Taxi weirdness?

[alansation]

Hi Guys,

Today I've been playing Cities Skylines and noticed something weird with how my taxi fleet sometimes work when dispatching to pick up a fare.

As an example a cab has just dropped off a passenger and is then instantly sent to do a pick up at the other end of the map.

This would normally be ok but I wonder why they travel so far to get a fare? When at the same moment a few streets away I saw people waiting outside a train station for a cab.

Surely it would make sense for cabs to go and pick up the closest fare & I know the people wanted a cab as they were standing far enough away from the nearby bus queue.

They got cabs eventually as I sat there watching them but it took longer for them to get a pick up since other cabs had to come from elsewhere in the map.

Unless the game simulates the person phoning their prefered company so they might phone company B when in fact company A has cabs closer or something. so Company B says 'Ok we will take the booking but have to wait to get an available cab and then send it to the pick up even thought it's at the other end of the map'.

I've lost count of the times I've seen cabs sit in traffic to go & pick up a fare even though the game could have dispatched another cab from a cab depot that's closer to the pick up point.

Another cab related though is I wish we had the option of changing the colours of the cabs like you can with buses for example.

I kind of wish we also had the option of other types of cabs too like the London style Black cabs as well as the option of seperate depots for private hire minicab services.

Lastlly when I play the game I sometimes wonder how many cabs I actually have on the road so when you click on a taxi it would be good in the display where it say's taxicab for it to have a fleet number so it says 'Taxicab #41' or something like that.

But I must be doing something right as I now have a population of just over 51 thousand people and they are still using a lot of cabs even with my network of surface commuter trains & bus services.

Maybe with the weird cab dispatch thing I just need more cabs on the road since I think last time I checked I have roughly 7 taxi depots all with roughly 30 cabe per depot so that's a fleet of about 210 cabs.

Sorry this post is so long guys I just thought I would share my thoughts & see what you think?

Looking forward to hearing what you think.

Best wishes

AlanSation

[HarryB]

The taxi ai is not very good to say the least. The fares are selected randomly, if you ask me and irrespective (is this a correct word? :-s) of the distance and other taxis that are closer.

Regarding the type of cab you would like to use, you might find this mod interesting:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=934994075

With this you can specify which vehicle(s) should be dispatched. You can find various taxis on the Steam Workshop.

[Vimes]

For all the strangeness you have noted, and probably more, I seem to care less about Taxis as a means of used transport in my cities.I might be placing them in poor places but when I look at my overall transport statistics, they are largely irrelevant.

Considering the cost and size that they take up, I also wonder about both types of airports. They have so few passengers or tourist for my 210,000 city that I wonder what use they really are.

After the Metro and busses, perhaps trains to a degree, I find other types of public transport more for fun that actual use.

[Ëvïlnïck8 ゴゴゴ]

Originally posted by Vimes:

For all the strangeness you have noted, and probably more, I seem to care less about Taxis as a means of used transport in my cities.I might be placing them in poor places but when I look at my overall transport statistics, they are largely irrelevant.

Considering the cost and size that they take up, I also wonder about both types of airports. They have so few passengers or tourist for my 210,000 city that I wonder what use they really are.

After the Metro and busses, perhaps trains to a degree, I find other types of public transport more for fun that actual use.

Maby a bit off-topic, but i have been wondering about purchesing the main DLC's when they go on sale, and ive heard complaints about how useless taxi's are.
While i dont mind the taxi one to much, what about the other ones?
Do people use trams, monorails, ferries, cable-carts and blimps? Or do they mostly get ignored for bus and metro routes?

[Vimes]

Originally posted by ëvïlnïck8:

Originally posted by Vimes:

For all the strangeness you have noted, and probably more, I seem to care less about Taxis as a means of used transport in my cities.I might be placing them in poor places but when I look at my overall transport statistics, they are largely irrelevant.

Considering the cost and size that they take up, I also wonder about both types of airports. They have so few passengers or tourist for my 210,000 city that I wonder what use they really are.

After the Metro and busses, perhaps trains to a degree, I find other types of public transport more for fun that actual use.

