Workers cannot walk to road construction

[Superbest]

It seems like with most construction types, there are two ways to get workers to the site: Either have the construction office bus them in from a bus stop (own workers) or the customs office (foreign workers), or, if within walking distance, they just walk there on their own.

However, with road construction they cannot walk to the road, even if it is right outside their door. You have to bus them in. I'm guessing this is unintended, since it doesn't make much sense that roads would be special in this way.

This creates an annoying situation in realistic mode: Suppose you have some apartments with little mud driveways. You decide to upgrade these 2-3m driveways from mud to gravel. When you issue the order, the road now becomes impassable, which means citizens cannot leave the house, tend to their needs, work, etc. In an extreme case, if you try to mass-upgrade all the driveways in a small town, you'll end up with plummeting happiness and the roads do not get built since workers cannot get to the bus stop to be picked up and bussed back to their own front door. You have to use migrant workers.

This is a bit illogical. If you are a road construction worker assigned to build a road in front of your house, you would just step outside and start working. You wouldn't complain to your boss that, well, there's this road work in front of your house so you can't get to the bus stop, so you can't show up to work today, sorry.

[Silent_Shadow]

There are some constructions (including footpaths and roads) for which citizens will not walk on to work; only those who get bused/flown to the site will work there. Considering that most people prefer to use mechanisms as substitutes for workers, that is probably a good thing.

As for your isolation via upgrades, you just need to connect those buildings with a backup mud or gravel footpath (you should do this with your stores too) and let your citizens use that while the driveway or footpath gets upgraded.

[Stele]

It's obvious engine limitation. Maybe connected to some issues with calculating distance to bounding nodes, or something. I doubt they'd make different construction rules for splines by design. It rather was lazy workarround for some initial issues and got left as "if it works, don't fix it" thing.

[Superbest]

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

There are some constructions (including footpaths and roads) for which citizens will not walk on to work; only those who get bused/flown to the site will work there. Considering that most people prefer to use mechanisms as substitutes for workers, that is probably a good thing.

Yeah, the mechanisms certainly make the problem moot for longer roads. It's only really an issue when building stretches too short for a mechanism.

As for your isolation via upgrades, you just need to connect those buildings with a backup mud or gravel footpath (you should do this with your stores too) and let your citizens use that while the driveway or footpath gets upgraded.

That's what I try to do! It's neat how the game forces you to discover things like building a temporary mud detour while roadwork is going on. However, sometimes it's difficult to find a place for backup roads in tightly packed blocks.

[Superbest]

Originally posted by Stele:

It's obvious engine limitation. Maybe connected to some issues with calculating distance to bounding nodes, or something. I doubt they'd make different construction rules for splines by design.

Oh, that's interesting. You'd think that whatever logic is used by the bus to discover the node could be used by pedestrians as well.

[Bailing_Out]

If we had real communism we could make them walk to it