Part-time school bus service

[originalfoo]

If I define a school bus route, currently that will run all day/night/both, rather than just when cims are likely going to or coming home from school. This looks odd, because I have a school bus going all day.

I had an idea that maybe RT could toggle school bus route +/- 2 hours around school open time and again at school close time. While this wouldn't handle the needs of all students (some students may require more than 2 hours travel time), it would be sufficient for most of the students.

To toggle a route on/off, either it's budget could be set to 0, or alternatively toggle the day/night setting as applicable? It would likely be low overhead as there are only 4 points in the day when changes occur, and with max 256 transport lines it's super-short list to iterate.

For defining which routes should be considered school bus routes, maybe the route name could be used, eg. adding a token such as (School) to the route name? Alternatively, a checkbox added to route detail panel?

[dymanoid]

The thing is, there are always students that will travel to/from school at any time the school operates. For example, the students that graduate from school might leave the building at random time. Or, the students that become eligible (or arrive to the city) will go to school at random time.

While they are not so many, I think it's a good idea to keep a possibility for them for reaching the school. Yes, maybe it's not that realistic, but anyway - the game simulation is not that precise either.

If you only set your routes to "day" and maybe configure the budgets via other transport mods (IPT2, TLM), does this make the school bus routes more realistic?

[originalfoo]

Using vanilla, the best I could achieve is limiting school busses to daytime. Same with IPT2. I can only limit to day vs. night. This is not normal behaviour for school busses. I've no experience with TLM (Klyte45 says he's doing complete rewrite).

Thing is, the school busses are visually distinctive, eg. bright yellow and different shape compared to other busses. So it's very obvious that they are not running to what one would consider a normal schedule for a school bus. You get this bright yellow reminder roaming your roads at strange hours and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Rewinding a bit, I think there's two things that are leading me to ask for this feature:

1. On-map visual cues for shift boundaries; as a user I will very much notice a sudden surge of busses on the roads.
2. Provide additional capacity for PT roughly when it's needed; it doesn't need to be exact, it doesn't need to cover the needs of all cims; it's just about reducing waiting times at peak periods.

So, thinking about this more, it could be extended to:

• Other shift boundaries (morning, evening, etc)
• Other types of PT (tram, metro, etc)

That being the case, there would need to be easy to use and consistent way of user to set things up. Ideally, a way to buff existing routes - that way we don't end up with mountain of transport routes to maintain.

Maybe there could be features on route details panel (or a 'Customise It' style button that opens a properties panel) with features such as:

Alter budget for shift boundaries: ⦿ School ------------------------[] 100% ⦾ Morning ⦾ Day ⦾ Evening ⦾ Night

So, using school bus route as an example, I'd set normal budget to 3% (maybe 1 vehicle) and then for the school shift boundaries I'd increase to 100%. The result is that I now get a surge of school busses on that route around the times when school is starting or ending. At all other times, there's just a single bus picking up stragglers.

I could do more advanced things with this too. For example, I could have a route with small shuttle busses that runs most of the day, but during shift boundaries it's budget drops to 0% (effectively turning it off). All the shuttle busses start to disappear. Meanwhile, I have another route that does the opposite, but with larger busses. Now I have a setup that, at peak times, removes the smaller shuttle busses and replaces them with larger busses.

Of course, this would only be viable if game speed is set slow. If it's too fast, the busses won't have time to travel between depot and route. Although, based on game speed, the timings could be adjusted? So fast game speed means the bus routes would be altered an extra game hour each side of the shift boundary?

[originalfoo]

See also: https://github.com/dymanoid/CitiesSkylinesModWishList/issues/2