Maby a bit off-topic, but i have been wondering about purchesing the main DLC's when they go on sale, and ive heard complaints about how useless taxi's are.
While i dont mind the taxi one to much, what about the other ones?
Do people use trams, monorails, ferries, cable-carts and blimps? Or do they mostly get ignored for bus and metro routes?

I hope that someone with better experiebnce will be able to answer you....

I have all the DLC's and my city that I'm playing at the moment is around 210 pop. What I have found in this city is fairly typical of what I expect....

Metro and bus are king and all other types of transport play a role, but a secondary one to the two mentioned.

However if I build on an island type of map and only have ferry points going to and fro for the general population to travel by, I have still had cargo trains or even road bridges (but banned cars from using them) then I can get some good numbers up on the ferry usage.

I get some use out of the monorails in the current city. I built three stations all transporting people to and from both types of airport. The monorail stations are next to some very big tourist attractions and I exppected more use from them as tourists come into the city and then use the monorail to get to and back from those tourist points. It hasn't worked in the numbers that I expected. I use the quieter built monorail stations from the workhop.

I do have a couple of good tourist attraction built on the top of a hill with a minor road runiing up to it. I then buit a cable car ride to the top serviced by a bus station and a monorail near to it. IIRC I saw about 20 people a week using it.

Blimps are fun to watch but I have not found them carrying people in numbers.
Trams seem to be expensive and generate a lot of noise, they do get some use though.

Taxis are generally useless. Using them at pick up points for tourists or around commercial zones has generated just a handful of trips a week.

Others might have had better experience and usage than me so far, I'm learning how to best implement them.

[Ëvïlnïck8 ゴゴゴ]

Originally posted by Vimes:

Originally posted by ëvïlnïck8:

Maby a bit off-topic, but i have been wondering about purchesing the main DLC's when they go on sale, and ive heard complaints about how useless taxi's are.
While i dont mind the taxi one to much, what about the other ones?
Do people use trams, monorails, ferries, cable-carts and blimps? Or do they mostly get ignored for bus and metro routes?

I hope that someone with better experiebnce will be able to answer you....

I have all the DLC's and my city that I'm playing at the moment is around 210 pop. What I have found in this city is fairly typical of what I expect....

Metro and bus are king and all other types of transport play a role, but a secondary one to the two mentioned.

However if I build on an island type of map and only have ferry points going to and fro for the general population to travel by, I have still had cargo trains or even road bridges (but banned cars from using them) then I can get some good numbers up on the ferry usage.

I get some use out of the monorails in the current city. I built three stations all transporting people to and from both types of airport. The monorail stations are next to some very big tourist attractions and I exppected more use from them as tourists come into the city and then use the monorail to get to and back from those tourist points. It hasn't worked in the numbers that I expected. I use the quieter built monorail stations from the workhop.

I do have a couple of good tourist attraction built on the top of a hill with a minor road runiing up to it. I then buit a cable car ride to the top serviced by a bus station and a monorail near to it. IIRC I saw about 20 people a week using it.

Blimps are fun to watch but I have not found them carrying people in numbers.
Trams seem to be expensive and generate a lot of noise, they do get some use though.

Taxis are generally useless. Using them at pick up points for tourists or around commercial zones has generated just a handful of trips a week.

Others might have had better experience and usage than me so far, I'm learning how to best implement them.

Thanks for the reply.
Im trying to find info about whatever these DLC's are worth it or not so i ask around in here.
Probebly better off making an seperate post but for now my qeuistions have been answared. thanks alot!

[Greenbell]

Taxis? What DLC did you get for that?

[Metacritical]

After Dark

Taxi's never make money, no matter how many i use. there's also no point in placing taxi ranks as no one ever uses them as every taxi is always either taking someone somewhere or on the way to pick up someone to take them somewhere.

[alansation]

Hi Guys,

Thank you all so much for your replies both to myself & each other. I've jusr exited the game after playing for a while & I think the cabs are also weird in the way they are all pouring out of their depots and are obvously busy when I watch them work.

But like others have said here the cabs do seem to be working at random as my public transport use display basically says that my bus routes & train services are heavilly used and as noticed the cabs offically get hardly any fares but when I watch them they are like a yellow swarm in some areas getting plenty of fares.

(Maybe the swarm thing is when I just have 30 cabs pouring out of a depot or sometimes more than one depot on the same general area so it causes them to swarm onto the same roads.)

