Profitable bus routes within towns - tips?

[AirToob]

At the moment I generally set up a circular ring of bus stops that joins the residential, commercial and industrial areas together (ignoring the parts showing as very pale colours in the Land Use overlay), and then set up two routes through these, one clockwise, one counter-clockwise.

One of these directions is usually much less profitable than the other.

These routes will often join up with routes connecting the town to somewhere else, e.g. I am trying to encourage people to get on a train to somewhere else.

I haven't found any way of making a route profitable other than trial and error. I generally get enough buses to get a frequency equivalent to between 60s and 100s.

I'd appreciate any tips or guidelines from people who know how to do it!

[Gregorovitch]

TBH if your trams/buses are making any money to speak of you are probably doing something wrong. Their purpose is to feed your passenger train and ship inter-city lines which not only make vastly more profit but also cause your towns to grow more. Every last passenger is helpful in this respect.

So the calculation is that to get every last passenger on your trains your buses/trams will by definition be running half empty a lot of the time and therefore barely break even at best.

For them to make money they have to be full most of the time and that means, because of the typically asymmetric bus/tram demand across stops, leaving a lot of passengers piling up stuck at stops instead of travelling on your trains. Not what you want for profits of for growth.

[AirToob]

Thanks, Gregorovitch - very helpful.

[Autocoach]

The above is definitely broadly true in that buses job is to get people to stations (airports etc) where the real money is made. Also don't forget that the passenger 'connections' govern the town growth so a bus route with one bus with stop coverage for every building is enough to get max figure although as above you really want to feed other lines mainly.


You could also check this from the previous game , it will hold true to a point here .

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1084787993

[Havan_IronOak]

It seems like intra city transport is a BIT more profitable than in Transport Fever 1.

With an 1850 start I generally try and make sure that my city to city transport hubs are serviced in my biggest cities and just drop a bus stop in any connecting cities. I try to get the bus stop to serve at least a BIT of each of the three kinds of districts without routing the line right through the main residential district.

There's always been a debate whether the "best" intra city lines are loops or a hub and spoke arrangement. I've not seen any testing on this so far in Transport Fever 2. I generally try to use whatever makes the most sense based on the city road layout.

[AirToob]

Autocoach, that link was awesome. Thanks.

[Gregorovitch]

Agreed, that research by Ajax_post is an extremely interesting analysis, big shout out for it.

My takeaway from it is that you seem to be able to profitably apply the same principle to town bus/tram systems as works well for passenger trains between towns, i.e. inter-connected single hop town A to town B and back systems. The big advantage is the same - you can much more easily tune capacity for each leg individually to match demand and maximise passenger trips (and therefore both profitability and growth).

In the example showcased in the video with the purely local residential - commercial - industrial route it is not clear to me if there is actually any point in the line calling at the industrial area, if in fact any sims travel by bus from home to their own town's industrial area to work. This could be tested by simply breaking this into two routes, one residential - commercial, the other residential - industrial. If they don't (take the bus to work within their own town) the latter route should be bereft of passengers, but if they do you would have to check that they were in fact not just heading for the station via the industrial area stop instead of the commercial stop.

To my way of thinking this research seems to argue for a hub and spoke bus/tram system with a high capacity tram line (and a whacking great boulevard to carry it) from a main central bus/tram station to the rail station and a series of feeder routes from commercial, industrial and residential areas not covered by the central bus station, probably using buses as they can have their routes more easily and quickly altered and optimised without messing about with tram tracks.

[mrtree]

I have seen ridiculous profits - when I was playing TF1 - by setting up a tram station on the outskirts of town, running "interurban" trams between towns (usually on their own dedicated right-of-way, using a tram-only road mod), and using buses in town to connect each outskirt terminal to a few stops in town as well as another outskirt terminal that points in the direction of another town. In other words, I use trams in the role of passenger trains.

The trams make oodles of money, and the buses run with full loads most of the time too, since they form a link in the chain. My main interest is in running freight trains anyways, this setup gives me a profitable backbone that frees me up to do what I want with freight.

I haven't played enough TF2 yet to see if this still works as well as in TF1; I've been trying to go back to passenger trains originating out of stations that have good coverage of a town, and not doing so much with buses.