Station size vs city size

[Youri219]

When you build a station next to a small town, the station will easily become larger than the town itself. Even for some of the biggest town a typical game gets (25000) stations which are capable of dealing with that amount of passengers are stil insanely huge.

As far as I can tell, this was a necessary evil in the original transport tycoon, because maps were limited to 256 tiles and railroads are 1 tile wide. In OTTD that limitation has been removed, so it should not be necessary anymore to have such unrealistic percentages of a town covered with railroads and/or stations.

Would it somehow be possible to increase the town size (amount of tiles in x and y direction) by some factor, increasing the catchment area of a station by an identical factor, BUT, keeping the passengers generated per month equal to what it is now?

[Tekky]

I am also in favor of increasing the town size and catchment areas by a factor of 2 (in both x and y dimension). It makes more sense to double the size of the cities and catchment areas on larger maps than to increase the number of cities.

[Mchl]

That's good idea I like it!

Just remember that town and industry density should be incerased as well (so that it wasn't extremely easy to find three coal mines within catchment area of 2x7 station )

[Torrasque]

I agree on increasing the size of the town.
But I'm not sure to increase the catchement area.
You just have to make transfert with bus stop, and it's like that in every station I know.

[Youri219]

Not increasing catchment areas would probably not such an issue. When the production per area is reduced it becomes easier to increase effective area this with feeder bus/tram- lines, just in real life.

An increased industry density (in particular raw resources) would probably be best if the production per industry would go down as well. The same would apply in this case, use feeders (trucks!!!) to get the goods of some industries together, then continue the journey per train.

[athanasios]

Plenty food of though here.
I 'd prefer a +1 tile more cathcment area for buses. Currently, if you use 2x2 grid you need to place a bus stop every 2nd road. (Very unrealistic: Bus stops in real life are not so near.) With just +1 catchment you need a bus stop every 3rd road.