I did notice they do tend to use the taxi ranks when I place them it seems even this is random as they will go off to a taxi rank further away than the nearest one that has spaces. But that in a way is probably realistc since most real life cab drivers will go and park on ranks where there is a bigger source of work rather than spend two hours on a rank where no one comes for a pick up.

Also I wanted to thank HarryB for the link to that mod. I'm going to have a look at this one soon & Thanks for letting me know about the different types of cabs in the steam workshop I had a look earlier today and we are very lucky to have so many different options to choose from. So a big thank you to the really talented moders we have who have created & shared so many great things for the game.

Lastly I've noticed it's not just taxi's that act weird. I was sorting out a rather long bus queue on my number 4 route and while adding extra buses to clear the queue I noticed that twice I had two hearses doing pick ups at a house by the bus stop so they picked up the bodies in the house by driving through my waiting bus queue.

Thank you all again guys for all your posts & thoughts about the game.

Best wishes

AlanSation

[Horoai]

Originally posted by ëvïlnïck8:

Originally posted by Vimes:

For all the strangeness you have noted, and probably more, I seem to care less about Taxis as a means of used transport in my cities.I might be placing them in poor places but when I look at my overall transport statistics, they are largely irrelevant.

Considering the cost and size that they take up, I also wonder about both types of airports. They have so few passengers or tourist for my 210,000 city that I wonder what use they really are.

After the Metro and busses, perhaps trains to a degree, I find other types of public transport more for fun that actual use.

Maby a bit off-topic, but i have been wondering about purchesing the main DLC's when they go on sale, and ive heard complaints about how useless taxi's are.
While i dont mind the taxi one to much, what about the other ones?
Do people use trams, monorails, ferries, cable-carts and blimps? Or do they mostly get ignored for bus and metro routes?

I've spend a good 20-30 hours now trying to figure out where and when to use which transportation type with the mass transit DLC.

I have to say, for the most part they are all pretty well balanced in their ratio of throughput / space invested.

That said, taxis aren't really a public transport method in that sense. I like to think tourists use them when they get of the intercity lines and didn't bring a car with them. In the end it's just a way of collecting taxes from regular car traffic but not a way of reducing the amount of car traffic.
With that in mind, it doesn't really matter where they go or who they pick up. They are simply part of your normal traffic except that you get paid.

A bus can replace 30 cars which is a good ratio of course but not enough in larger towns. They help to keep your intersections un-jammed in congested areas but too many busses will start blocking lanes as they queue for station time and roads with bus lanes reduce your normal car throughput.

Metros are usually the best all-around tranport type because they are easy to setup and use barely any surface area. However, their trains are smaller than regular trains and what's even worse is metro stations themselves have a very limited capacity. You cannot just jam 3 or 4 lines into them as both people and trains will start piling up.

If a metro is not enough then the new train stations sure as hell are. I use the metro to collect all passengers from around the trainstations and then regular trains to transport them between disctricts. I have 2 lines, one to connect my industrial area with my residential area and the other to pick up passangers at the airport. Together they easily shuffle more than 1000 people around my city every single day.
There is a 2-way high way road next to the train line which used to be one huge city wide traffic jam. Well it's not anymore with houndreds of cars gone from the streets.

Monorails are something inbetween metro and trains but their key feature is that they effectively don't use any space at all. From rails to stations everything can be included within your streets. I use a monorail to connect my residential zones to commerce and the stadium and it has similar effects on my traffic as the train lines mentioned above. Just a little smaller in scale which is perfectly fine considering the space.

Blimps are... well very very low capacity. They're like large and slow busses which need dedicated landingzone structures. I guess their unquestionable benefit is the fact that they can go ANYWHERE and ignore your entire infrastructure on their way. However, it is difficult to not set them up in such a way that ALL public traffic is poised to use them. The AI isn't very smart when choosing from a variety of transport methods and if blimps end up as you main transport then transporting them will be well beyond their capacity.

I wasn't able to convince my residents to use ferries even with the encouragement district policy as a way to travel around town and avoid traffic at the center. I guess they're only really an option if people actually have to cross water but they should work well then.

Haven't tried trams and cable cars yet.