Reducing the number of freight trucks

[Andreas]

One thing that always annoyed me is the number of freight trucks the game produces. It looks odd in industrial areas, and esp. worse in agricultural areas, where the streets and roads are sometimes packed with trucks, while you'd expect not more than the occasional tractor or harvester. A long time ago, there was a thread at ST where I asked Tropod how to change it, and he looked into it, telling me that there were some drawbacks - IIRC, you can only reduce the number of freight trucks globally, not limited to the agricultural areas.

ST is down at the moment, and most likely, the thread got buried or archived anyway, so I'd like to ask here what property needs to be changed. I assume it is a property in the NAM Automata Controller, but my attempts in editing the "Max Freight Trucks Per Second" and "Freight Truck Density Curve" properties didn't create any visible change. Is there something else that I'm missing? What excactly is the Density Curve property controlling?

[zero7]

Andreas, there's a LUA (farm.lua) that generates the farm traffic (attached to occupant group 0x1912 farmland) - so a modded one could bring things down to a more realistic level.  It would also help if the farm traffic included some tractors, horse boxes and 4x4s, so that it wasn't just a stream of trucks.

[Andreas]

Thanks for the hint. But unfortunately, this still doesn't solve my problem with the number of freight trucks that are produced by the industrial zones...

[zero7]

The other global one that might affect it is the freight truck clock which looks like the time of day and percentage for the generator.

[kassarc16]

Thought I'd make myself useful and offer a hint for my first post in awhile.

Andreas, I too was annoyed at the amount of trucks that are generated by the game. I looked through the Automata file, fiddled with a few things, but didn't get much change. BUT, looking in the Traffic Simulator (Z-High in my case), I found that lowering the value of the "Freight traffic scaling factor" entry, cuts trucks a bunch.

I used "0.010000", but I'm not sure if this has an effect on the effectiveness of industrial zones since it lowers the actually number of freight trips generated. It doesn't solve the problem completely, some farm roads are still heavy with trucks, but it's better. Hope this helps.

[Andreas]

There was a discussion somewhere else, and I also modified my automata plugin a few months ago, which helped a bit. I'm not sure anymore what I did, but I'll try your suggestion as well - thanks for the hint.

[kassarc16]

Glad to help. 0.050000 was the default number, so realistically it cut it by 4/5ths.

Did anyone look at the farm.lua? That could also help with the farm traffic, since big farms put out way too much traffic. By the way, what did you tweak in the Automata file, and did it help?

[Swamper77]

Kassarc,

I looked at the farm.lua file. There is nothing in there controlling the traffic that appears around farms. Maxis put the script together, but they never attached the Occupant Group 0x1912 to any of their buildings that are farm related. The "farm_vehicles" specified by the script are actually regular civilian vehicles, not freight trucks.

The amount of freight trucks put out by farms is proportional to the number of jobs contained by the main farm lots and their surrounding fields. The larger the farms are, the more trucks you will get.

Also, the property you edited affects the normal industrial zones as well. It is a global value.

-Swamper

[kassarc16]

The amount of freight trucks put out by farms is proportional to the number of jobs contained by the main farm lots and their surrounding fields. The larger the farms are, the more trucks you will get.

I suppose the only way to get around that is to shrink all my farms down. I usually zone large enough to be at least slightly realistic, but maybe min zoning plus ploppable fields could be enough.

Also, the property you edited affects the normal industrial zones as well. It is a global value.

Yes, I did notice that, my Ind areas are no longer choked with trucks, thankfully.

Slightly OT, but do you know what to tweak so vehicles don't disappear soon after spawning? Trucks are especially bad.

[Swamper77]

Try the property "Vehicle Lifespan Range". This is also a global value and it will affect all vehicles. Pedestrians have their own property: "Pedestrian Lifespan Range".

It's kind of sad isn't it that I know what all the properties are and where they are used?

-Swamper

[kassarc16]

It's kind of sad isn't it that I know what all the properties are and where they are used?

Nah, you're just dedicated to your hobby!