[OTTD] Albion - A Fictional Britain [40% Complete]

[Kevo00]

Looks like nice work.

[Dave]

Development continues - albeit at a slower pace as other things are taking over right now.

Village of Clogau on the east Cambrian coast will form a junction from the North Cambrian Main Line for the short Penrhos Branch which will serve the small headland village of the same name.

Getting there slowly...

[Kevo00]

Looking very creative. Loving the potentially complex network

[Dave]

Overview map without town names of the south "third" of Albion.

The red lines are newobjects in place of railway lines. Good innit!

[Kevo00]

Looks good, really like the coastline - time for a commuter belt round the 'capital'?

[Dave]

Yes I think so. I don't know how capital cities on coasts work in terms of commuting though so might have to get Jamie's expertise on New York.

[Kevo00]

Yes - lots of potential for ferry based commuting like in Sydney, and I assume New York has too? Jamie?

[JamieLei]

Haha! How did I miss this! Thenagain I hadn't poked my head in this area for months, until Dave PM'd me!

Coastal cities have varied levels of ferry commuting as far as I know. I think it's generally more to do with the topology of the land and bay, and the climate, than the populations themselves.

The advantages of Ferry commuting generally: nicer commute (scenery, seat guaranteed by law), lower implementation costs. Disadvantages: subject to weather, slow speed, inflexibility in only being able to serve coastlines, poor linkages to other transport modes, unreliability. Factors that play in a possible 'artificial' disadvantage: not being properly integrated into a local (subsidised) transport scheme, safety concerns.

We know about London so there's no need really to explain. Generally it's there because the rest of the transport network is so crowded.

As for elsewhere, New York and Hong Kong pops to mind:

New York: Ferry commuting is very minimal. Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Red Hook are all waterfront neighbourhoods, and here's the latest American Community Survey figures:

Screen Shot 2013-04-20 at 12.46.17.png (68.6 KiB) Viewed 683 times

Part of it can be explained by the the fact you can't use a MetroCard, and the fare is $4 single instead of $2.25. The city is trying to expand what it calls the 'Blue Routes', expanded on in the Vision 2020: Comprehensive Waterfront Redevelopment Plan, but it doesn't really look as if it's going anywhere. There's a subsidised ferry service going on at the moment, although people are not sure if it'll last beyond 2014 when it expires. There is up-river ferry service too, but it doesn't really compete time-wise against trains or express buses.

One important point here, is that waterfronts in industrialised countries tend to be industrialised. Go back to the 1940s and 50s, and the best purpose for waterfronts would be getting heavy goods in and out. Of course, modal shift for freight, coupled with de-industrialisation has rendered this impractical, but waterfronts have remained generally uninviting places to go, with a lack of residential uses. And if your 2 blocks adjacent to the waterfront is industrial, no one is going to particularly want to walk to the waterfront to catch a ferry. (Interchange tends to be bad, since waterfront subway stations have to be built very deep and very expensive, and unless specifically built as an interchange, will only have half the catchment area of one built further inland, so they tend to be rather rare). There are some grandiose schemes to redevelop the whole area in one go. Again from my dissertation, this is the extent of waterfront rezoning in Williamsburg and Greenpoint:

Screen Shot 2013-04-20 at 12.54.59.png (332.46 KiB) Viewed 683 times

Which throws up a bunch of ideas - why don't you put a load of industry on the waterfront in your capital? Initially serve them by ferry (have a load of transfer stations on the other shore - it's perfectly realistic). Also perhaps have some waterfront freight lines too. And as time goes on, you could tear them up, or bury them, or run passenger services along them?

The other comparison would be Hong Kong where the ferry does play an important role. But there, I think even compared with the MTR, it's still not a large proportion. Also, the distances involved between Hong Kong Island and Lantau make a direct bridge not cost-effective, and some of the inward-facing communities do better with a ferry service than taking a bus to the MTR station.

But yeah, the point I'm trying to make is that waterfront residential development is a surprisingly recent phenomena. If you were to build your cities realistically through the ages, I would hold back on the ferry commuter services until perhaps about 2010 with a regeneration of the waterfront. Long distance routes - go for it though.

[Dave]

That's pretty much how I saw it, but thanks for the expansive information, I'll be sure to look into how best to show it. What about the commuter belt on land? How is it formed? What are the commuting patterns? Do they extend out similar to the London belt, but only in one direction? Or are they different?

