Catchment Areas

[Crass Spektakel]

Lets say I build a bus-stop. Why does a 20m long and 3m wide bus stop pile up several thousand passangers in a big city (just imagine THAT picture)?

I rethought my upper brainstorming, my ideas can be very easily implemented in a much simplier form which I call "advanced distribution":

1. stations have a specific catchment-area, a new capacity-arrival and a new capacity departure-limit.

2. special stations act a a sort of industry and convert e.g. "local passengers" to "long distance passangers" and vica versa. Implement Long-Range- and Local-Transport Versions for selected freight

Examples: eg "local passengers" only pay up to a limit for long-range-travels so you earn the same money for hauling them 10 or 100 fields. "long range passengers" simply aren't accepted anywhere else than another City-Long-Range-Station but pay well even for long distances.

There are small local busses which can halt at every station but only haul "local passengers" and there are big long range busses which only accept "long range passengers". Do the same with trains, e.g. Tram- and Subways against Intercity-Express. Planes are always long-range, while helicopters and ships are both.

long-range stations have no catchement-area at all. Combine them with local stations if you need catchement. Short-range stations do have specific catchement-sizes, e.g. a small bus-stop has less range than a big subway-station. But only the biggest catchement counts so no more "station walking/growing"

Capacity-arrival- and capacity departure-limits: Long range stations are big, expensive and have very big departure-limits. Local stations are cheap, small and have specific limits, eg Bug-Stop 100departure/month+200arrival/month, one-field-Subway 200 departure/month+400arrival/month, three-field-Subway 600 departure/month+1200arrival/month.

[mkrwii]

I think that this problem should be solved in a way resembling how it's solved IRL.
If we look at London Airport Stansted, it is located 50 km north of London, which of course means that no one will walk there. Instead, what do they do?
Most people choose one out of three:
Train
Bus
Private owned cars

This is not unique to Stansted, Oslo Airport Gardermoen is using a very similar system.

In TTD this solution could be like this:

- a road to the airport (or long-haul railroad station) will increase its catchment area in the area where the road reaches
- Local tranport may be converted to long-haul transport in the airport, or long-range buses (or trains) bring long-haul passengers to the airport using some kind of a transfer system, though this system will need to be worked on a bit...

I'm sorry if this brainstorming is too untidy, just ask if you want...