with your highway (b), you would have to build res to make comm demand, load city b, extrapolate the demand, and then load your com city.

After that you would test to see how many tiles a sim would cross.  Make a bunch of small city tiles and use the fastest transportation method and see how many tiles your sims will travel.

If you can get sims crossing a large amount of tiles, then your only constraint is commute time.  I believe you can change this using the NAM traffic tool (that comes with the latest version of NAM), but perhaps you can also change the speed that can be done on a transportation type.

[z]

The first is understanding commute time.  Sims do not like to travel for over 90 minutes.  Different types of networks have different travel speeds (I believe rail is fastest, although bus on highway might be).  A simple road can have sims cross an entire medium tile (mmm, vanilla SC4), but not much more.

This is incorrect; with the NAM traffic simulator, Sims prefer closer jobs to farther jobs, but there's no limit on how far the jobs can be.  This also means that theoretically at least, there's no limit on the number of tiles that Sims can cross in a commute, regardless of the travel type used.  Travel speed merely helps determine which route is used, not whether Sims can get to jobs or not.

If you can get sims crossing a large amount of tiles, then your only constraint is commute time.  I believe you can change this using the NAM traffic tool (that comes with the latest version of NAM), but perhaps you can also change the speed that can be done on a transportation type.

Although you can change the maximum commute time using the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool, all you really can do is reduce it, since it starts out effectively infinite.  Other than by adding bus lanes, speeds cannot be changed using the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool.  This is intentional, as the speeds picked for the various travel types have been optimized for the Maxis traffic simulator engine.  For this reason, it is not recommended to change these speeds using a tool such as Ilive's Reader, either.

[SC4BOY]

The actual "total distance" doesn't matter .. once a sim leaves a city tile, his commute effectively ceases to exist from the simulator standpoint and he is deemed to "have a job". When you open the next city tile, your sim is a completely new simulation and has no clue to his "origin".

[six9nc]

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I have several methods for creating suburbs and exurbs. My time limited so trying to create ultra realistic regions without cheats is not possible for me. However I do not over do it and I think I create decent looking regions.  For one the core city has to create the demand for CO and I. I dont build large tracts of residential housing in the core city. I start building my sprawl-suburbs with dense SFH adjacent to the core city. I also force commute them by putting rail and light rail in some tracts that are not connected to roads.  Then I connect a highway or parkway to the suburb to the core city. I let the similation run and bam there you go a suburban boomtown where 90% of the residents commute to the core city. As they mature and the region develops demand I can then start building the CO to augment the residents who don't have jobs or the traffic becomes to much for them to handle.  One thing I found out is you have to build in the suburb first or you will wait a while before the city grows. Its like there is competition for jobs or something.  The commute patterns pretty much stay the same once the core city starts its growth spurt.  Just ensure you match demand with demand.  I like to make my core city dense with the density leveling off to the suburbs.  Before you know it you got a region view similar to SoCal mega region.  I love this game and I just sit for hours sometimes looking at different neighborhoods.  The one I posted is a test region where I was trying out a few ideas from this forum. You can tell where I started some suburbs and didnt finish.