Dealing with passenger demand during rush hour/regular hour/late night/weekends

[adlet]

I know timetables will be completely revamped in 1.5 and hopefully this is just a month or two away for the initial release. Nonetheless, I wanted to ask, how do you deal with passenger demand variances during the course of the week. All lines I launched so far (which are mostly trams/buses), I simply set the same number of trams/buses to run the line throughout working hours (around 6 to midnight). This is simpler but does create a lot of extra traffic during early morning/late night/weekends when it is not needed, and I have almost 900 vehicles across ~130 lines, so it slows down the computer quite a bit.

However, if I change the vehicle timetables to reduce the number of vehicles during various non-rush hours, because there is only one interval per line, the issue I worry about is that whenever the vehicle arrives to the point where the interval is maintained, the game will think it is late and send it on as soon as possible. And I suspect vehicles will try to move faster than the line speed as well to catch up because they are late.

Any good practices you are using to deal with this issue for now before 1.5?

[MirkoC407]

I go the "peak time interval all day long" approach. If you only use one line exactly what you wrote will happen. Otherwise you could make the same line twice with different intervals, like RE1-30 for 2 trains per hour in peak and RE1-60 for offpeak 1 train per hour. Then you need to change lines after peak. However it comes with side effects and confuse AI. Pax will leave the 60-train at each station to change on the 30. Once they are on the platform, they notice the train they just left is the next one to their destination and reenter.

[Yonsef86]

I would probably make 2 different lines, whereby one runs all day, and another one runs only during peak hours on the same route. You could give the lines similar names, and same color for the visual.
This way pax will not really get confused a lot because there will always be one line with all day trains to fall back on.

Still, the tricky thing, besides to fix the precise interval between the two lines, would be when the peak hour trains enter and exit service to/from depots.

Right now, I prefer all day peak service (between 6:00 and 2:00) and I will start experimenting with peak service after implementation of timetables.

[adlet]

Thank you both for good ideas. Seems like other than adding more lines (which I already have too many of, and managing intervals would be crazy), waiting for 1.5 may be optimal.

With 1.5, one issue with inserting trains mid-day, similar to BAHN, will be to insert them into the right time. Say the line is A-B-C-D-A, and the line from the depot joins between B and C passing through point C0, and neither of those is a timing point (which is A). Trains 1 and 3 which are already on the line can get to B or C with a delay. So a new train 2 which needs to go between them may actually get on the line before 1 (or after 3 if it itself gets delayed). Of course you can make B and C0 timing points too, and give the related trains some cushion time in case they get late, but then you may be delaying other lines which may also use these stations. There was never a good solution for this issue in BAHN especially if intervals are very short (2-4 minutes).

And if this happens, unless the functionality allows to overtake the train somewhere, the timetable will get screwed for one or both of them, as they will be lined up in the wrong order for departures from the timing point A. In real life, drivers will figure out how to allow one to overtake the other, but this is likely too much for the software to ask.