I think my sluggish population growth is due to lack of jobs, not services. The problem is I’ve never expanded my initial industrial area, so I’ll do that next. But first, I’m at 29,000 population racing to 34,000 for the next milestone so I can put in a nuclear reactor before ramping up my generic industry.
I was mostly just joking around about how excited I was for bicycles. I just think it looks cool seeing packs of bicycles swarming around all my streets. They do seem to swarm in packs. Very gratifying. (Every single inch of street in my city has bicycle lanes except roads you can’t change because they’re part of buildings like a harbor.)
I did experiment with trams (so I had to buy snowfall) when my bus lines had giant crowds of people waiting, but apparently my citizens just really like buses. I had an overcrowded bus line sending maybe 300 people a week. I put in a tram line along the exact same route and nobody used the tram, still 300 a week on the bus. Tore out the bus line entirely, leaving the tram line, let it run for a while, but still only 45 people used the tram.
But during that first test, I saw how buses normally work. They blocked the right most lane of whatever road you use. So if you use a two-lane two-way road, the bus will block it at stops. If you use a four lane two-way road, the bus will block the rightmost lane doing a stop.
Interestingly, that has not been my experience until this test. Bike lane roads have extra space on the right for the bike lane. Buses do not block the right lane on roads with bike lanes. This makes bike lane roads overpowered, in my opinion, though for damn sure I’m still using them. The funny thing is I had unlocked and upgraded to bike roads before I put in my first bus line, so I never knew they were supposed to block traffic. Also, bikers ride right through buses as if they’re not even there, though buses will slow down slightly for bikers.
My final solution? Jacked the individual bus line budgets way up, so that there is one bus for every stop. My lines with 17 stops now have 17 buses. My lines with 23 stops have 23 buses. It is nonstop every second a bus showing up at every stop, with huge crowds of people swarming on and off them. One line was so clogged I had to kick it up to 20 buses for 17 stops. That cleared it, but it now is responsible for over 400 passengers a week all by itself.
If you haven’t combined bicycle lanes and buses before, definitely try it out. It’s friggin’ awesome.
The only thing better than my buses are my metro, where I again jack up the budgets to match the number of cars to the number of stops so that turnover is constant. The train station dumps off hundreds of people at a time, frequently, who then flood my Metro system, get quickly hoovered up and dumped off into the bus system.
All my testing showed that my citizens greatly preferred ridiculously frequent bus stops. The more bus stops I put in the closer together the more people showed up and rode the bus. More people rode the bus from the train station to a tourist area I set up when I made it like 10 stops than when it was only one stop. I mean the number of people going from that one destination to that other specific destination was much higher when there were nine stops in between than when it was a direct route.
So after fixing my overflowing bus line by doubling the number of stops so I could jack up the number of buses from like 9 to 20 – and that worked fantastically – I started side-eyeing my least used bus lines, which were transporting maybe 120 people a week. Just as a test I doubled the number of stops and buses (both from 9 to 17), and almost immediately and ever since double the number of people use that bus line, hovering around 250.
So it’s a pretty simple fix. If your bus lines are overcrowded, add a bunch more stops and jack up the budget until the number of buses matches the number of stops. If all those buses start blocking traffic, switch to roads either with bus lanes or bike lanes. I would recommend bike lanes, and then apply the encourage biking policy. It takes probably half your cars off the road.
