using openTDD scenarios to simulate real situations

[corradoccc]

Hello,

in some countryside near here, public (=regional=county) transport company are going to reduce the "granularity" of their services, in order to save money.

Basically they are now providing bus services with large buses for long routes, with these big buses also serving each single village, climbing up and down hills, which is expensive and polluting.

In the future they would limit the service to those large buses stopping at local hubs, not reaching every single village anymore.

A friend of mine is the major of such a small village and he's wondering how to build a local small bus service, to connect between the small villages and the regional services hubs (there's also a rail station in the area, as long as some inter-modal facilities for car-sharing).


I thought it could be worth trying using openTTD to simulate providing such a local service, by creating a scenario with the local geography, city sizes, productive activities, but also core services (local small hospitals for example, being "reduced" the same way).


I see openTDD has a model for simulating and measuring several core aspects:
- financial sustainability, as money is quite well tracked
- technology choices, as we could add more bus, trains, etc
- community feedback, as the level of service is somehow tracked

would you think it would be possible and valuable to run such simulations, with the aim to find the "best choices" in terms of which buses to buy, how frequently to schedule the services, which routes to cover, etc?

And where to find more details on the internals of the game?


Thx & regards,
Corrado.

[Chrill]

I'm afraid OpenTTD is not able to provide a fully representable simulation. There are several aspects, such as economy and customer feedback, not properly simulated. While perhaps a well designed game could provide a bit of a suggestion, there are surely more powerful tools out there than a 20 year old game developed by some dedicated enthusiasts in their spare time.

[kamnet]

Indeed, OpenTTD is just a game, and it's primary design is to play a game where you make more money than any other competitors.

[NekoMaster]

Being a game I don't think OpenTTD would be a good choice to simulate real world stuff aside from "pretending" your running a real world company like Amtrak or British Railways.

Though if you guys want suggestions, since there probably aren't a heck of a lot of people in these villages, you might want to invest in a small bus like those used for special routes in cities.

Also another hurdle you'll have to deal with is the legal issues, towns and cities don't just let every tom dick and harry run busses and trains through without lots of legal red tape these days. Hell it takes a couple years sometimes for cities to approve building new tram and rail lines and then it takes another couple years to actually build them. Then again I dunno how the politics work in smaller villages.

Maybe go around the villages and towns you guys wish to help out and get feed back from people and the officials and see what people think and what you can do legally. Though I'm sure people wouldn't mind having a way to get from each villages town centers and/or industrial areas.

Remember, transit is only good if it goes where people want to travel.

[fredbull]

Yep, ottd is waaaay too easy to make money.

I m in transport irl, but tranporting goods, not people. anyway, the basics are still the same.
U have to study the demand, how many people are gonna use the service, when are they gonna use it,...
When u have that u can choose the material needed, no need to set a bus with 40 places if u never have more than 5 people together travelling.
Of course there will be hours when u ll have more people and other when u ll have much less or even none.
Once u know the material needed, u know how much will it cost.
Honestly for small villages, it will probably be better to set lines running at rush hours to get the bus(or van) as full as possible, and none or much less out of rush hours.

Also it will be good to study where people are going(industrial zones/ schools during the week, commercial centers during the week end)

Joining some big company stops to let them do the rest of the trip( lowering your own costs) would probably be a necessary solution.
That could also interest the big company cos u ll bring some more customers, there could maybe let some place for negociation

[Redirect Left]

As it is. OpenTTD isn't suitable for the use you suggested.

Could you edit the code to do that? Probably yes. With enough editing and you inputting the desired details to represent, you could probably make it do that to some degree, and just use the base code and graphics to base your suggestion on. It'd be a whole heap of editing.

[fredbull]

you would have to completly remake the economic model, much more complex, with much more variables.
Also slowing down the time to get the hour of the day changing the demand.

In other words even if u hold the graphical base of the game, u would have to make a completly new game.

For the moment, the transport sim approaching the most the real economy was "train and trucks tycoon", bud sadly the game was still WIP and they never finished it.

[YNM]

OpenTTD won't be able to simulate the real world, it'd be very far from even reminiscent.

Not even any simulation game.



But, in case you insist, probably Cities:Skylines or some other city-building simulations would allow for that, at least quite farther than OpenTTD would, but still nowhere near the real thing

Or if you want to modify it yourself, OpenTTD's source code is always there.

[JamieLei]

As a real world transport modeller, I wouldn't completely throw OpenTTD under a bus. It's actually quite good at simulating route distribution through the CargoDistribution patch (now part of the main game, I believe!). I used to build really congested city networks, and it is fascinating how building a new direct line between X and Y (where previously passengers would have had to go via Z) can see demand change and redistribute around your network. On the flipside, I remember also building a very rural network with passenger generation turned right down; and replacing my buses with trains almost ruined me due to the high costs and the reduced revenue from infrequent service!

However, the main flaw is that it's only about distribution of a set amount of demand, rather than actually attracting and generating demand (although it does this very crudely and very weakly). It also doesn't assume more than a simple time penalty for changing. In the real world and certainly in the scenario you suggest, I would expect that the majority of people travel by car, with public transport fighting for a very small share of the market.

Ultimately, we can't just look at the costs of providing transport; the flipside (which is where my technical speciality is) is on how demand responds to the service pattern that you put in. And demand means passenger fares, which means REVENUE!

So going back to your original question, we need to answer the following questions:

- if we have 1,000 people who have no access to cars, how would they continue to make their trips, and how would the frequency of their trips change?
- if we also had 2,000 people on those buses who do have access to cars, how many of those would switch to or from cars due to the changed bus service? What would be the revenue effect, particularly if the service is subsidised?
- if we were to value environmental benefits and socioeconomic sustainability, what would be the value of having the existing service pattern versus the new pattern?
- if we were to change the speed of the journey, how would revenue change and would passengers expect to pay a higher or lower fare for the service they are receiving? Or (as is often the case) is your public transport structure set so that you can't change the fares to reflect changes in service offering?

Of course OpenTTD can't answer these, but then OpenTTD is primarily about operations!