Transcription
Today we're going to be taking a look at a game that's been recommended to me a ton over the last few weeks, Subway Builder. Now, if you haven't heard of Subway Builder, it's a hyperrealistic transit simulation game where you get to build your own subway system from the ground up while dealing with real-world constraints and costs. So, this is not City Skylines. We're not trying to make a pretty subway system and we're not going to watch people scurry away from it. We are dealing with the nitty-gritty of subway building and we're going to be using real-world data and real-world constraints, which I think is super cool.
Now, I absolutely loved reading that they're using census and redistricter data. Now, I've never used data from redistricter, but it looks like it's just basic demographic information at the street level. That's things like education level, monthly rent costs, things that would give you information about a particular neighborhood and who might use transit. But, the data that got me really excited is the census data that they're using. They're using job flows and loads data. So, loads data is origin and destination information. It's really the base for all transit planning. Because that's really what it comes down to. You want to link people from their origins, where they live, to their destinations, where they want to go, things like schools, places of employment. So, I'm really glad that they're using this because it's the data that I actually used in the real world when I was planning transit routes. So, I'm very familiar with it. I know it's high-quality data.
Now, one thing I want to mention is because they are using these two data sources, this is a US-based game. So, all the cities represented in the game are going to be in the United States. As we jump into the game, there's not a lot here on the main menu and I respect that. No fancy graphics, no frills. This is Subway Builder, so let's get building. And what you see here is we have a bunch of real-world cities. Everything from New York to Honolulu is represented in here, with the exception of one major city, a city that's near and dear to my heart, Los Angeles. Now, I guess there were some technical limitations or constraints or issues at launch, which is why Los Angeles isn't in here, but it will be added at a later point in time. But still, there's a lot of variety here. You've got New York, Chicago, San Francisco, DC, Philly, Seattle, Austin, and Denver, which is the city that we're actually going to be building on today. And the main reason for that is I'm very familiar with the city. I lived there for a couple of years. I went to grad school there, where I actually had my first professional job as a planner, and I interned for RTD, which is the regional transportation agency there.
Now, there are two game modes. There's the normal game mode where you start with $3 billion and have to play with constraints, and a sandbox mode where you can build without thinking about constraints. I want those constraints. So, let's build in normal mode, and then we're immediately dropped into the city. Now, this is really cool. This is OpenStreetMap's data that we're looking at, and what that means is that we can actually take a look at the city in three dimensions, and that it's streaming this information from OpenStreetMap's, so it should be very up-to-date. So, this is just it's really, really cool. The other thing about this is that it should run on a wide variety of systems. There is a Windows version, there's a macOS version, and there's also a Linux version. And what the developer says is that if you can run Google Earth plus a Chrome window at the same time, you can play this game, which is really, really cool.
Now, the first thing that we want to do is take a look at our underlying demographic information to figure out where to place a route. So, for that, we're going to take a look at our demand stats, and we can see where our residents live and where they go to work. And these are represented by these circles, and in the real world, this is what we look at as well. So, for our residents, we can see that they are fairly well dispersed, although we have a lot of larger circles right here. This is places where there are lots of apartments and condos and more density. And then, as we get away from the city's core, and when get into the more suburban areas, those circles get a lot smaller. Now, for workplaces, we have a lot downtown, but there are other corridors where you can see a number of workplaces. And I happen to know that this is the Denver Tech Center. There's a lot of employment down there. We've also got the airport over here, and you can see a ton of workers over here as well. I think for the first route, I want to link downtown Denver to the Tech Center. So, let's start out by building our stations.
The first thing we have to do is figure out if we're going to be building heavy metro or a light metro. Heavy metro is New York City style metro. It's got higher capacity, probably not appropriate for a city like Denver. Light metro is modeled after Montreal system. It's more flexible, it's cheaper, it's moderate capacity, probably more appropriate for a city like Denver. So, I think that we're going to stick with this the entire time. Then we have to select the number of tracks at the station. I want to build near Union Station, which is right here. So, I think we want to have a lot of tracks coming in at Union Station. And I'm going to place this right out in front. The reason I want to place it here and not in the rear underneath this is look at this. We end up conflicting with Union Station. This would cost us half a billion dollars approximately if we took out Union Station accidentally. So, we're not going to do that. Now, keep in mind, we are in a blueprint mode right now. So, we're not building anything, we're just experimenting a bit, and I'm going to place this right in front. Now, one thing to know is we are only 5 m deep right now. So, we're doing cut and fill. So, if I were to, for instance, try to go diagonal under these buildings, I'd have to use eminent domain under all of them. So, this is probably not appropriate in the downtown area. So, I'm going to clear the blueprints, and we're going to drop this down a bit more. So, at 10 m underground, we get a standard tunnel. If we go any deeper than that, we get twice the cost. So, I'll go 10 m and draw that back in.
