I'm trying to build a high capacity station layout for trucks, but trucks end up going in the first station and piling up.
There's plenty of layout ideas on the wiki for trains, but tried to follow for trucks and it doesn't work that well.
Is there a way to force trucks to fill stations from the end?
Layout with issues:
sokiee wrote: ↑09 May 2023 16:05
I'm trying to build a high capacity station layout for trucks, but trucks end up going in the first station and piling up. ...
Put a way-point (or a via station) immediately before your truck station.
RVs decide which bay to use when they leave the previous stop, so if bay one (the closest one) is empty they all decide to use bay one. That decision needs to be made just before entering the truck station, occupied bays will then not be chosen.
Only after all bays are occupied will trucks 'pile up'.
sokiee wrote: ↑09 May 2023 16:05
I'm trying to build a high capacity station layout for trucks, but trucks end up going in the first station and piling up. ...
Put a way-point (or a via station) immediately before your truck station.
RVs decide which bay to use when they leave the previous stop, so if bay one (the closest one) is empty they all decide to use bay one. That decision needs to be made just before entering the truck station, occupied bays will then not be chosen.
Only after all bays are occupied will trucks 'pile up'.
Coal Terminal.png
I know base openTTD has waypoints for trains but not for trucks.
You mean putting a station before the loading part and adding a via order?
This seems to help atm indeed.
Jastrzębie Transport, 1991-09-22.png (1.32 MiB) Viewed 1918 times
Your examples get stuck at the first stop! I know because I've played that way many times. The simplest solution is for the truck to have an easy choice of maneuver when it enters the landing zone
Jastrzębie Transport, 1991-10-22.png (1.1 MiB) Viewed 1918 times
OzTrans wrote: ↑09 May 2023 23:04
RVs decide which bay to use when they leave the previous stop, so if bay one (the closest one) is empty they all decide to use bay one. That decision needs to be made just before entering the truck station, occupied bays will then not be chosen.
This is not quite right. The trucks look a number of road junctions (decision points) ahead, so doing something like what gravelpit suggests above with putting a ton of seemingly-pointless crossings just before will push the decision for which loading bay to enter until later on the route. Note that they need to be real crossings where every branch leads somewhere, it can't just be a side road into the empty grass.
jfs wrote: ↑10 May 2023 19:41
This is not quite right. The trucks look a number of road junctions (decision points) ahead, ...
There may well be many ways to make this work; what I have described works well for me. Of course, in JGR-PP this may work slightly differently too; there you can also put the road stop in one-way direction mode and get double parking; i.e. up to 4 standard trucks fit on a single stop tile.
You can use bay stations that branch off a single entrance. The point is that the distances between each bay and the entrance are roughly equal, so the truck is equally likely to choose any single one. Also, an occupied bay doesn't block access to other bays.
trams're proving useful...same principles in (a) equivalent approaches, and probably more importantly (b) multiple saviour points whereat approaching callers have more than one possibility (at least two chances' worth) for evacuations should their paths suddenly become obstructed, which these pictured tram-stop approaches happen to accommodate:
not trucks per se, but the rightmost coach stop of the trio's worth has to be clawed back from the service road to yield that 'equi-distance' otherwise the lazy haulers punitively foul its adjacent junction (crossroad -- these stops happen to be divvied up by stops substituting as through waypoints, by the way):
There happens to be a stalwart of a leftover of an old-school bus station of mine..! I now much prefer bus loop stations, for they don't jeopardise timetablings. Yet this one had me stumped, by far it's the one that I had pored over the most; it worked. But I couldn't ever comprehensively detail its functional mechanisms for you, but its science is primed, which is why I still haven't the heart to replace it altogether with bay loops like I've done with similarly unwieldy bus exchanges. It turned out that the junctions needn't be crossroads after all, yet the pairs of chances to ditch the approaches are borne therein (thereat?):
Even smaller exchanges are similarly unsightly, and I think only one of them had had all its thru stops protected by pairs of 'crossroads':
Anyhow, I would like to sum up with my noticing how vehicles will approach their stops in a straight bee line WHENEVER possible, and thus I'd fold that functionality into my pairs of evacuations (ditches at the very last moment) to my advantage.