Impatient Commuters

Makes waiting passengers more likely to leave an overcrowded stop and find another route. Probability is highest the moment a citizen arrives at a crowded stop, then fades as their wait builds, then rises again with frustration. All shaped by age, trip purpose, line frequency, and nearby alternatives.

The vanilla game already has a boredom system: passengers who wait too long eventually give up. But there is no crowd awareness. A passenger standing alone at an empty stop and one packed into a crowd of fifty behave identically.

This mod adds crowd-based impatience on top of the vanilla system. When a stop is more crowded than the vehicles serving it can comfortably handle, waiting citizens start weighing whether to leave and find another route. Two distinct behavioural effects combine:

• Balking. A citizen who just arrived at a heavily overcrowded stop is likely to turn around immediately. The longer they have already waited, the less likely they are to abandon. Nobody wants to give up after standing there for five minutes.
• Frustration. A slower effect that builds with accumulated wait time, representing the classic impatience of a long wait in a crowd.

Each behavioural component is scaled separately by age group. Both balking sensitivity and long-wait patience are fully configurable in settings, with a restore-to-defaults button for each.

• Crowding sensitivity on arrival (balking). Seniors and teenagers are the most likely to turn around at a packed stop. Children are the least (they follow an adult and rarely reroute independently).
• Long-wait patience (frustration). Seniors grow restless faster than average; children are more patient. All five age groups are configurable.

When enabled, balking and frustration work in opposite directions depending on where the citizen is going. Someone heading to work is more likely to immediately seek an alternative when they see a crowd, but far less likely to give up the longer they wait (they have to arrive). A tourist is the reverse: unfamiliar with the network so they tend to stay put at first, but they have no fixed schedule so frustration builds quickly.

• Going to work. High balking, low frustration.
• Going to school. Moderate balking, low frustration.
• Going home. Mild balking, moderate frustration.
• Leisure / shopping. Neutral balking, slightly higher frustration.
• Tourists. Low balking, high frustration.

Passengers on a busy metro that comes every two minutes behave very differently from those waiting for a single bus on a long cross-city route. The mod accounts for both the number of vehicles on the line and its length: a frequent, short metro keeps passengers far more patient than a single bus servicing dozens of stops.

If another transport line has a stop within 150 m, every citizen at the overcrowded stop becomes noticeably more willing to leave. Knowing a viable alternative is close by makes rerouting a real option rather than a gamble.

The mod only activates when a stop is genuinely overcrowded relative to the vehicles serving it. A minibus line triggers at much lower crowd levels than a metro line with large trains. If no vehicles are deployed yet, the mod has no effect until they are on the road. The threshold is adjustable in settings.

Open Options → Impatient Commuters.

General

• Enable mod. Master on/off switch.
• Capacity threshold. Controls how crowded a stop needs to be before the mod activates. Raise it to only trigger at very full stops; lower it to trigger sooner.
• Scale by trip purpose. Enables destination-aware balking and frustration.

Behaviour components (each can be toggled independently)

• Balking. The on-arrival crowd-deterrence effect.
• Frequency scaling. Lines with shorter headways make passengers less inclined to leave.
• Alternative line bonus. Citizens near another line’s stop are more willing to reroute.

How long each age group waits before giving up (frustration)

• Per-age dropdown from Very Patient to Very Impatient, with a Restore defaults button.

How likely each age group is to leave immediately on seeing a crowded stop (balking)

• Per-age dropdown from Very Low to Very High, with a Restore defaults button.

Debug

• Debug logging. Logs each forced departure to the game log.

• Compatible with Stops and Stations by dymanoid. Both mods work independently and do not double-fire.
• Compatible with Improved Public Transport Essentials. No dependency, works standalone.
• Pairs well with Better Train Boarding. That mod makes passengers board the closest carriage so trains load efficiently; this mod handles the platform side by making people at overcrowded stops decide to reroute. Together they produce much more realistic rail flow.

• Harmony (Mod Dependency). Subscribe and enable this first.

https://github.com/roberto-naharro/ImpatientCommuters