Now, I want to go back to my demand, and we can see that there's a lot of residential demand over here, but the workplaces is what I really care about. So, there's a lot of state government workers over here. We've got RTD, where I used to work. We've also got the Denver Post. There's a lot of employment over here. So, for the next station, I'm going to keep it fairly close. In fact, I'm thinking we've got the Capitol Building right here. Maybe we'll actually place this right here off Colfax by the Civic Center Plaza. Now, for this station, I only want parallel tracks. We don't need to have quad tracks. That's way too much. Now, I think for the next station, we're going to want to go shallower if possible. We'll get cut-and-cover stations then. So, I'm going 5 m deep. Looking back at our demand stats, you can see there's a lot of residential if we get further down here. I think I want to increase the spacing because we don't have a lot going on right here. That spear, that's a major barrier, and there's not a lot of development over here. In the real world, we actually might want to add a station there, though. We might want to encourage development. It really depends on the goals of the transit entity. I see that we've also got a major employer right here. So, for this next station, I'll go right about here. I'm just trying to make sure that my eyes aren't deceiving me as I look at this. The last thing I want to do is inadvertently put this a block over and have to do a whole bunch of eminent domain. That is perfect. That is great. And not as much residential over here. There's a lot right here, and we've got some employment near this interchange. So, I think we're going to go quite a bit further here because I don't want to cannibalize demand at this station, but I also want to ensure that we can turn at the highway. I think we're going to run underneath the highway for a little while, so we'll build that right there at Virginia Avenue. Then we'll go underneath the highway, and that's because though there is demand here, it's not crazy. And there's basically no employment demand. But if we were to cut here, and then maybe drop down right here, we could pick up these couple of major employers. The other option would be to skip the highway altogether, run right here, and try to make the turn. Looks like maybe we could go underneath here. That would slow things down, but we would hit all of this residential. You know what? I think I might try to do that. And I think to make this more palatable, I'm going to add the station right about here, because then you'll be slowing down in this location anyway. So now I think we want to try to line up right here with this major employment center, and I'm going to place this right at Evans Avenue. Now, from here, I want to try to get back towards the highway. We end up going through a bunch of suburban stuff until we get to the tech center down here. And you can see from a residential standpoint, the density is pretty low until we get down here. And from a worker standpoint, not all that much happening. At least not outside of this area right here. So maybe we'll add one more station right here at Bellaire, and then we'll have nothing else until we get to the tech center. The bigger question in my mind is should we have two stations here? I think we probably should. There's a lot of residential right here, and a lot of employment over here. So I'm going to add one station right here, and I'll place one right here.
So now we have to link everything up with tracks. And this is fairly simple. There are two ways that I can handle this. I can just grab this and draw in segments, or I can just link them up right here and let it do its own thing. But here's the thing, as I do this, we start to use tons of eminent domain. In fact, if I just let it do what it wants, we're going to spend $270 on this one building alone. That is insane. We don't want to do that. So, I'm going to be really careful about this. And as I adjust this, our speeds change. So, as I have this relatively straight segment, we're going 89 km/h. That's pretty good, right here. We're cutting and filling. So, if I can get in between these buildings, maybe I can work some magic. Probably not going to happen. So, let's do this instead. I'm going to get really close to these buildings and then we'll start the turn right here. And then to maintain speed, we're going to sweep way down here. And that actually didn't work well. Let's go back to the drawing board. Best-laid plans. Maybe if we can get down here, we have a clearer path. And this will cause me to slightly bump this station over. Now, this isn't beautiful, but we're not using a lot of eminent domain, and that's ultimately all that I care about. Now, before we move on from this area, because we're at the end of the line, we have to have a crossover. If we don't have this, the trains won't be able to turn around. Now, these are easy to figure out where they are. It just shows up as this little indicator right here when you hover over the right spot. So, we'll just add this. You can see we get the crossover track right there, so the train could turn around.
