Have a city with High Pop, and Low Usage.

[Vimpster]

I believe the auto-spacing feature does work for trains, just as it does for the road vehicles. It isn’t very aggressive unfortunately. However it is usually easier to see the spacing doing its thing with buses and trams as you typically have a lot more stops on a line for those. This gives the auto-spacing a lot more opportunities to adjust the spacing. At each stop the auto-spacing feature holds the vehicle in the station/bus stop for a couple seconds longer then needed in order to space the vehicle from the one ahead of it until they are evenly spaced. However a single interruption can undo potentially years of auto-spacing work. This is why it is important not to share station platforms with multiple lines or have to many areas where train lines are crossing each others paths and holding each other up. With an uninterrupted line the auto-spacing for trains works just fine. All my train lines, both with loops and straight line multi-city connections, attest to that.

[Xcenty]

@Vimpster : there still some problem with this “auto spacing”

1) When you get new buses or new trains, you’ll upgrade your fleet. (The auto replacement feature is not the best action to take at that moment cause you’ll need less bus or train)

2) When cities are growing, they sometimes build roads close to your bus lines. There are 2 sides effects to these situations. a) the bus near this area is teleported somewhere else. b) the path of the line is recalculated and can change using this new road.

3) When your vehicle are 100% lifetime, you can use auto replacement feature which disturb the “auto spacing” calculation.

==> That’s why I prefer to space them manually first and let the game do the work after that.

However, as you said, building good lines (no crossing lines, no shared platform, ..) is a good key to maintain a sync 🙂

[Vimpster]

Yeah I agree, it is often better to space them yourself to start with as the auto-spacing is simply not aggressive enough so it can take a really long time for it to space them on its own. But again the more stops there are the faster it will be able to space them. Trucks typically only have a few stops on their route so they seem more prone to staying clumped together if I don’t intervene in the beginning. And road traffic in the later game can potentially make the spacing impossible with road vehicles.

But trains I find much easier to control their environment so they seem to space themselves rather well for me. The signal placement gets them quickly to a generally good spacing and then the auto-spacing feature fine tunes it from there so that they are never slowing down or stopping to wait.

[Author]

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