City · Part 5 · About 9 minutes
Rail, transit and buses
Streets are only half a city’s movement. Railways, metros and buses are drawn as lines rather than sections — and stations, rather than being declared, come to serve whatever runs through them.
The one-minute explanation
Everything in this part shares one model: a line owns its identity — name, colour, mode and type — while the segments own the geometry. That is why a line can branch, run underground for part of its length and stay one line in the manager and in your head.
Like streets, none of it consumes development capacity. But unlike streets, transit changes the numbers behind your score twice over: it lifts residential transit coverage, and it takes trips off the road entirely, which improves the commute time that feeds the same score (Part 2).
City railways
City railways come in two types — conventional and high-speed — and each can run at ground level, on a viaduct, or in tunnel, with the rendering to match.
Two operations are worth distinguishing, because they produce different objects:
Continues the railway you selected. It stays one line, keeping its identity.
Leaves the existing railway and starts an independent line from that point.
Branch topology is worked out from where segments actually meet, not from the order you drew them — so a network built out of sequence still reads correctly as a set of connected lines.
Four transit modes
Rail transit covers metro, light rail, monorail and tram. They are separate modes rather than skins, and the choice sets both the character of the line and how it draws.
Lines carry their own colour, and the palette is yours: pick from the swatches, enter a hex value, or drop a swatch you no longer want. Colour is not decoration on a network of a dozen lines — it is the only thing that lets you read an interchange at a glance.
The create card separates defaults for new lines from what the selected line uses, which is the distinction that stops you accidentally restyling an existing line while setting up the next one.
Buses route themselves
Bus lines are the one network you do not draw. You place via points near roads, and the line routes itself over your street network — respecting one-way streets and grade separation, so it will not send a bus the wrong way up an avenue or across an expressway that has no junction there.
Once a line exists: click its body to add a stop, double-click a stop to name it, right-click to remove one, and drag a via point to make it take a different way. The line re-routes as you drag.
This has a consequence worth planning for. Because the route is derived rather than stored, changing your streets changes your buses. Add a better parallel avenue and the line may move onto it; demolish a street and the line reroutes — or, if it genuinely cannot, the demolition is blocked, which is the bus guard described in Part 4.
Stations are placed, then serve
A station is not declared as belonging to a line. You arm station placement from the selected line, click on that line, and a station body appears — after which it is an ordinary station zone, reshaped, rotated, renamed and grouped with the same gestures as any other zone in Part 3.
What makes it a station is geometry: a station serves every line that passes through its footprint. Nothing is assigned. Draw a metro through an existing rail station's body and the station now serves both, and is marked as an interchange.
Remember that stations are zones, so unlike the lines they serve, they do consume transport development capacity.
What the national network leaves you
The city sits on top of roads and railways that already exist nationally, and the two are reconciled deliberately.
National roads are adopted into the city — each becomes an editable city road, once. Adoption tracks lineage, so when a national link is later split in two, the city does not re-adopt it as fresh content and lay a machine-default copy on top of the street you had already renamed and restyled.
National railways are inherited rather than adopted. They render as inherited lines and are labelled as such in the manager — and they refuse station placement. If you want a station on a national railway inside your city, the line has to be part of the city's own network rather than the country's.
How transit reaches your score
Two channels, and they are worth separating because they respond to different things:
- Coverage counts residential floor area with a station or stop nearby. It only enters the average once the metro passes 200,000 people — and from that moment, having none is a hard zero rather than an absent component.
- Mode shift takes trips off the road. A journey served at both ends moves onto transit; served at one end, it shifts partially. Rail takes a trip when both ends are within 800 m of connected stations — connected being the operative word, since two stations on unlinked lines do not make a journey.
The second channel is why a well-placed metro shows up twice: coverage rises, and the roads it parallels empty out, improving the commute time that also feeds the score.
Practical habits
- Put stations where residential floor area is, not where the map looks empty. Coverage is weighted by floor area, so one station serving three towers beats three serving fields.
- Check the 800 m rule before expecting a rail shift. A station just outside walking distance of the other end carries nobody.
- Make interchanges by overlapping station footprints. It is the only mechanism, and it is easy to miss by a few metres.
- Colour lines early. A dozen grey lines is unreadable, and the palette is per line.
- Re-check bus routes after street surgery. They are derived, so they move when your network moves — usually correctly, occasionally not where you wanted.
Common misconceptions
“I need to assign this station to a line”
You do not. A station serves whatever crosses its footprint, and becomes an interchange when more than one line does.
“I can put a station on the national railway running through my city”
Not while it is inherited. National railways are not part of the city network and refuse station placement.
“My bus route is drawn where I put it”
It is routed, not drawn. It follows your streets under one-way and grade-separation rules, and changes when they change.
“Transit lines eat my transport allowance”
Lines cost nothing. Stations, terminals and airside areas are zones, and those do.
Continue the collection
One part remains: the ground everything sits on — coastlines, rivers, reclaimed land, and the names that turn a plan into a place.