So, now we've got a pretty long segment where we don't have any stops. We should be able to get some pretty decent speed right here. So, now I should be able to just follow the highway. And I wanted to remove that segment because we had a really slow segment there by taking it back max speed once again. Now, I feel like I've got to point one thing out. Going underneath the highway has its pitfalls, too. We couldn't do cut and fill there necessarily because we would be tearing down the highway, unless of course it's elevated. Either way, we have some easy connections here, and I'm wondering if I can just do it automatically. No. I would completely take out that nearly $10 million building. Let's be careful. And now that we've gentled things up, easy peasy lemon squeezy. So, we'll go straight down the road here, and then I just want to make sure that we're not taking out any more buildings than we have to. And thankfully, these single-family homes, at least some of them aren't crazy. Like that's a garage. The garage is only $126,000. The home is 1.7 million. So, that's a little bit problematic. And this is a more expensive area, so that kind of makes sense to me. Now, the trouble is we're going to have to really go slow if we don't use the eminent domain. I think we're going to use it. We're going to take out some homes right here. Be the most expensive part of the route so far. And I just couldn't do it. It just didn't make any sense to me. The numbers started to get really extreme, but I also noticed that we've got this little diagonal spot right here where maybe if we play our cards right that's slow but the amount of eminent domain is not that bad. So, what I'm going to do is just try to shift this down this station. You know what? On second thought, if I just come down here, there's not anything happening right here. This must be a redevelopment site. This is ideal. Oh, that is a thing of beauty. So, then we're only taking out one small building over here. That's not all that bad.
Now, as we get to the downtown area, I've got to be really careful. If I just link these up, look at that. This would be tens of millions of dollars of eminent domain. So, we'll be very careful. And now we get into really dense, challenging areas. So, we're 10 m underground right here, which means that we have to link up. And we need some distance for that. I think this is probably good enough. Perfect. We maintain our full speed there. And now for this one, we're going to basically loop around. So, I want to be underground here. Oh, we're not deep enough. We're not deep enough. So, to make this work, I'm going to back this out. And I think that at this station, we've got to be 11 m underground. And then for our track, we'll link up in between here and here. And now at this station, 11 m underground. Uh thankfully, we're able to easily link up with Union Station without much of an issue, but that's a bit of an issue. I thought that we could go under the buildings right here. We're not deep enough yet. So, back to the drawing board. What I think I'll try to do is follow existing right-of-way. And it looks like it's just the tallest buildings that are causing me issues. So, if I go this way and then skip Coors Field or go under the nose of Coors Field, we're fine. That's perfect. Now, we have to add our crossover over here. And now we're ready to build this. All we have to do is click build blueprints and it would build the whole thing, but I want to take a look at the costs. It looks like this will cost us $1.3 billion to build this, which is kind of wild. And just like that, $1.3 billion out of our bank accounts. We better work to recover that money.
And to do that, we've got to build a route. So, we'll create a new route. We can name our route anything that we want to. We'll just make this the A line. I think I want to go blue. This is going to be a light metro route and then we can adjust the shape if we want. I kind of like the traditional circle. So, we'll just create this route. And now, we have to select the route and add our stops. We'll start here at Union Station and then work our way down. We just have to basically go all the way down here adding our stops in the order that we want them to occur. So, now that we have our route designed, we need to add trains to the route. So, we'll go over here to trains and I want to purchase some train cars. Now, during the high demand period, this is going to be between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. and then 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., we are going to want to have most of our service. Probably at least two train cars. We'll buy that right away. And that costs us $5 million. We'll put that in service. We'll put that in service. We'll add two to this. We're out of train cars right away, it says. So, let's buy another set. Then we also have to buy the train cars. We only bought the engines before. We're going to want to have at least two per train. And we just bought six trains. So, it would stand to reason that we have to buy 12 of these. And this is $2.5 million per train car, so 30 million total. And I bought extra so that I could also have some on our medium demand train. This is going to be between 4:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., between 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., and between 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. And then the low demand period, I don't really think it makes a lot of sense to fund on this route. This would be incredibly expensive. This is all the rest of the hours of the day. And generally, I think that maybe a bus service would make sense for this, particularly in a city that doesn't have a ton of density on a route that's pretty long. I just want to make sure that my math wasn't wrong. It was. I bought way more train cars than I needed. So, I'll bump this up to four and two. And now this route should be good to go.
