How to get workers to commute from other cities

You have a problem with people turning left at that first intersection. If everyone turns the same way, it effectively turns the road into a single lane road. Address this by making sure that people who turn right and go straight can still reach destinations on the left. Cars do not always take the shortest route, so some will take the alternate routes.

Do you see that square at the entrance? That's a conversion intersection between a heavy avenue and a streetcar avenue. Making a streetcar avenue at that point is useless - people aren't just going to jump out of their cars and ride it. Since you can't upgrade the entrance road to streetcar avenue, downgrade the road between the conversion intersection and your first turning intersection to heavy avenue.

Add destinations that incoming sims will want before the first turning intersection.

I landed in a similar situation in my game today. Here's a shot of the commuters. It's a nice mix of workers and shoppers which have founded a bumper-to-bumper parking lot outside my city. 9pm? That's not a rush hour, it's a way of life.

Everyone is turning right at the first intersection. I tried various things to solve it. Reducing the number of commuters. Adding a commuter train. Adding 48 commuter buses (at ~5000 simolean monthly cost). Nothing stuck, so I removed those buses and made the roads "worse". Here's a shot of the solution, along with a nice long column of flowing traffic. It's 8 o'clock and I don't know where the traffic went.

The fix addressed two issues.

Cars were turning right at that first intersection and immediately getting hit with another stoplight. Throughput was limited by the synchronization of those stoplights. In my fix, there are a few 2-way intersections after that right turn. 2-way intersections (and conversion intersections) have no stop mechanism: cars just flow through. That driver may turn right, but it will be a long time before he hits another stopping mechanism.

But that's not enough. By itself this would just move the problem to the end of that long street. I moved the right turn forward, and made cars have to drive back to reach places near the entrance. Cars also would enjoy a shorter trip to places in the back of the city if they just would go straight through that first intersection. This had the affect of dividing the traffic. In that first intersection, get 3/4 of the traffic to go straight (using three lanes!) and 1/4 to turn (using one lane).

Breaking the grid this way made the drivers do what I want, even though they could have done it themselves. Now, they have a longer commute, but less time spend parking during it.

The problem with answering this question is that SimCity displays so little of "behind the scenes" information that it's basically been up to the community to decipher what's going on behind the scenes. Region play and Region statistics are disjointed like you say, probably because its also very slow to update.

Maybe part of your problem is the job requirement of 100% industry + 100% residential/commercial hybrid probably is too much for your 100% residential. Having a 33/33/33 slice of each RCI won't work in a single city so it wouldn't work in region play. Unless of course you zone high density residential and medium/low industry. If you zone high density commercial or industry you are screwed. This is due to a bug that High Density residential units can't keep up with the jobs that High Density Commercial/Industry creates. This is a well documented bug. Here's a link to the statistics on jobs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0Aox0IWxZalS2dGN0N2J6aUVFRVJwU21DeDVhbnBVdHc&f=true&noheader=true&gid=1

Keep in mind that your game is only registering what each city sees of the region at the time.

For instance:

1) When you load your Residential city: it sees that there are jobs in 2 other cities. I assume the Sims just commute to the closest city (just like they do in a single city). So all the residents just look for the closest job and come back. Why this city would have unemployment is beyond me.

2) When you load your Residential/Commercial City: it doesn't really care whats going on in the Industrial city as freight is not required, all it wants is those residents coming in to fill jobs, but it has residents itself. I think what's happening in this city is too self-sufficient. In other words maybe the workers never need to commute out because they have enough jobs in this city. By the way, the "commuting out" statistic (as far as I know) only counts as residents leaving your city if you have residential there. It won't count people leaving work to go home, or leaving a shop to go home.

3) When you load your Industrial City: it needs commuters to fill the jobs as well as Commercial to "ship freight" (which doesn't even work right). As you say its lacking workers, which I cannot explain if you have enough workers in those other cities. Pull up your statistics sheet and look to see if available jobs is more than available workers in your Residential City.

If you actually made perfect amounts of I, C, R cities, while you are loaded into each city, your other cities are frozen in time. All the Region does is count amount of Workers, Shoppers, etc in your other cities based on when the last time you played them was. I have used this frozen fact to my advantage by basically creating a minus income city that is producing absurd amount of power, water, etc to pump to my other cities. It doesn't matter that the city would go bankrupt in 1 month because unless you are LOADED into that city, time stands still.

There is several issues with getting perfect synchronization regional play right as you are trying to do, and I tend to avoid it since its buggy. It causes stupid amounts of traffic from the highway which can congest a city and bring it to its knees.

Like what was mentioned in the other thread you linked, its a very hard thing to answer what exactly is going on behind the scenes, but hopefully I gave you a few things to think about.