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Hi! Just bought the game today and I’ve played thru all the way to year 1890. And although I have bus lines, trams and three cities connected, people won’t use the train. Why?
The train is the much faster way to travel, and even if I remove the inter connecting bus lines, people won’t take the train. Why?
Thanks for the help!
Passanger AI has a formula which decides, by which means they travel to other locations.
Waiting time, so frequency is a huge factor in it.
I guess, the frequency for your intercity-busses is higher than the frequency of your trains.
So people tend to use your busses because they don’t need to wait that long for it.
Also I think, the travelling time to your train station might be too high and/or the traveltime to the other city might be too high, even with trains.
When you remove the Intercity busses, the travel time+waiting time seems to exceed the 20 minute limit, if it takes for the AI more than 20 minutes to travel to an other location, they won’t travel there.But without Screenshots or a savegame-file so everyone could look for himself, the cause can’t be determined for sure.
Running trains in the early years is a little problematic. The locomotives are slow so they take quiet a lot of time to reach the closest villages. And travelling time is the decisive factor why people will take the train, or not. So:
- Keep train routes short, straight an flat
- Have maximum about 8-10 minute frequency (preferable with only 1 train to reduce the running costs)
- Have bus or tram lines from the station to one ore more key city centre points, straight , no circular line as one see them being build a lot. (people can walk from one city end to the other within 20 minutes. They don’t need your bus. You have to convince people to go to the station as quick as possible, in one straight line)
- have the bus/tram routes with max about 3 minutes frequency.
- Let it run about 2-3 years for it to become popular. You should get about 30-50 passengers per run, which just covers the running costs (in hard mode)
Have bus or tram lines from the station to one ore more key city centre points, straight , no circular line as one see them being build a lot.
This the first I have heard of this. Everyone says you should use a circular route.
You want to convince commuters to take your train. Therefore you need to get them to the station as fast as possible, without unnecessary detours. They only have 20 minutes to get there where they have to go, so every minute counts! I use straight tram lines from city centre to the railway station.
Circular lines work well to get some money from people who commute inside the city, but on its own it is counter-productive for your train business.
Having both (straight lines to the station, AND circular lines for inner-city traffic) is possible, but without straight lines to the train station, your trains will suffer.
Just my experience and playing style (learned after playing only on hard mode). Everybody is free to play as he/she likes. There is no “enforcing law” to play a certain way. Just have fun!
Sorry, I wasn’t criticizing you I just never heard of using straight line city routes, but I will try anything that makes the game more fun.
I am playing right now on another computer and using straight line routes. How many stops should these type of routes have?
No problem 😉 Glad to see your curious.
Mostly I will add a stop at the centre of town; the crossroads were the name of the town is placed. Sometimes I will add a second stop, if the town is large enough.
Secondly, I will often add a bus line to collect people from the outer edges of town to the 2 or 3 tram stops on the centre line (the bus line uses the stops at the centre and the railway station itself).
If needed, I’ll make this evening a screenshot of a typical layout of lines I use in a town.
I have always used radiating lines with this type of game. Out from the city centre with maybe a circular line around big city’s. It helps keep track of where they go, and as the city expands you just add stops to the end of the line, and add a few more buses to keep the frequency’s.
Above line layout I used from 1850 until the automobile invasion period (1940-1950). I’m with my current game at 1941 and notice a severe decline in public transport use. So, I have to restructure the lines to take as many people to trains as possible, and forget about inner-city connections. Within a city, people are much faster by automobile at destination (door to door) then by walking to the bus stop and waiting for the bus (1-2 minutes).
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