So, now we get to finally start this service. And I screwed up. I didn't save the route. Much embarrassment. Let's add all the stations again. Now, I will actually confirm the changes. And now we'll start to see the trains going up and down there. So, I'm going to slow things down for a moment because I want to point a couple of things out. So, these little red indicators right here are people that are going to your stations to take the train. Now, I want to zoom into this station cuz you can see all of the folks moving away. They got dropped off. Here we've got people waiting. Whole bunch of people waiting here at Union Station. You can see that at 17th Street right here. We did have a pass-up. That is not good. Now, the other thing I want to point out is right here we can see the cost per hour. You can see that right now we're making a bit of money. That's good to see. And right there we were able to completely clear that. So, that is perfect. Same thing right there. I'm not going to lie. It's really cool hearing those sounds, seeing the subways ping back and forth. So cool. I think I'm going to let things run for a couple of days so we get some data that we can make decisions based upon.
You know, we have one day down. So, let's take a look at the data that we have so far, because we actually have quite a bit. So, the first thing that we can see right here is the demand statistics. And you can see that for the most part in the Denver region, we're looking at our mode split right here, 88% of people are driving. We've got about a half a percent that are taking transit, and the rest are walking. Which, you know, not surprising, lots of walking in the downtown area, lots of driving everywhere else. And we only have transit along this corridor, which is why you see some mixing. Now, we can switch it right here. We can see this is the driving mode share, where you can see if it's bright yellow like this, most people are driving. Same thing for walking and for transit. And it is cool seeing that around the transit center, we're starting to see that there are a lot of people taking transit. That is fantastic. And we can do the exact same thing with workers and we're not seeing quite as much improvement there. Maybe that will take a little bit of time.
Now, in the real world, when I've worked on transit routes, I've told elected officials and the general public, let people move. Let them make their life changes and choices based around that transit route. Now, for a bus, that might be a year. Might be 6 months. It depends on how long it takes people to move to different apartments or move homes based on that transit route. For a fixed route service like this, a high-quality subway service, you might see a ton of development around here. So, it might take 5 years, 10 years to start to see all that investment take place around the transit centers. My guess is the game doesn't get into that level of nuance, but I do hope that we see ridership improve over time as the service becomes a bit more mature.
Now, in addition to this, we could take a look at the route ridership. We only have one route, but we had 12,869 rides, which is pretty nice in my opinion. And then we have our station level ridership and you can see a ton of ridership downtown, not quite as much over here near the uh the tech center, which is kind of surprising to me. Maybe things will improve. a fairly suburban area, but there's a lot of jobs down here, so we'll have to see. This also makes me think that we could potentially divide this route in half, have a maybe one route that goes from downtown and ends right here, and then a second route that picks up and has fewer trains going back and forth between the tech center and the station right here. Future thing though, future thing.
And then there's another thing I got to show you. So, from the pause menu, we have both our news archive and the transit feed. The news archive is basically a newspaper. We don't have anything there yet. It would pop up automatically. But, the transit feed's really interesting. It's basically Twitter and we can see what people are saying about it. So, angry neighbor says, "Why does Bellevue Avenue have a station but not my neighborhood?" $1.6 billion spent already. Zero trains across one route. The A line now spans 17 stations. So, yes, we can we can see all of these different information and see how people are feeling about our service. And it looks like a lot of it right now is the same, which makes sense. But, I have love to see that happy commuter says, "Just took the A line from 17th Street. Smooth ride." We did a great job there.
Now, in addition to that, we can take a look at our finances. So, I'm just going to click on this right here. We can see our current fare is three bucks. So, presumably, if we were to lower the fare, we would get more ridership. And there is going to be that perfect sweet spot where if we lower the fare, we get more ridership and overall our revenue's higher. So, we'll have to play with that. But, for our revenue, you can see that we generated a ton of revenue in certain periods and we had more expenses than others. What I'm seeing here is that we could probably open up some of these other periods because our peak period is making up so much money that we don't wouldn't have to worry about it all that much. And our operational profit for the day, $6.6 million. That's pretty good. That's pretty good in my opinion. Now, eventually, we'll be able to take a look at this by the day and then over time and we can even see that we spent a whole bunch on construction, not very much on operations in a particular day. So, again, let's let things run for a while and see how things shake out over a longer period of time.
