Realistic Boarding Times

[BoominGranny]

Hi,

I was playing a game yesterday of my local city (one i made) and i noticed how easy it was to connect to ends of my city with a boat and transport passengers from one end to the other. with about 20 boats running at once i was making a fortune. In reality most people would use bus to travel this distance because you have to turn up about half an hour before the boat departs. So my thought is this:

Could vehicles have time it takes to load per passenger/cargo

My thoughts are this:
Trains load fastest, then busses, boats then airoplanes. (could be wrong here...)

You could do it like this (values are from my own life experience - once i complete my statistic collection i will make these more acurate)

Seconds doesn't mean seconds - but a period of time ingame that will work best.

unload:
no minimum time period, unloads as fast as the vehicletype can unload/load passengers.

bus takes say 5 sec/passenger
train takes say 5 sec/passenger
boat takes say 10 sec/passenger
plane takes A LOT longer

prepare:
saftey checks on vehicles etc - they may only do this once a week but if it was averaged out...

load:
minium waiting time period depending on vehicle.
eg.
bus = no minimum - the bus will go past the stop if noone is waiting in reality. But average of say 20 sec a passenger to load.
train= as i said before - 10 sec per passenger per carrage or platform (whichever is smaller)
boat = i am inexperienced with boats - please enlighten me!!
plane=minimum of say 30 min waiting, 30 sec per passenger??

[MeusH]

Passenger Train = 12 seconds / passenger / (carrages or platform lenth - whichever is shorter)
Passenger Road Vehicle =20 seconds / passenger

I'm with 0,5 seconds in train per carriage
and 0,2 second in the bus (that would make 6 seconds to unload 30 passengers bus, then 6 seconds to load it)

I don't see point of waiting 20 seconds to enter. Here, the bus' doors open and ~30 people board/exit the vehicle in about 15 seconds. That makes 0,5 seconds per passenger. Note, there are three or four doors, where two or three are super wide.

[White Rabbit]

Don't a lot of train carriages have multiple doors and allow people to enter/exit faster than on a small, single-door bus?

[jezza5-1-0]

In earlier years boarding and exiting time are longer and the later years they become smaller because of technology

[Brianetta]

In reality most people would use bus to travel this distance because you have to turn up about half an hour before the boat departs.

The Tyne & Wear Metro system incorporates a ferry across the Tyne in its ticketing system. The ferry makes four crossings an hour, leaving any given jetty every half an hour. As a passenger, all I do is turn up and wait for it to arrive, just like a bus. If I see it coming, I run down the jetty so I don't miss it. Why would I want to turn up half an hour before it departs? It leaves every half an hour anyway. There's no check-in time, and you can buy a ticket once on board.

I don't think we need to muck about forcing passengers to choose between a long wait and catching a bus. I certainly don't catch a bus to go where the Tyne ferry goes, because the bus does a significantly further distance, and takes a correspondingly lengthy time to travel - almost an hour.

Run for the ferry or wait half an hour! It's about to go:

[BoominGranny]

Point taken! i knew there would be a better way to look at it.
I still believe the game should take into account the time it takes for people to actually get onto the vehicle rather than instantly whisking passengers/cargo on (maybe it does already?)

how about three phases?

unload:
no minimum time period, unloads as fast as the vehicletype can unload/load passengers.

bus takes say 5 sec/passenger
train takes say 5 sec/passenger
boat takes say 10 sec/passenger
plane takes A LOT longer

prepare:
saftey checks on vehicles etc - they may only do this once a week but if it was averaged out...

load:
minium waiting time period depending on vehicle.
eg.
bus = no minimum - the bus will go past the stop if noone is waiting in reality. But average of say 20 sec a passenger to load.
train= as i said before - 10 sec per passenger per carrage or platform (whichever is smaller)
boat = i am inexperienced with boats - please enlighten me!!
plane=minimum of say 30 min waiting, 30 sec per passenger??

what this would achieve is that you would have to consider how many passengers you are taking and how far you are taking them and then decide which method of transport suits best.

ps. maybe boats need more realistic accelleration/deselleration then??
also how long is the time between the boat stopping and then the boat starting again? as fast as a bus? i believe you are right that i shouldn't presume a vehicle type (eg. boat) has prepay, but train doesn't!

[MeusH]

Busses... how can you determine if this is standard bus where it takes less than second for three people to load, or it is "holiday bus" where some big baggage must be loaded, too?

[Brianetta]

Or a bus where you have to wait for six kids to be unloaded from three double buggies by two young mothers, neither of whom had the foresight to have some change in their hand, leading to the tiresome spectacle of watching them attempt to pay, fold up buggies, stow shopping and control six children, all simultaneously.

Something like that can keep a bus at the kerbside for very nearly seventeen minutes.

[Patchman]

I'd like to point out that all of this is part of the NFO definitions. I don't know if OTTD supports it yet, but vehicle property 7 is the loading rate and can be set for each vehicle individually. So you can have local train cars that load quickly and long-distance cars that take longer to load, for instance.

[MeusH]

That's terrific! I'll ask developers about property 7

[Metalhead]

Correct me If I'm wrong here BoominGranny....You want trains to take 5 seconds to unload per passenger?

I have multiple trains carrying 800 people
That would just take too long.

[MeusH]

In real life 1 second per passenger per carriage (assuming carriage has 2 exit doors) is good value.
But this would mean 40 seconds per carriage.

Take under accound that it is TT world, with completly different time and distance measurement. 7 seconds per carriage would be ok IMO for TT world.

[BoominGranny]

Metalhead:

to quote myself:

Seconds doesn't mean seconds - but a period of time ingame that will work best.

[Brianetta]

Bear in mind that every two seconds standing at the platform is a whole day in the big picture. Days count, when it comes to profitability, so balance needs to be borne in mind here.