What is the best way to get Bus Routes running both ways

[Mirabilis]

If you want people to get to their station you need them to come in by bus. There are many ways to route a bus, but in real life bus routes go both ways (clockwise and anticlockwise ring routes for example.)

Transport Fever is quite relaxed about bus routes, but I feel that having two routes per line is the best way (one going in each direction.) That way a passenger doesn't have to travel the entire circuit of the line to get to the previous stop.

I hoped that Transport Fever would automatically run buses in opposite directions with a line, but apparently not. At the moment I have to plot a bus route going through all points in one direction, and all points in the reverse direction, and call it a single line (and add several buses to cover the distance.)

How do you manage it? Have you found a better way?

[Wenatchee Willie]

Why can't you drop a bus stop on both sides of the street, and then route the buses so that after one circuit around, you continue the route around the other direction back to the start?

[Mirabilis]

That's what I do. But I feel that it should be automated as part of the game. Otherwise you're going to be carrying passengers a very, very long way to get to their stops if they are travelling in the wrong direction.

I should point out that the game tutorials don't warn you of the importance of getting bus routes going both ways. You have to find it out for yourself, and many people wouldn't even think about it if they hadn't played other transport games that take bus routes more seriously.

[Rod]

Originally posted by Wenatchee Willie:

Why can't you drop a bus stop on both sides of the street, and then route the buses so that after one circuit around, you continue the route around the other direction back to the start?

I've seen Skye do this in his TF2 YouTube videos, where his bus routes will look like:

A-B-C-D-E-D-C-B-A

My presumption is that if a passenger wants to get from B to A, they will NOT board at the second stop and ride the whole line. Instead, they will wait to board when the bus comes back around (8th stop) and ride directly from B to A.

[SBGaming]

If you have a line that starts at a station and then travels across the city hitting say 5 stops, and want it to come back the other direction, you have to assign the stops going back because the game doesn't know that in some cases Local bus lines you want them to stop in both directions or Truck lines that do a Quarry-ConMat Plant-Town route, where you don't necessarily want the truck going back to the ConMat plant if the distance between the town and quarry is shorter than going via the Quarry, as in a triangle.

The game has a single behavior when it comes to LINES in the game and the game doesn't distinguish between the different types of lines possible. It doesn't know a line will be passenger or cargo, or how the player intends to set it up, and the different needs it might have. You build your stations, and then you assign the stations in the order you want the line to stop at.

If the game guessed that you want to go back to middle stops, it would turn Cargo routes that have more than two stops into lines that look like this:

1. Quarry
2. ConMat Plant
3. Town
4. ConMat Plant

You'd then have to go back and manually remove Stop 4 if you didn't want it to stop at the ConMat plant.

If you had a loop that went around the city hitting 5 stops, your line that you want to be A-B-C-D-E, and have a separate line doing A-E-D-C-B, the first line would automatically become A-B-C-D-E-D-C-B, and then you'd have to manually remove the stops you don't want it to do, otherwise vehicles would do weird flips or take detours when it got to E and then when it returned back to A. Add to that, any passenger who got on at E to get off at A (a short distance) would travel back around the loop paying as though they went E-A but taking up a seat around the loop.

[Autocoach]

Originally posted by Rod:

Originally posted by Wenatchee Willie:

Why can't you drop a bus stop on both sides of the street, and then route the buses so that after one circuit around, you continue the route around the other direction back to the start?

I've seen Skye do this in his TF2 YouTube videos, where his bus routes will look like:

A-B-C-D-E-D-C-B-A

My presumption is that if a passenger wants to get from B to A, they will NOT board at the second stop and ride the whole line. Instead, they will wait to board when the bus comes back around (8th stop) and ride directly from B to A.

This behaviour can absolutely happen , if there are a lot of passengers waiting at B to go to A , a new arriving passenger might decide to jump the queue and go the wrong way round. I do two routes , one clock and one counter clockwise as I always do loops but point to point should earn more money.

[FluffyAdmiral]

You can always make a bus transfer to central bus station in town and divide passengers between the routes there. This way you don't effectively need clockwise and counter clockwise route. It all depends on size of a town/city too. Sometimes one line to transfer people from station to center of a town is more than sufficient.

[bluetooth]

I prefer to build modular bus/tram stations. I usually build three or four in every city. If the demand increase you can configure them and build more passenger platforms. Then I create a line clockwise and another counterclockwise both starting and end at the railway station.

[jhughes]

I do two seperate loops. One clockwise, one counter-clockwise.

[Mirabilis]

I do one line going forward and then reverse the same line back on itself. Two loops is probably better, but then you have to remember the exact stops in the exact order to get it working correctly. Some cities have horrendously arranged layouts that don't make for neat routes making two routes harder.

Another solution for large, neatly laid out cities is to break it up into several lines. Have a line going clockwise, then next to it a line going counterclockwise, then another line going clockwise next to that, and so on, making sure to get each line to overlap the previous. Its not perfect, but it saves the forward and back nonsense.

I don't know. I feel that any line should have the option to tick a box that will run half the vehicles in the opposite direction and opposite terminal. That way ring train lines and ring bus routes can be accommodated easily. Also, new players could just tick the box without understanding fully how it worked and get a decent, efficient line every time.