Okay, a few days have passed now and I can tell you one thing, we're making money hand over fist. So, let's see how things have changed over time. You can see that every day we have way more revenue than operating costs, which is outstanding. That is the hardest part of the pie for a transit agency to come up with the actual operating cost. If you can make money on transit, every agency in the world would absolutely love that. But, the part that I'm really concerned about is right here, the operational profit over time. You can see that things are pretty even. Seems like we've reached an equilibrium that day one was definitely a bit lower than day two and every day there on out. So, we kind of understand what's going to happen now and that makes me want to tinker around the edges. And one of the things that I've been toying around with the idea of is adjusting the route and dividing it in half. So, the first thing I want to do is edit this route and I'm going to take away the stations back here and have it turn around right here. So, I have to add another crossover track right here. And then I'll build the blueprint so we actually get the crossover. You can see it right there. And now we can modify that route and I basically just want to remove all the stations going out to the tech center. And then we'll confirm those changes.
And one of the reasons that I wanted to do this is we're going to change this quite considerably. I want to have a low demand service. This is the furthest of the off-peak, the overnight periods, things like that. I want to make sure that we have some sort of a service then. So, this will be every 30 minutes in the midnight hour. So, folks will be able to be a janitor for instance and still be able to get home in the evening. But, in addition to this, I want to add another route. This is going to be a forced transfer right here, which isn't ideal, but I think it's going to be just fine for this particular area. I'm going to make this the AX route, so A extended. And basically, what I want to do with this route, we'll select our light metro, and we'll start here. Hit the tech center. And that's it. It's just going to ping back and forth. Now, for the trains for this, we're going to go very minimal. Only during the high-demand period, and maybe during the medium-demand period as well, but only one train. And thankfully, I purchased way too many trains and train cars earlier, did some math wrong in my head. That's why I'm a planner, not an engineer. But now that we resume this, you can see that we have trains running in this overnight period. They're just pinging back and forth between this area. Nothing is happening over here. That is what we wanted. And there are people using this service. Now, for me, this is a valuable community amenity. This is a denser area. This would likely encourage additional density along the route. And just in general, sometimes you provide service when it's not super highly utilized because it really makes people feel good about transit. It makes them be able to depend on it if it's always available for them. The last thing you want to do is take the subway somewhere and get stranded.
So now, here we are. We're at about 5:00 a.m., and you can see that this is the medium-demand period. We have the train coming along here, and it's operational. Only one right here, though, and we've got two right here, three in total. Now, one of the things I want to keep an eye on is if there's overcrowding on the AX line. It looks like it's full, but it's not overcrowded. And we have a lot of full trains over on the A line, but we have much higher frequencies now that the line is shorter, and we haven't decreased the number of trains. We've actually increased it. So, generally, that would mean that our capacity is higher. We're in a much better place. That is concerning. We had one train stuck due to a signal blockage. I think that I might have screwed up here, and maybe we need to have two crossovers. It looks like we had a bit of a conflict right here. I'll add a second crossover, so hopefully they're not crossing, and we'll build that. And I'm going to see if that warning comes up again. If it does, that tells me that I probably should have built another station right here, or something with more capacity. And my goodness, watching this particular station is kind of like watching the DVD menu and waiting to see if the DVD's going to hit the corner. I'm waiting to see if the trains get to the station at the exact same time, and if they collide. Which is not a great thing to look for, but it's what I have to. It seems like we're in a in a better place now. It seems like things are fixed.
Okay. So, we just completed day five with our new service pattern, so I just want to see the way the numbers look. And we were still making money again, I think. Yeah, we definitely made a bit more money. We definitely had more expenses, but the service in general would be much better. Looking at the hourly breakdown, I'm really surprised to see that we actually made money during those overnight periods. Generally, those are big losers, but apparently with the way that we have everything structured, everything is just fine. The only periods that are a little bit rough for us are 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. Those are the two periods that we're losing money, but we're more than making up for it the rest of the day, so I wouldn't worry all that much about that. Looking at our ridership, you can see that route A absolutely dominates route AX, but that makes sense. Route AX is going through that suburban area, and we've been able to really increase our service in the route A service area because of separating the route right there. So, our ridership is that much higher because of what we've done. I think this makes a ton of sense, and I really am happy to see that the ridership has jumped up that much. And then looking at the station ridership, check this out. This station right here, Bel Air Street, is basically as busy as Union Station. Now, the other thing that I've noticed, I think I can rename this. I don't want to rename that one, but this one right here, 17th Street, yeah, we'll make that one Union Station. The other thing, we have one over here that's called 14th Parkway. That's crazy. We'll make that Civic Center. That is much much much better. So cool.
