Getting a lot of 0% bus capacity used in highly dense areas with NAM?
Hi folks,
Been a long time SimCity 4 player that has finally added a bunch of mods for the first time. Giving the game a-go again and it’s been fun playing with these mods.
I have used bus stops in the past and have gotten regular usage, however after installing NAM I’m noticing that for the majority of them I’m getting 0% for capacity used with low actual usage numbers in dense areas. However, adjacent taxi stands to the bus stops are getting 150%, 280% usages. Which is weird.
I have all the ordinances checked on, and increasing the mass transit budgets, but the usages don’t budge. Some bus stop usages are higher but don’t break 10% tops, and those are placed in less dense areas. Increasing bus usage will help fix a lot of my traffic woes.
Just wondering if anyone has any solutions to fixing this? Maybe it’s a bug in NAM? Any ideas are welcome.
Posted Mar 4, 2019, 5:01 AM UTC
It's not a bug, it's a feature of NAM. In regular game buses are faster than cars (on same road). In NAM buses are slower than cars (which is realistic), also 1000 people riding buses create same traffic and pollution as 1000 people driving cars, so buses are completely useless in NAM. Also in NAM population preferences for cars are much higher, rail transport can work, but slow buses have no chance.
Mass transit budget doesn't affect usage, popularity or speed of public transit, just causes a strike if it's too low. Overfunding is a complete waste of money.
Only one ordinance affects transport preferences ("shuttle service") and its effect is tiny, one ordinance ("carpool incentives") has absolutely no effect, and in general most ordinances in SC4 are totally not worth enacting (including "shuttle service").
By the way, if you don't know, in NAM maximum commute time is increased x100 times. You can force people to walk long distance through multiple toll booths and commute time still will be "short" (or "medium" in the worst case), and nobody abandons because of too long commute.
What the hell? :D
Like what kind of logic is that - 1000 people will fit into about 20-40 buses depending on usage of each bus, while they will fit into 250-1000 cars (in reality running more towards the 750-1000 number considering how few people actually carpool in many places). Nobody is going to tell me that 20-40 buses equal 750 cars in terms of road usage and congestion.
The way Maxis originally set up the buses was rather broken, and only sort of worked because of how broken the pathfinder was, when they had to severely downtune the heuristic to meet EA's specified minimum system requirements (a Pentium III-500MHz with 128MB RAM).
z, who designed the current iteration of the NAM Traffic Simulator, describes the situation in detail here (that whole thread is a very thorough explanation of how the simulator and the NAM's changes to it operate). The pollution thing is unfortunately a hardcoded quirk--any travel type that generates congestion also automatically generates pollution.
If you've installed the NAM's Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool (TSCT), you can uncheck the "Buses contribute to traffic (highly recommended)" box, and it'll restore the standard bus settings, though that can cause massive bus overuse. Alternatively, you can also adjust the Mass Transit Usage options--there's several presets (the default is Medium), and you can even set custom options there.
Ah okay the problem is that buses only carry 1 person per "vehicle", so Maxis disabled buses contributing towards traffic to not break computers, which in turn made buses become too good because they would just pass through any traffic and be unrealistically fast compared to other transit types.
THANK YOU!