Moving Passengers within the city

[MuddyEdg]

Right, so I've spent a few hours in the game (341), but I still can't quite make passenger lines profitable in the city.
Cities grow, new residential areas show up on on random sides of the city for some reason and you have to move them around.

There are two options right, either create 5 single lines, or create a network. Tried both and still failed making any money, yet there are passengers. Buses are automatically renewed, so no high running costs there.
I'd like to mention that single lines do better than multi stop. ( In single line I mean > Train Station to City Center and back)

I don't really have a question, I'm more interested in your experience and maybe a solution ? I guess that counts as a question :P

Update : While writing this, passengers on my single line dropped badly. I have two buses, from one side of the city to the other, (Time: 125s), out of 36, I have max 15 passengers.
Update 2 : Passengers are back, still waiting on the profit.

The City : http://i.imgur.com/yVRnAFH.png
POP : +2400

Cheers.

[CSI48]

i myself have found that city's become more traveled if they are serviced ( Goods,Food,ect )
Passengers are good for flow , but won't become very profitable if they have no reason to move to that city. i may be wrong , but this is only what i myself have seen as far as money.

try this. Find a city you like , connect 2 lines from it. One going ,say East , and one going say , north. now your city in the middle will have flow to and from 2 other city's funneling into the central city. then after you start making a little bit of cash , then focus on indusrty , i find food prodution my go-to. make a network of intustry flowing into the center city and City North and City East will want to come to Central City to shop and work.

I hope this helps.

[MuddyEdg]

Money is not a problem, I have 50 million on hard. I have fuel delivered there. I will add something to the comercial zone as well, we shall see if that changes anything. The city is connected to other 5 cities by train and to 4 (out of 5) by bus, so there is movement. And also by ship. All lines make a decent profit. Just the lines in the city won't make any profit.
I'm not really interested in making money out of it, it wont be much anyway, but it just bugging me that all lines ( in all 5 cities ) are losing money for ( most proabaly ) my bad setup :P
Thanks for your input.

[canophone]

The flow is: home (green)-commerce (blue)-home (green)-work (usually yellow, sometimes blue). Your residential land use zones need passenger connections to both commerce and work/industrial, with sufficient frequency and price per km value cost to match the "cheap" and "fast" preferences of passengers.

[larry_roberts]

I rarely found (even on 'easy') passenger services within a city profitable!. Better to make a route in and around a city then let it connect to a neighboroughing city (doing the same thing in that city), then it serves to take people to the train and connect two cities or towns together!. That sort of service has always been profitable for me!. I still have dificulty in creating profitable air routes but I can do it now!.

[MuddyEdg]

Originally posted by canophone:

The flow is: home (green)-commerce (blue)-home (green)-work (usually yellow, sometimes blue). Your residential land use zones need passenger connections to both commerce and work/industrial, with sufficient frequency and price per km value cost to match the "cheap" and "fast" preferences of passengers.

Right, I keep that in mind, maybe I can play it somehow. Cheers.

Originally posted by larry_roberts:

I rarely found (even on 'easy') passenger services within a city profitable!. Better to make a route in and around a city then let it connect to a neighboroughing city (doing the same thing in that city), then it serves to take people to the train and connect two cities or towns together!. That sort of service has always been profitable for me!. I still have dificulty in creating profitable air routes but I can do it now!.

Yes, you make profit because the passangers from the other city pay a s*** load on price / km :D That never was a problem. I'm not worried about not making money. This has to work somehow, if not, then something is wrong with the game. I know hard is hard, but c'mon. You lose 50k on a the bus, but the train makes a profit of 1.2kk, I'll take it :P

[MuddyEdg]

I'm going off now, I will try tomorrow all suggestions and see how it goes.

[genemead]

I USED to use a loop from terminal to several bus stops (make sure the stops cover all the town). I'd keep adding busses until the time is less then 40 seconds OR there's no more than 2 (yellow) passengers.

The problem I always ending up having is that the bus (stagecoaches, whatever) were always full by the time they hit the last stop or 2, so they never picked up any passengers at those stops.

This time around I used a differnt method. Same placement of bus stops, but I made 2 Lines per city. One line covers the stops in 1/2 the city, another Line the other half. I don't use any more busses, but with only 2-3 stops per Line, they hit their stops quicker and don't fill up as fast. Seems to be working well, and both lines make money.

