After having been graciously granted two hours of server issue free playtime last night, I have some questions relating to police, fire, and health services coverage.
Does adding additional vehicles actually increase the service area of these buildings? Or does it simply make them more effective at responding to multiple/larger fires/crimes/epidemics?
For example: I have some outlying industrial zones outside my green fire coverage radius. These buildings still get coverage when an actual fire breaks out, but their land and density value is not increased due to their distance to the fire station. When I add another fire truck garage to the fire station, will that coverage area increase? Or will it simply be more likely that my firefighters will be able to put out fires?
Best Answer
The service area is always the entire city. Travel time determined whether you'll reach the destination before a building burns down, patient dies, or criminal gets away.
Early on, with little traffic, one single service placement can usually cover the entire city. Adding more vehicles lets you dispatch to more places at once. Once traffic increases, the effective service area is reduced, no matter how many vehicles you add (except for helicopters). You can wind up in a situation where a vehicle can't reach the building next door because it can't even exit the vehicle bay. Good placement, road layout, and public transportation will keep your services most effective.
You'll notice that the game lets you plop the vehicle bays apart from the building. Don't lay them all next to each other so they exit on the same road in the same direction. Place them on opposite sides of the road and across intersections. That way, traffic in one direction will only clog up some of your vehicles instead of all of them.