[JamieLei]

There's always the 'chicken and egg' situation of what comes first - the towns or the transport? Generally, I see it as a co-evolving process - the two come together. The London suburbs grew up a bit long before the tube got there, served by the buses and Green Line, etc. But as the tube was put in, development really took off. It's quite rare actually for a station to plonk itself in the middle of nowhere and expect development - there's normally at least something there to begin with, even if it's rather small.

The I suppose in some ways, you might want to think about your political situation in your scenario, since that really determines transport. The building of transit, even when it was done by private companies in Britian, was still rather political. Would one county be more permissive to railway development than another, providing the infrastructure to enable commuter towns? And would a county also be willing to subsidise the service? Finally, what other economic aspirations would counties have in mind? New York City isn't the only economic centre of the region (although it's the biggest). It's in New Jersey's interest to build up Hoboken, and the more financial skyscrapers that jump across the river, the more property taxes they get. (Admittedly, we don't have the whole local 'cities as a tax-base' phenomenon in the UK, but it's a nice concept to think of!)

On the regional scale - which is perhaps what you're most interested in - development does overwhelmingly run along coastlines, even if 4 miles inland you're back to rurality. While industry (and before that, fishing) might historically take the waterfront itself, corresponding towns will build up around it. Commuter lines thus tend to overwhelmingly run along shorelines, and partly because shorelines were already relatively highly densely populated before the arrival of the railway (fishing employs more than farming, relative to where people live). It's certainly the case for London - both north and south of the Thames. New York has its Metro-North and LIRR. Dublin's suburbans hog the coast going round. Indeed, bring up a map of Dublin on Google Maps and compare how far Bray is from the centre of Dublin, compared to the rest of the urban limit, which aligns roughly with the M50 ring road.

Of course, as in London or anywhere else in the world, commuter lines don't tend to go to nowhere. They tend to have a great big city on the other end, whether that be Peterborough, Cambridge, Ipswich (you get the idea). If you build a lot of ribbon development along your main lines, it'll certainly seem realistic. You will end up inevitably 4-tracking the lines to make way for both locals and expresses, but that's the way it is.

[Dave]

Cheers dude, this is great stuff!

[Kevo00]

Jamie - it seems to me that you are assuming derelict, or high productivity industry which employs few and does not mean a lot of people. But, surely ferries did play an important role in industrialising cities like Liverpool and Glasgow, where a lot of people worked on the waterfront in docks and shipyards? Ferry commuting is not very important in Glasgow today, but the Clyde used to have six ferries - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renfrew_Ferry.

[Dave]

Please feel free to continue the discussion here, as it's helping me to build a more realistic map.

[EXTspotter]

Ferries are still common in some cities in the UK, and are used for commuting. This would include the two crossings of the Tamar in Plymouth. The passenger-only Cremyll ferry links Stonehouse in Plymouth to Cremyll in Cornwall and the car/passenger Torpoint Ferry links Devonport in Plymouth to Torpoint in Cornwall. This is very heavily used for commuting from southeastern cornwall into Plymouth and vice versa.

Ferries are important in rural settlements also, especially in areas where estuaries are very wide or topography is difficult, however the cost/benefit to build a crossing is low. This can be seen through places such as the car/passenger King Harry Ferry across Carrick Roads in Cornwall and the Higher and Lower car/passenger ferries between Dartmouth and Kingswear on the River Dart. In these places, the ferry cuts journeys by preventing cars (and passengers) from travelling back up the river to find a crossing - 26 miles for the King Harry and 25 miles for the Dart ferries...

[Dave]

Been trying to work out how I will simulate the southern section's companies...

I thought about this. Without IS there's obviously an issue of splitting stations but this isn't necessarily so unrealistic anyway.

So with a few minor changes I've created this provisional "southern" map. The companies on the west side are very provisional, but the Cambrian area is pretty set, I think.

[JamieLei]

Seems weird that some of your lines are flowing AWAY from 'London' though!

[Dave]

I don't understand? Haha. Were you trying to be funny!?

[Kevo00]

Expect the orange line will go up to London eventually too though?

[Dave]

It's fluid, I must admit.

I don't want everything going to London because that's not how it worked irl.

[JamieLei]

I don't understand? Haha. Were you trying to be funny!?

Oh crap - didn't realise the ambiguity in the sentence when I wrote it.

I meant as in the way they connect to the network, is by initially flowing (usually south) away from London, with the terminus to the North. So to get from to London, you'd have to go 'away', and then 'to'.

Seemed a bit odd to me that it would do that in real life, if there weren't any topological considerations. You'd expect lines to branch out, not back in again!