I bought the transportation department and two bus terminals. The two bus terminals offer me 100% coverage to my current city. However after adding them they actually created road traffic issues in two areas. Shouldn't these actually reduce traffic so that I can have more skyscrappers in an area without the need for road upgrades? It is my understanding that is the point of them. Not to mention in reality they do the same thing reduce traffic not make it worse.
I believe it depends on what happened.
If you moved a big building and put the station in its place, this should not happen, IMO.
But adding buses to your city would cause more traffic unless people would stop using their car to use the bus.
However if you consider that only people that don't have cars will use the bus, then traffic will indeed increase.
Adding transportation adds a lot more citizens to your population; the folks who were already there and using their cars plus all the new ones who moved in due to the avaialbility of mass transit.
I had not read anywhere that transportation buildings reduced traffic; did you see that in the game FAQ's?
There is the population increase for sure. But in all sim city games to date the addition of mass transit (buses, subways etc) always was designed to reduce traffic just like they do in reality. So one expects that to be in this game as well. After all EA is the developer of them all. It is implied in the new mayors guide to the game on EAs site with: "Transportation: Keep your city in motion, Mayor. The green regions displayed on your Specialization view map show the residential zones covered by your transportation buildings." Between those two things that is what I was expecting here. I've even had where there are two skyscrapers on a stretch of road just long enough for those two buildings with 4 ways those people could go and have a traffic issue on that small stretch of road. Even rotating them did not correct the problem. So for now I have been moving them all over the place. From here on out though I'm going to have to have every square filled with something. In reality we don't have a skyscraper here with 3 times as much space as it uses between it and the next skyscraper. So I shrug and think, what the heck is this nonsense.
Other than for looks I don't see the point of placing things that offer higher cost to coverage ratios. Bus terminal covers 48 squares per key, airship 25.6 per key, and balloon 18 per key. Unless I'm missing something entirely here?
I had not concidered that metric. Ok bus terminal 48 squares coverage per square used. I don't have enough keys and I can't find any online resources for game info still. So I can't do the math for the heliport. How many squares does it take up?
I was looking for the amount of space the building takes up. For example the bus terminals use up 4 squares each. I calculated out the ratio of space taken up by the buildings and their coverage for all but the buildings that require keys or I have not unlocked yet due to my level only being 15. For whatever reason they designed it so that if you don't have the keys you can't even drag the building for reference purposes. But you can drag buildings you don't have the simoleons for oddly.