I want to see if we lower the fare cost, if we see a major increase in ridership. Now, unfortunately, I don't think that we have a way to look at ridership over time, so I'm going to do the next best thing. I'll open up a Word document and just paste it right in there. And then I'm going to drop the cost down to $2 a fare, and let things run for maybe 2 days so we see how things shake out. And look at that, we get our first newspaper, transit growth. 22,443 riders served to date. That is super cool. Coffee shops near the Bel Air station seeing a 7% surge in morning customers directly attributable to the new transit operations. That is because transit is good for business. That is awesome. So, I want to pause it. We just finished day seven and I want to take a look at our stats. The first thing I noticed First thing I noticed is that we do have more ridership. In fact, that is a considerable jump in ridership. On a on a percentage basis, that that's huge for both routes even. Looking at our revenue versus our expenses, you can see that things aren't as rosy as they were before, but we're still making a profit, which I look at as being a positive thing. Here's the thing. Transit is a public service and I don't believe that you should be generating huge profits with your transit agency. You should be trying to serve as many people as you can as cheaply as possible. So, you can see we're only generating 3.45 million in profit daily. That's completely fine. Definitely down from where we were before. If we were trying to save up for a service expansion, then absolutely we would want to make sure that we are generating those huge profits, but right now I'm pretty happy with this.
I think I want to create one more route. And for this one, I want to do something fairly different than what I did before. I want to try to create a route out to the airport. Now, for this one, I think I'm going to try to go down Colfax. Then maybe we'll cut up near Colorado or another place if we can find a better route. Maybe we'll just stay on Colfax for a while. Then try to get to the highway. Maybe we'll stop near Aurora. And then we'll have limited stop service until we get over here to Denver International Airport and Lucifer right about here. So, the thing I want to see, the thing that's going to make this a little bit different than the other routes is I want to see if we can go at grade. To me, that's all that makes sense. You can. That's super cool. This actually reduced the cost. We can also we can elevate it. We can create the L in Chicago. That is super cool. All right, let's go at grade and we'll have our first station right here right at the airport. Now, for this next one, I think we're going to go fairly far away. And that's just because there's not all that much happening out here. Not in terms of residents, not in terms of employees. So, I think our next stop, I'll add that right here by this green space, Green Valley Ranch Boulevard. And then I think that we want to try to parallel the highway as best we can. Now, to try to be realistic about this, I will drop the track underground or over the top. But, for this next station, let's see if we have a good location for this. It looks like we've got a major employment hub right here. I can't recall if this is the mall or not in Aurora. I think it probably makes the most sense to come down this way anyway. You can see that it wouldn't be that difficult to get over here. So, after that one, I just kind of want to take inventory of where we are. Now that I zoom out to here, I can see this is Colfax right here. And this right here is City Park. So, I think this neighborhood, Central Park, actually has a light rail station, and I think it does fairly well. What I'm going to do, I don't want to pop up this way. What I'm going to do instead is have one stop right here, and I am going to drop underground right here. It seems like you could have some sort of a corridor through here, so I'll just stop this right here, right on Colfax. And then uh this is Colorado. So, we'll stop near the corner of Colorado and Col- Actually, this is Colorado, my bad. So, this is this should have a stop right here and that'll also serve the zoo and City Park. And now we start to reach more density because we're underground, I'm going to try to go to Cheesman. So, I'll have a stop in Cheesman. The whole idea behind this is that maybe we can link back up with Civic Center right here. So, let's build the tracks. And we are not deep enough right here. This is going to be a big problem. These are very expensive buildings. But since we're so deep, I think I will try to have a nice gentle curve right here. And one of the things that I haven't been doing, if I turn on maximum tunnel depth, I can see the depth that I need to get under these buildings. So, right here you can see it's 10 to 14 m. Some of these taller buildings and larger buildings, I need to go deeper, but over here I don't need to go quite as