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I treat my citizens well. Not only a first class train station to take them to neighbouring towns but also serve them with various bus lines so they can travel to their chosen area of the town. And back and forth too ! Then why the heck won’t they appreciate that and hop on them !!??
Oh, yes, sure they will, for a couple of years…. But then, all of a sudden, they start avoiding my buses like the plague. Like the’re something so pathetic about them you don’t want to be seen in them. Oh,yes, driving around in their expensive Cord’s causing the most terrible traffic jams, that’s what they love to do. Snobs…
I’m sure i’m not the only transport tycoon having trouble with bus finance turning from green to red and staying there but does anyone have a clue why ?….
At the start of a bus line people can’t wait to hop on it. Bus stops glogging up with passengers so i add another bus, maybe two. I setup the line from one bus station (at the train station) to another at the outskirts of town. Carefully place bus stops along the route at each side of the streets and select them. First one side of the streets followed by the other side so that i have a perfectly looking double line without any odd zigzags or loops. I do that for another area of the town as well.
Works great initially, busses full, all figures in the green, but at some point in time it goes all wrong while the town at hand has grown to more then 500. Also the buses haven’t got more years on them than 10. My 3 pax train figures are green (serving 3 towns), my truck cargo figures are green, *all* my bus figures are red in all 3 towns…
It’s 1942 ( there’s a war on…. could *that* be it ?….), i have about 19M in the bank and, not withstanding the bus problem, still counting.
Btw, my fav bus is that lovely cream and red 1950’s Mercedes. Great little model !
Curious to know if anybody else also has to deal with these snobby citizen as well. First they love the buses then they hate them. Is there a way to sort these guys out and get ’em back on the bus ??….
Any hints/tips highly appreciated !
they start using cars in the 1940s. Solution: Delete roads between towns and they WILL use any service you offer them
Yeah you have to realize that as years go on, not only there are new/faster buses invented but also people have faster cars. So if you keep old buses running around cars will be faster a lot. Also towns tend to grow (if you treat them well) so you need to add new bus stops otherwise ppl will get to new areas faster.
Increase catchment area too. For example in a 4 way intersection put two bus stops on each road section and then group the 4 together to be one big stop. This will help with line traffic flow and will increase the size of the area you’ll be getting people from. You can also cut stops down with this as well as buses/trams.
The problem is that when cars get invented I dont think the travel time takes into account traffic jams. So if a passenger can get from door to door by car quicker than by using your services based on the time it takes to travel that distance without traffic jams then the car will be used. In my game I have a constant traffic jam between 2 of my cities that are connected by train and my train is almost empty as the game has calculated that based on distance alone, the car would be faster
Delete the road between the two cities and they’ll be forced to use your trains! muahahaha!
When upgrading roads between cities always, always, make a bus lane if you have a route there – it makes a colossal difference in the travel times. As an added bonus any trucks that use the road will also use the bus lane.
As to the OPs question, yes I can’t make town bus or tram routes profitable either, town to town is fine but if they don’t wanna use my busses or trams – sod em, they can walk.
Thanks, guys!
Tried your suggestion, Fuji, but no luck so far. Not a very dignified solution and if it will work wouldn’t that be a flaw in the program… When i first met with this tremendous traffic jam i noticed that the main culprits came from another town. I *did* demolise just a short piece of road and that took care of it.
Yes, two towns have grown considerably and i have LOTS of bus stops already… Remarkable thing is that the tram lines do work perfectly. Always full. But these lines are much shorter than the bus lines. Could that have anything to do with it ?
I have just cleared all of the bus lines in the biggest city and put 2 shorter ones back, one from the train station(sometimes more than 100 pax on the platform) to homes/leisure and one to the industrial area. The first one picks up only a few pax back and forth, the second one is much better but not exactly full neither. This city didn’t have a tram line yet. Set it up from the station along the main street with 5 stops to the outskirts. Just about immidiately pax fill up the stops so i let a second tram run too. Big success!
The bus lines finance still in the red after a year or so although they keep picking up a few people. That’s more than before…
Didn’t know there are bus lanes inplemented in the sim. Great ! ( wàs thinking about that when seeing buses/trams stuck in traffic jams) I haven’t build any of the super roads yet, just medium roads. Tried to upgrade roads in the cities but there’s a lot in the way, i suppose you have to demolish first but than you’d be left with only half of the city…
Didn’t try buses/trams from one city to another neither just yet… When you have a couple of trains running would that really be profitable ??….. Or is it like you have either a railway OR a bus/tram line running between cities ?..
Thanks very much for your views/tips/suggestions, gents. Highly appreciated !
Removing the road connections between cities can cause city shrinking if you’re not capable of fulfilling all of the transportation needs of the people living there.
I’d focus on more/bigger/faster lines between the cities that you see cars driving first – before deleting any roads.
Also, you shouldn’t worry too much about lines that are in the red. They’re still feeding into your transport system and their existence, so long as you have a high enough frequency, is still buffing the income from your other profitable services. Just aim for good service and encouraging high overall ridership rather than specifically trying to make everything profitable. Adequate frequency may require more buses than are necessary for full passenger transport but as long as your main train lines are making, say, a million or 4 each then it doesn’t matter if you lose 20k here and 100k there.
I’m having huge problems with buses and trams. The cities (the ones I’m active in) in my game are all around 1500 population and there’s just no way I can make it work. The main problem is cars stopping in the middle of the road for no apparent reason, and before you ask, yes I am using bus lanes, but so are the cars and some of them just feel like standing there. So right now this game is mostly about converting roads back and forth to clear the jams.. Quite tiring
I *do* have something good going now, up to 60M and counting, but before, while train lines were profitable, i’d still see company finance going downhill all the time, slowly but steadily. AFAIK this was mostly caused by all these bus line figures in the red. Have to say i didn’t do much about cargo just yet. Got seriously into that now and i suppose that’s the main reason i’m at 60M now. Still learning.. 😉
Personally, I never have buses with more than 10 people at any time. Yet I cover all my cities in bus lines with a 30s frequency to feed my trains. I offset their -x00.000$ loss by making a goods line to the cities too which usually pulls 1 million or so.
What baffles me more is how train demand fluctuates. I’ll have 40 million in rail income one year and 29 million the next. Are those just bad years for voyages by train?
I see this a lot in the early stages of the game (not with millions of $, of course). Trains usually run for months, and it can make a huge difference if they arrive three or four times a year. Trains are, in my experience, rarely spaced out evenly, so one train on a line might arrive just after another one at the station, so there’s not enough people to fill it, but it may be better next time. Industries seem to produce things in batches, so if a train arrives at an unfortunate time, it may not fully load. And similar things – when running a lot of lines (or, in the beginning, only a few), these effects can add up quickly.
Every now and then i put the game in 4x speed ( i wouldn’t mind if a possible future patch would include an option for us to control time flow ourselves. F.i. i’d like to stay in a specific era much longer than is possible now) and watch my trains from above. If i think there’s too short a time between one another i just put one or two on hold until i’m satisfied with the seperation.
Often i see a train arrive at the station unloading lots of people of which a bunch walk to the tram station. The tram has just arrived there too, but it’s not like the driver waits from them, he closes the doors right in front of their noses and off he goes leaving 10 people standing there until he arrives back from his route… I feel for them, glad it doesn’t rain in this world…
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