SimCity 4 Transportation Tips & Tricks

Sims won't walk much farther than a block.

If a Sim looks towards the other side of the city, and sees his destination a couple miles away, they will choose to go to a bus, train, or subway station within walking distance. If one isn't within walking distance he or she will decide to use his/her own car and drive.

Sims can drive to a train station. Let's say that about three blocks away, there is one, and the sim knows that the train will take him/her near the destination.

Transportation in SimCity 4 is more complex than any of the previous versions. In previous versions Sims actions were very simplistic, so mass transportation was an obvious choice, but in SimCity 4 that is not the case. First of all, transportation is not only used by Sims going to and from work. There is transportation to do errands at Commercial-Service zones, to take freight from a factory to the seaport or freight train station, and even tourism plays a role in how clogged your roads can get. Your goal, traffic wise, is to make the easiest way for your Sims to go from point A to point B in all of those different forms of transportation.

Make sure you have a useful mode of transportation next to your train stations. Otherwise, if a sim may only walk from the train station to the final destination, that train station is only serving a very small radius and won't be used very much at all.

Another thing to note is that high-wealth sims rarely take mass transportation, and like to stay in their luxury cars, and mid-wealth sims tend to take trains and subways if it's practical, but rarely busses, and low wealth sims tend to take the bus a lot.