Cargodist and alternative routes

[trainsman]

Good day everyone! Let's examine the following station graph in my city of Chiba. (Several stations within Chiba omitted for brevity.)

Chiba-transport.png (37.71 KiB) Viewed 1303 times

With pax set for symmetric distribution, each of these stations is overflowing with travelers. Nothing new, here. My concern is that when I tried to alleviate the flow by introducing some trial connections (the tram line or the orange train shuttle), cargodist largely cut off the flow between the well-established route of Chiba East - Shin-Chiba. This poor single-track shuttle can't handle the flow (the red and purple lines are proper dual-track lines) and now peeps are waiting forever for the single shuttle train.

What can I do, if anything, to help cargodist calculate alternative routes?

Can cargodist emulate a "local/express" train logistics to the success I hope it would?

[Emperor Jake]

If Chiba-West and Shin-Chiba are both major termini for Shinkansen lines, then naturally there will be a lot of passengers transferring between them. Passengers prefer faster routes (i.e. those with fewer stops, not necessarily faster vehicles). That's why all the passengers are flooding the new direct connection. Once you know that this is how cargodist behaves, you can anticipate that this link will need much more capacity than you provided. Ideally, the two stations should be connected with a direct Shinkansen line or high capacity metro link, not a single track shuttle train

There are ways to adjust cargodist behaviour, such as the setting "saturation of short paths before using high capacity paths" and "effect of distance on demand" but there's only so much you can do with those.

[jfs]

Keep in mind that it's a cargo distribution system, not a cargo destinations system. The cargo (such as passengers) forgets what destination it had in mind as soon as it gets loaded onto a vehicle, and then decides on a new destination every time the vehicle stops to unload.

[trainsman]

Thank you for response.
I was trying to think outside of the box: perhaps by using some incompatible orders I could make these extra connections invisible to Cargodist algorithms. (The shuttle and the tram would revert to manual cargo handling.)

The red and purple lines are high capacity and I think what I need to try next is to combine the two into one metro line. Maybe this would make the alternatives more equal to each other in the eyes of Cargodist. If there was a way to make the shuttle more unattractive, adjust its 'weight'... Too bad we can't dictate the ticket prices on individual trains, to control demand. Then again, that would make things way too easy.

[trainsman]

Keep in mind that it's a cargo distribution system, not a cargo destinations system. The cargo (such as passengers) forgets what destination it had in mind as soon as it gets loaded onto a vehicle, and then decides on a new destination every time the vehicle stops to unload.

I've read this advice many times but your comment in bold helps me to understand it better. Thanks!