Cities: Skylines – I Love Monorails

This is the transcript from my video “Monorails are Awesome!“

Good morning or whatever time of the world it is in your part of the world.

Tonight I thought I’d share my love with you for monorails (in Cities: Skylines). They cop a fair bit of flak. Some people really hate them and I don’t know why. They are probably the best form of transport in my mind. There’s quite a few reasons I like them and we’ll rattle through them one at a time.

First, they don’t need a support station or depot. They spawn their own monorail at the station so you don’t need to have a multi-layered set up (of stations, depots, and stops) like buses. It’s all very clean. They don’t interfere with traffic like buses – they don’t jam up the road network.

Also they can turn a profit, which with buses, is very hard to do, and quite a good profit to to be honest. I’ll just go through what I’ve set up.

This is my new world I’ve started called Palu. It’s only got about 82000 people in it at the moment and I’ve set up one industry. I’ve literally been working on this for about 8 hours. Each of those grid squares has about 10000 people in it – low density in the middle, high rise on the outside.

The system I have at the moment comprises one central hub in the city and three terminus station – end stations that don’t go any further. That may change later as the world grows. Next, I don’t have really complicated loops so people can get out at one and get back on another to go wherever they want.

Have a look at the city station. People are just pouring in from everywhere. That platform is packed. 1622 passengers last week. That’s mad – you don’t get figures like that on the bus. Ducking up to the burbs, this was the first station I set up. People are pouring in and going to the platform. It’s packed. That’s just brilliant. 190 people – that’s the line’s full capacity. How many people are on this? It serviced 373 last week. If we go check out the other one on the other side of the suburb, 372 – similar numbers.

That’s really good. They’re jumping on the line, going down to the city, and across town to the university. I figured the university would be a good place to have a monorail station, because you’re going to get all the the visiting students. 312 in that one. It serviced 2600 people last week. Monorails cost me $2085 last week and it’s generated $2794 so that’s a 30% profit. Again that’s just so hard to do with buses and I don’t have the traffic jams – it’s a no brainer. It’s such a game-friendly way of doing it (setting up public transport).

You also save yourself a heap of vehicles. I messed around with buses for a while (on other maps) and I’m not a big fan of them. I wanted to make a good transport system here and I think I’ve got monorails well tweaked. I’ll probably end up with half a million people on this map and I think I’ll just stick with the monorail for people movement and trains for freight and external passengers. I don’t think I’ll worry about all the other stuff.

To make a successful monorail station, you need to have something interesting there like in the city here. I’ve got this unique building which is the Media Tower, which is apparently a tourist attraction for some reason. People come to look at the big aerial – don’t ask me why. That and a couple of little shops there like the noodle shop or whatever, so people are already coming to the area to eat lunch.

Further down we’ve got the passenger rail. This is linked to the outside connection – it links directly to the outside world transporting tourists. They’re going straight down the footpath, stretch around the noodle shop and the monorail and over to the broadcast centre, so they’re all using it and it’s really integrating well with the city. And of course they can jump on the monitor and the kids can go to the university etc.

Again, having something special there at the uni (is important) apart from the University – are the stadiums. Also through the park from the university station we’ve got the music festival which is another unique building or park and you can just see the tourists pouring in from everywhere. So yeah that’s really important.

Something to keep in mind when you’re planning where to put your monorail station is that they contribute to noise pollution. That’s the only downfall in my opinion. Back in the suburbs, looking at this one, you’ll see I’ve got a buffer zone and just a one-way street with a nice cafe away from that row of high-rise residential (but not too far away) A funny thing when you do drop in monorails too close to residential is that you’ll see a wave of smiley faces then a subsequent wave of grumpy faces or vice versa. That mixed reaction is because residents want the service but not the noise.

They’ll walk a long way to the station as well. Look at them all the way back one city block and they’re still walking towards the station. We duck up a little further on the main street and there’s still a general pattern of walking towards the station. That’s a really long distance.

Just before I take off, I’ll go back to this one here (because you may encounter a similar issue. I was finding that this station was only getting about 150 people using it despite being in a good area. I then put in this lovely little network of trails and some trees and a swimming pool and that lifted it to about 400 people. I then added a sauna. That lifted the station usage again and even brings people in from the city and other stations. That’s what you want – people jumping from one station to the other.

I hope you found this video on monorails of use. Have a great night.