Tapping the revenue potential of tollbooths

[Ken]

We all struggle to generate enough revenue to keep our cities in the black while keeping sims happy. I have discovered that if used properly, tollbooths can be a highly effective source of revenue and on many of my cities where I have implemented a border tollbooth plan I now generate revenue surpluses for my transportation networks.

First some caveats. Sims don't like tollbooths on inner city roads and if a residential or commercial zone is "pointing" two the section of road where the tollbooth is placed it will get the symbol of a little green car with a slashed red circle indicating it doesn't have access to a road. Industrial zones do not have this problem.

How I use tollbooths
I have found that the most effective place to put tollbooths are on all roads leading into and out of my cities. Since I use a standardized grid pattern for all my cities, and normally place industrial zones along the edges of my city (to reduce the pollution impact) this works really well. What I'm discovering is that a lot of the traffic along my city edges are actually just sims passing through from one adjacent city to another adjacent city. By putting tollbooths on all edge roads I'm able to hit these sims up twice for tolls and am able to make a killing with revenue. In the case of a city I was playing last night, I was generating 10,000 in net profit per month from my transportation network which had total monthly transportation revenues of around 16,000. The key with this is that your cities need to have lots of road connections between cities.

The attached screen capture from early on in my efforts with our first SimCity challenge which gives a good illustration of a good intercity road grid. You can see the post where I first posted this image at http://simcityforum.com/showpost.php...6&postcount=45

[awesomeadvisor787]

I have one avenue between two of my largest cities and it has about 15000 cars and buses travel on it. How much money to you think this would make?

[Ken]

I have one avenue between two of my largest cities and it has about 15000 cars and buses travel on it. How much money to you think this would make?

A whole lot. I'd defiantly put one or two tollbooths on it. What I have been doing is starting with one tollbooth on every road leading out of my cities and then monitoring congestion on my roads. If I find edge roads are heavily congested and that the Sims are using a specific route to simply pass through the active city on their way between two other cities, I will put a second tollbooth on those roads. The second tollbooth can help encourage Sims to spread out across more roads, which can help reduce congestion.

Attached is another screen capture showing just how much money one can generate from tollbooths on edge roads. You can see that I'm running serious budget surpluses but have very low taxes.

[Ken]

I've started to discover an interesting side effect to all of the tollbooths I placed at all of my city borders. Now that all cities have them and all have been played for at least a few years with the tollbooths, my road traffic has decreased considerably and my inter-city subway lines are all starting to become congested. In some cities I have even discontinued my shuttle service ordinance to save money. I have also started to see a decline in tollbooth revenues in my cities because of the decline in road traffic.

[FrankU]

Yes, the sims don't like to pay toll. Just like IRL. But now the revenues from your tollbooths go down, the revenues from your public transport go up. And who knows, in the same amount? Anyway, public transport generates no pollution, so this is a good development for your cites. I advise you to plop more busstops and subwaystops. Maybe start some elevated rail or monorail lines.
You know what they say? You should plop a lot of busstops and if you think you have enough, plop some more.

[FrankU]

I just posted my first post and it seems to have gotten lost. Perhaps it will show up and you will read two posts. Sorry for that.

Sims don't like to pay toll. Just like in real life. So they look for other ways of getting to their jobs.
Now the revenues form your tollbooths go down, but I'm sure the revenues from your public transport system went up. That's a good thing, because public transport doesn't generate pollution. So I advise you to plop some more busstops, more subwaystations and subwaylines and maybe elevated rail and/or monorail services.
You know what they say about busstops? Put a lot of them in your cities and when you think you have enough, put some more.

[Ken]

Hi FrankU, welcome to SimCity Forum. Your posts weren't lost, they were just sent to a moderation que. I've had a lot of problems with spammers posting really inappropriate stuff on these forums in the past so the first posts by new users don't get displayed until I have reviewed them. Now that I have approved your first batch of posts the server will shortly start to automatically post future posts you make without me needing to review them first. This is an annoying step, but it has put a stop to spam.

[FrankU]

Ken,
So how's your experiment with tollbooths doing?
Are you able to let your sims travel the way you want, or are they as stubborn as real people?

[Ken]

I haven't played SimCity in a couple of months, but I did find tollbooths to pretty effective and generating revenue and moving traffic congestion from one road to another. There is a "herd mentality" in SimCity, which one can take advantage of.

[Ergo]

Ha! This is GREAT! I just started a watered, powered city with only roads, no zones, and a tollbooth on each neighbor connection. I did have to build some fire stations, but this city is bordered by two cities with almost 200k sims each, so it is now making almost $2k a month just in tolls (net $700/mo avg)!

I could pare it down so I'd need fewer fire stations to increase the profit even more, but since the point will be to build a city on the plot (once I'm bored tinkering with the limits of my sim-less city), it would just be a waste of a bulldozer.

Thanks for a great tip! I can't believe I missed this revenue source for so long.