deep. Now, would you look at this? It's hitting me with a slope violation. Maximum of 4% slope is allowed. And when I hit 4% slope, I hit that building. That's not going to work. What I think I can do to fix this, I'll delete the Gilpin station, I'll build it right here on 12th instead. And then we'll do all of our dropping right here. And now I have relatively high speeds. We still have our Cheesman Park station and we're not knocking down a bunch of buildings. Not going to lie though, that might have been an unforced error. We might need to stay lower because otherwise I'm taking out a whole bunch of buildings. So, let's go back to the drawing board and I will unfortunately keep this 11 m down. But this also means that we can pick up a bit more speed here cuz nothing really matters. And then over here, I'll diagonal underneath, continue our high speeds, and then we need to start surfacing, or not surfacing, but getting higher. And we're at 5 m over here, and I can go nine right here, and then hopefully connect back up at -5 in between here and here. Maximum speed. That is a thing of beauty. That is a really nice-looking route. So, now, in between these two stations, we just stick under Colfax, and then we need to get to our next Colfax station. And then, finally, we end up going over to what I believe is the mall. Now, the tunnel depth doesn't matter anymore, so I'm going to turn that off and just work our way over here. Now, whatever this building is right here is going to cause all the problems in the world for me. I'll tell you what, that is a realistic scenario having just one random building that creates all sorts of problems. Also, this is at grade. I think that's our other issue. So, I'll place it right there instead. So, now we're at grade, and this is going to be problematic in a couple of areas. I need to be able to get right here. We're going to see if I can make this work. Yeah, there's no way. It's not letting me because these roads right here are too close. We're having lots and lots of crossings. So, I will back this out. I do want to go at grade, but we're going to wait until we are closer to DIA. So, now we have to get to here, and I think that the easiest way to do that would probably be to follow this right of way. There's also a lot of undeveloped parcels over here. One of the unfortunate things, though, is that there are like little breezeways like this that will create conflicts. That is not realistic. I wouldn't think that that's a huge issue, but if I go through it, that is a $600 million expenditure. So, we're obviously not going to do that. What I'm going to try to do is basically snake my way around here. It's a little bit slower, but honestly, you got to do what you got to do. And now it should be fairly easy to get up there. I just need to follow the right of way. I'll sweep around right here. And then for this one, I would either need to elevate or go underground. I think I am going to sweep like this. Then we're going to take Green Valley Ranch Boulevard. I'm going to move the station. I think I'll move it maybe right here in this in this undeveloped area. And then I'm going to get to right about here, and then we'll take it at grade. And then looking at this, I actually couldn't go at grade right here because of all the conflicts with the roads. So, I am curious. What is more expensive, going above or below ground? It's actually much cheaper elevating. So, just for fun, I'm going to try to elevate here. So, now we're elevated and can make it over, and I want to run this thing right down the middle of the highway. I think that would look super cool. And then we'll go with something like that. That is really, really cool. Let's check out the cost for this route. We're looking at 1.5 billion dollars. So, we would have absolutely have had to have some of these segments the exact way that we've had them. Let's build it. That's not good. We don't have very much money, so let's create a new route. This will be route D, yellow, going out to the airport on a light metro. And then for this route, we'll start Well, we've got to add our crossover, actually. I never added the crossover. And now we can modify the route. Start it right here at the terminal. So, for this one, we can start it here at the airport, and then we're going to run it all the way to Union Station. So, now we need to add a couple of trains here. Thankfully, we still have some. And I'm not sure how to see how many trains we have in our inventory, but I can tell that we are out of train cars. We also don't really have all that much money. So, I think I'm going to start out with just the one, and we're going to run one train all day along this route. Now, I've really rolled the dice here, and we could lose the game. So, there's one thing I want to change. We need to make a little bit more money, so rather than going $2 for our fare, I'm going to bump it up to $2.50, and hopefully that's a nice balance between ridership and revenue.