[killakanz]

Originally posted by MuddyEdg:

blah blah blah my inner city busses aren't profiting blah blah blah

Making money depends on distance travelled. Bus routes that stay within a city generally mean the stops aren't very far apart, so for these short hops around town, your passengers don't have to pay much. Bus routes travelling between cities are profitable because the passengers are paying for longer distance of travel.

So while they're not hugely profitable, if at all, inner-city bus routes are still handy for supporting the rest of your network and helping the city grow by helping people get from home to work/shops or vice versa faster. They also help passengers get to your train stations faster, which means your trains will be fuller and that's where the profit comes in, more the enough to cover running those buses.

That's how I've always played it. The buses are the supporting act, the trains are the headlining band.

[Vimpster]

In my experience, inner city passenger transport on easy is almost always going to be profitable, in many cases quite a significant profit ($200k-400k). On medium difficulty maybe half of them will be profitable, but the loss' and profits are quite insignificant either way. And on hard, well I wouldn't expect to see any profit from them at all quite frankly.

But I think this is fine, and the way the game is meant to be. Those inner city transport lines make their profits via the traffic they provide to the city to city transports. I think of it as the "loss leader" marketing strategy. Perhaps you are familiar with that.

[Viss Valdyr]

I take a different approach for "inner city transport". I actually don't want to transport the citizens, I want to transport the tourists, who left their car at home. So for me it is very important to have a good connection from and to the trainstation/airport and also having all the bases covered. I usually use my trainstation as a hub for innercity transport. Those who just want to travel innercity (citizen) will go to the trainstation-hub, and drive off with a fitting busline. Those who want to use the train, well, Bus->train->bus. And this is the same for my tourists.

[hodderd]

It can be fun to click on a passanger and follow him/her around to see what bus lines they use and I find that just changing a stop a couple of streets can improve flow even if the "capture zone" doesn't really change

[pat]

Personally, I think that trying to make intra-city passenger transport profitable is a fool's errand. I try to make it as efficient as possible to make the city grow, and to entice outside visitors. A larger city means more need for various goods, which I can ship from afar, making a boatload of cash. Also, more people living in the city means more people wanting to travel to remote cities, which is also profitable.

When I sort my lines by profit, the city shuttle lines are always at the bottom of the list with negative profit. But then I look at my 50B bankroll and I'm ok with it.

[MuddyEdg]

Originally posted by geneomead:

This time around I used a differnt method. Same placement of bus stops, but I made 2 Lines per city. One line covers the stops in 1/2 the city, another Line the other half. I don't use any more busses, but with only 2-3 stops per Line, they hit their stops quicker and don't fill up as fast. Seems to be working well, and both lines make money.

I did this, 3 lines covering all areas. No profit however.

I just want to say, I'm not looking to make profit because I'm broke. I just find it stupid that those lines can't simply keep up with their costs.

I'm done trying at this point. I will just make sure I cover everything no matter how bad is the cost.

[Ghrathryn]

From what I understand most of the time people want to move from residential to either commerical or industrial (shopping/work) and back, they also like moving from one city to another so probably the best bet with inner city lines is 2-4 'circle' lines (UK B'ham 8 and 11 for eg) that basically loop around the city, probably with a 'reverse loop' once things start getting past say 10-15 buses on a line, then as things gro, run lines between major districts so main res blocks to main industry or commerical blocks with maybe 3-4 stops (I'd suggest using terminii stops at the ends or looping them) then back on themselves.

Inner city is probably the most annoying area to make money, mostly due to the short trip issues. Some cities just don't make money, at least until they've grown a bit, others, particularly hub cities, end up needing dozens of buses/trams for internal transport. From personal experience the two main things for money early are short goods routes that trucks can cover and intercity links, inner city runs will mostly be shifting people between stops for those, particularly at the start and pre-1900.

[J_Malukker]

I actualy build mostly only 2 lines in every City with between 7 to 9 stops, not make money eigter but make the money with the Trains instead. I only build pas lines if I want to transport Passangers via Train. However I can confirm how more citys are conected how more likly it becomes that you will make some money. I rather see it as Investment to get the Money through the Trains. See my most recent Game https://youtu.be/FR2fLp3bOMk?t=57