How far will sims travel to work?

[pat]

I was surprised that I couldn't find anything when I searched for this. On a huge tract of flat land, I've got a boring mega-grid of residential with commercial interspersed. Nearby, I've got a few grids of industrial. Boring, boring, boring. My game is demanding more residential, and I'd like to build on some more interesting terrain.

How far away can I build that my sims will still be willing to commute back to my original industrial areas?

Side question: I haven't been playing long, but the maps that I *have* played on always start me on a large flat area mass. Nearby might be a few large cliffs, but when I watch some youtubers, they always seem to be building on interesting hilly areas. Is there a flat/hilly option that I overlooked?

[snowflitzer]

Cims can walk or cycle far. I had people go at least 2 tiles

[OneJasonBradly]

In this clip I follow a citizen travelling to work. He travel past many industries and other work areas to get to their place of work. He travels over 5 tiles to get to work and never pulls out a vehicle to do so. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1670338123
There is no limit to how far they will travel to get to work. So make sure the path is flowing well for them. There is a mechanic in play where if the residents can't get to work because the path does not exist then they will teleport to work, or should I say they just arrive there. They will also do this teleporting thing if they are forced to despawn too many time due to traffic jams.

Maps starting point are mainly flat so you can start to create a good budget. There are a great many maps available both with the game as well as in the workshop. Some of them do have challenging starting points.

[pat]

Ok, so it looks like one less thing to worry about. And here I was trying to gauge how close I could put the industry without the pollution cloud touching the residences. Thanks.

[OneJasonBradly]

Originally posted by pat:

Ok, so it looks like one less thing to worry about. And here I was trying to gauge how close I could put the industry without the pollution cloud touching the residences. Thanks.

You may notice in the clip I zone industry close to residential all the time. I tend to fill the space between industry and residents with parks and paths.

[me22ca]

Originally posted by pat:

How far away can I build that my sims will still be willing to commute back to my original industrial areas?

I think the restriction is time, not strictly distance.

Pedestrian speed limits:
- 0.25 on sidewalks
- 0.40 on ground-level pavement paths
- 0.50 on elevated pavement paths
- 0.80 cycling on ground-level bicycle lanes
- 1.00 cycling on elevated bicycle lanes
- 1.00 cycling on dedicated bicycle paths

So you're very safe within 1 unlock tile for just sidewalks, 2 unlock tiles with elevated paths, and 4 unlock tiles with elevated or dedicated bicycle routes.

[OneJasonBradly]

For vehicles:
The restriction is time. If a path/road (not meaning walking path) is made and they can get from A-B within their calculated timer they will travel from corner to corner of your city.

It's like this, when a "vehicle" for an agent of any kind is created it is done so with a destination to go to and a "safety timer" that is calculated to get to "that" destination. This means each timer is different and specific to "that" agent and based on its destination. If its timer expires it's due to traffic flow being too low. The agent with an expired timer will despawn the first moment it is stopped, or is still. Agents don't calculate congestion.

Pedestrians:
Pedestrians are a different beast all together. They only have a timer when standing still, a bored timer kind of thing while waiting for transit. It's the only time I see them despawn other than from being confused.
They do have a set travel distance based on the terrain travelling, what they're walking on. You can get them to walk their limit then take a tiny bus ride and do that walk distance again, of coarse it must be the quickest route.

[snowflitzer]

Originally posted by me22ca:

Originally posted by pat:

How far away can I build that my sims will still be willing to commute back to my original industrial areas?

I think the restriction is time, not strictly distance.

Pedestrian speed limits:
- 0.25 on sidewalks
- 0.40 on ground-level pavement paths
- 0.50 on elevated pavement paths
- 0.80 cycling on ground-level bicycle lanes
- 1.00 cycling on elevated bicycle lanes
- 1.00 cycling on dedicated bicycle paths

So you're very safe within 1 unlock tile for just sidewalks, 2 unlock tiles with elevated paths, and 4 unlock tiles with elevated or dedicated bicycle routes.

Thank you, good to know

[MarkJohnson]

Typically, a worker will strictly walk about 12 blocks (1km) before pulling out a pocket car and try driving to work before he times out and despawns, then respawns to try to get to work again.

But they can travel great distance with a little ingenuity such as transportation (I think times suspends its timer during transit, or maybe even resets it?) and even the broken, using sidewalks as roads, so they can't pull out a pocket car and they don't seem to despawn.

But the game loves grided continuous cities, like real life. It really hates segmented or island districts. The traffic can't freely move about, and must divert vehicles on wild tangents and can delay cims so long they will despawn and get stuck respawning over and over.

It can still be done with success, but it takes a lot of planning and balancing to keep cims from traveling across the map to get to work, or shopping, or whatever. Also, you need these island districts to be self-sustaining if you want to keep them in balance

Within 9-tiles of the base vanilla game, it is fairly easy to control. But when you start expanding past the 9-tiles with mods, the AI isn't as friendly, especially past the inner 25-tiles.

[me22ca]

Originally posted by OneJasonBradly:

He travels over 5 tiles to get to work and never pulls out a vehicle to do so.

Sterling matches what I've seen is the best way to arrange transit too, though I used metro.

It seems surprisingly effective to have one train line for very-long-range movement of people, with metro right by the train stations for local distribution out to every quarter-unlock-tile or so.