Okay. So, we haven't run a full 24 hours, but we've been able to see what's happening generally with the system, and it seems like we're making money hand over fist. Now, this new route is an absolute disaster, and that's because our frequency is pretty bad. It's every 71 minutes, I believe, that you actually get a get a subway. Yeah, 71 minutes. That is not good frequency. So, I want to increase that because we're having a whole bunch of people queuing right here at basically Colorado Avenue at Colfax, which isn't surprising. That's a very busy area. So, what I think I want to do is add a vehicle during the peak period. I got to tell you, this part of the game shows me that this is a game because people are just waiting. They're just queuing up. This is, I believe, National Jewish Health at the hospital, which it makes sense. That would be a place where there'd be a lot of demand, but to have them wait there all day, probably not super realistic. Still, two ways that we could handle this. We could add another train, or we could add another train car. The train car has 400 capacity that would be be adding. So, that would be a lot, and maybe it could clear that queue, but we'd still have 71-minute frequency, which is pretty bad. So, what I think I'm going to do is add one more train during the peak period. That cuts our frequency basically in half. Now, I'm not going to know if this is better until tomorrow. So, I'm going to do to just kind of let it run for a little while, but I do just want to take a look at one thing. Route ridership for route D is half of that of route A, and we've had one train going out there, which is kind of wild. It means that we could probably pair back on route A, add trains to route D, and still be in a fairly good spot. And part of that is look at the station level ridership right here. There's only 3,000 right here, but that's with all the people that haven't been able to get on. Once we're actually picking people up right here, I have a feeling this is going to be a lot like Civic Center right here. We're going to see quite a bit of ridership or maybe it's more like Bel Air. But, we're also going to see a spike here at the airport. So, let's just let it run and see what happens. But, not before doing one thing. I just want to take a look at our revenue. That's the other important piece of this and you can see that things really spiked. It seems like we've done some really good things here. Operational profit $14 million, almost $15 million. Our biggest day ever because we opened up that new line. So, you got to spend money to make money with that with transit it would seem.
Okay, this is wild. Even with all that extra capacity, we never cleared our queue here. So, we're going to make some more modifications. I think for route A, I'm going to steal a train here. That'll take us down to 10-minute frequencies, but that's completely fine. For route D, I'm going to add another train during the high demand peak period. We don't have enough train cars for this, so we'll have to buy more. And then during the medium demand period, remember that's 4:00 to 6:00 a.m., kind of peak airport time, as well as 10:00 to 3:00 and 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., we'll add another train here as well. That'll take it down to 35-minute frequencies. Still not perfect, but a lot better. And I am just curious, if you were to add four here, that would take it down to 18-minute frequency, which is definitely better. But, because this is a long route, you're getting diminishing returns. So, I think that 24 minutes is probably good enough. We can We're going to see how that works. But, for now, let's see if this clears the queues. Okay, and this is slowly getting better. You can see that Colorado Boulevard at Colfax is getting smaller. Cheesman Park still has a ton of people at it. So, there are a couple of different ways that we could resolve this. We could divide this route. We could uh that definitely increase the capacity here. I think that that would definitely do it. Uh but I just want to see overall from a revenue standpoint number is continuing to increase. From a ridership standpoint, route ridership for D is almost equal to A, but the the modifications that we made to A did decrease ridership. So, I think that there are some changes that we can make there. Maybe the actual play is keeping those frequencies high on the spline on A, and then taking that extra those extra train cars and adding them to D. Maybe that is the perfect solution here.
But I got to tell you, this is one of those games that, you know, if you are a specific type of person, if you're like me and you just really like transit, and you've always been fascinated in these sorts of things, I think that you could spend hours on this. Now, I want to thank the developer for giving me a copy of this game. This is 30 bucks, which, you know, it it it's quite expensive for a game that it is kind of doing this sort of thing. However, I think for the right person, it's really going to speak to them, and they're going to like to play it a lot. Right now, it's only available on the developer's website, which I'll leave a link to below. In the future, it will also be available on Steam, which I'm guessing will be a lot of people's preferred way of getting it. However, once it gets on there, for my understanding, it's going to jump up to 40 bucks in price. Got to say though, I really enjoy this. I think it's one of those games that it's just fun to tinker around with. Is it a realistic depiction of everything about transit? No. But is it an educational tool that will teach you a lot about the way transit works and about the way transit planners think? I I think it absolutely is. And I think it's a ton of fun to play around with. Now, obviously, transit is not this profitable. If it was, your city would be building subway lines all over the place. But I do think that some of the tradeoffs and some of the thought process behind it is really, really fun and interesting and that part of it is realistic. And I do love that the engineering constraints and the the actual aspects that you have to think about, they're there. They've done a really good job with that. So again, huge thanks to developer for giving me a key to this. Huge thanks to everyone in the community who reached out and said, "Please play this game." And thank you to all of you for joining me today. It's been a lot of fun. Hope that you've enjoyed this one. If you did, please hit the like button. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, please consider doing so. I want to thank you so much for your time today. There's a million things that you could have been doing that you decided to hang out with me and play Subway Builder and build a subway in Denver, a city that absolutely probably shouldn't have one. For that, I appreciate you and I appreciate your time. Thank you so much and I'll see you in the next one. Take care.