no commuters between regions

[auroville]

Hi there,

my problem with simcity 4 is that there are almost no commuters between regions. I've built one residential city and one commercial, but in the commercial city almost all buildings when I routequery them show no workers. No matter how good my infrastructure is and no matter how many commercial zones I make, res demand in my residential city stays negative and from there there are only several hundreds commuters per road.

I know it's possible otherwise cause prior to that I made a region where there were tens of thousands commuters between regions. The only thing I did differently was to make connections between regions later in the game. Is it really the case? What I am doing wrong?
Thanks in advance for any help