cities-skylines
I've noticed that on some of my bus lines, there are not enough buses to deal with all passengers. What can I do to increase the throughput of a bus line?
Add more stops? Remove stops? Replace long bus-lines with multiple shorter ones? Create multiple bus-lines which intersect? Build more bus depots? Allocate more budget to buses?
First, a few tips:
I am currently having your exact problem. My current has 131k population but zero demand:
As you can see my RCI is almost zero across the board. Something else must be going on here. My traffic has hardly any red spots, tons of services, and high land value in the right places. What's going on? It turns out high unemployment can cause your city to be undesirable to move in to:
But how do I have unemployment if my industry demand is zero? Personally, I have an un-even location placement of homes vs jobs.
I think this is causing my high unemployment even though there is no demand for OVERALL RCI. The industries that are far away from homes are complaining no workers are available while the residents that are far from jobs are left unemployed.
I also have a few other problems like an unnaturally low commercial percentage thanks to the park bug (BTW, thanks for the mod heads-up, I'll check it out!)
I think you've got it right, it really is that simple. A single bus depot is sufficient to supply enough buses to a city of any size1, and its position isn't really important as long as it is connected by road to any bus routes you create (if your city isn't entirely road-connected you'll need a depot in each area you want bus routes in).
The only other thing to be concerned about is that depots create 50 noise pollution, so you probably don't want them nestled into the middle of your residential areas.
If you care about fine details, buses will need to travel from/to the depot to get to/from bus routes, this only happens when routes are created/edited/deleted (as you say, they never rest). This means new bus routes set further away from a depot take longer to start working. Also, if you change your city's bus funding (changing the number of buses on all of your lines), you might find a swarm of buses around your depot. These are temporary issues that you can probably ignore.
Also, I guess if you only have one depot and it catches fire you might have a problem, but meh.
Best Answer
If you don't mind using mods, there are some of them that deals with that problem. I would recommend using Improved Public Transport that gives you more control over your transport lines.
This mods allows to set the capacity for each kind of public transport and to manage the number of vehicles for each line. As you increase the vehicles' capacities, the maintenance cost are also increased accordingly.
Alternatives to this mod :