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From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games
Subject: Re: SimCity
Message-ID: <9668@fy.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 27 Nov 90 12:58:16 GMT
References: <11590@milton.u.washington.edu> <90330.145528RJGRAHAM@MIAMIU.BITNET>
Reply-To: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 16

In article <90330.145528RJGRAHAM@MIAMIU.BITNET> RJGRAHAM@MIAMIU.BITNET (Bob Graham) writes:

>     When I have heavy traffic on a road, adding a rail next to it
>does not seem to lower the traffic level substantially.  This seems
>to indicate that there is a preference for roads.

That's been my experience too, playing the scenarios that have this
feature.  Since the traffic algorithms are based on the trip as the
unit, and a trip is a journey from one specific zone to another, my
conjecture is that, like humans, sims prefer not to change modes of
transport.  So if they start out on a road, they'll tend to continue
on a congested road rather than switch to rail.

Try building a city where the zones are grouped into clusters, with
only roads within the cluster and only rail joining one cluster to
another.