i use a map wide 120u grid metro system connected to pedestrian walkways. Puts everything and every one within 60u of at least one subway station. Almost everyone walks or rides metro. City street traffic nearly non existent.

Interesting find. I being interested in the findings removed all my mass transit options from a city of 90k. That is busses, trains and metro. Of course in doing so I had a back up of all those busses returning to the depot, no longer in use. I waited for the busses to clear the roads before I examined further. After they were done returning to the depot I noticed traffic fell from 85% to 74%. Even though population had dropped due to the land value the bus stops brought but now are gone. The longer I run the city the lower the flow rate becomes. As I write this the flow has fallen to 68% and the highway are backing up at the ramps. The ramps now can't handle the volume of vehicles wanting to use them. In fact the longer I run this the more jammed the highways become. Now down to 66% as I write.

What you are most likely experiencing is a feature with traffic that when a vehicle has stayed on the map beyond it's timer allowance it is forced to despawn at the next time it stops for any reason. This feature would help greatly to those struggling with traffic. I use the "No Despawn" mod so there is no way for them to despawn and must make it to their destination before they are allowed to do so.

At the end of writing this reply my flow dropped to 58% and population is now starting to fall below 80k due to services having issue serving the addresses needing their help.
I would conclude Mass transit does work to reduce the amount of vehicles used on the map. Thus so does the time limit handicap placed on vehicles in the vanilla game help to reduce vehicles too.

Originally posted by Challenger™:

i use a map wide 120u grid metro system connected to pedestrian walkways. Puts everything and every one within 60u of at least one subway station. Almost everyone walks or rides metro. City street traffic nearly non existent.

SO? you play your way.... the conversation is that transit makes no difference. Not how you build your transit or "one trick pony" your metro.

Originally posted by OneJasonBradly:

SO? you play your way.... the conversation is that transit makes no difference. Not how you build your transit or "one trick pony" your metro.

Well, Lazarus is certainly free to play any way he pleases. Or make up his own mind I'm sure. Just so happens that transit makes one hell of a difference "the way I play". Not much of a "trick" really. All it actually takes is find a way that works well and go with it.

If that offends your very delicate idea of fair play I suggest you find an alternative means of gratifying your needs.

You can literally see a citizen pull a car out of their pocket and drive off, but if you put a bus stop there they won't do it anymore

Originally posted by OneJasonBradly:

Interesting find. I being interested in the findings removed all my mass transit options from a city of 90k. That is busses, trains and metro. Of course in doing so I had a back up of all those busses returning to the depot, no longer in use. I waited for the busses to clear the roads before I examined further. After they were done returning to the depot I noticed traffic fell from 85% to 74%. Even though population had dropped due to the land value the bus stops brought but now are gone. The longer I run the city the lower the flow rate becomes. As I write this the flow has fallen to 68% and the highway are backing up at the ramps. The ramps now can't handle the volume of vehicles wanting to use them. In fact the longer I run this the more jammed the highways become. Now down to 66% as I write.

What you are most likely experiencing is a feature with traffic that when a vehicle has stayed on the map beyond it's timer allowance it is forced to despawn at the next time it stops for any reason. This feature would help greatly to those struggling with traffic. I use the "No Despawn" mod so there is no way for them to despawn and must make it to their destination before they are allowed to do so.

At the end of writing this reply my flow dropped to 58% and population is now starting to fall below 80k due to services having issue serving the addresses needing their help.
I would conclude Mass transit does work to reduce the amount of vehicles used on the map. Thus so does the time limit handicap placed on vehicles in the vanilla game help to reduce vehicles too.

Ok maybe I should use the no despawn mod. Have you tested it while having this mod disabled? Also going to give it some more time, maybe I should give it 30 in game day cycles. Thanks for your reply

It does have an effect, as you yourself noted.

In a 500k city, removing all public transport lines in a city well covered with them increased the number of vehicles by a couple of thousands, and reduced traffic % from 77%-78% to 72%-73%.

Now, in a real life, if 100k people suddenly had to drive - assuming all of them had cars to begin with - then you would likely indeed see massive increase in traffic congestion.

But this is not real life. It is a game with many limits, including a 16k vehicle limit and 64k citizen instances limit.

Plus pocket/magic vehicles mitigate traffic issues a lot - disable spawning via TM:PE and you will find that you do not need to disable public transit to make your traffic % go down, real real quick.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3014583016

5 days, like less than a week? That's hardly enough time anything to happen really.

Overtime as the incoming demand is not able to be fulfilled by pedestrians, the cims will wip out their pocket cars and get on the road. Observing the traffic flow % may not be the best indicator of this test.

You could observe how many vehicles are in the game before and after.

The PT lines also show the "%" of vehicle trips saved or something like that. There's already a base calculation to display how effective the PT line is at saving vehicle traffic (at least to the end destination, perhaps not to the beginning of the line itself).

Certainly having and not having PT will have impacts. How you have your road infrastructure setup will determine how many of the total vehicles on the map are traveling at the speed limit of the roadways they are on (flow %)