How do I prevent my Sims from moving out because of their long commute time?

I have a big city with 173,000 population and there are lots of abandoned structures caused by having too long commute times. I don't have any industrial inside the city because I have them at neighboring cities.

To lower commute time I put bus stops literally everywhere, but I still get long commute time. How can I fix this?

Solution 1:

Having your Sim's jobs exist in neighboring cities automatically makes their commute time long. Frankly, there isn't any fix for that - that's the burden of having jobs in other cities, they take the pollution, you take the commute.

You can prevent having abandoned buildings with a variety of solutions, the simplest being increasing your land values. Placing down parks, monuments, emergency services, or a variety of other improvements will make your Sims tolerate the long commute. They'll never stop complaining about their commute, but the benefits of living in your city will make them stay. Other options like lowering taxes can achieve the same effect.

With that being said, make sure you have enough capacity for your commuters too. With 175k citizens it is very easy for your city to have too many people and not enough buses. Allocate more funding for your transit system or look into other means of locomotion such as railways, subways, highways, or even airports. Right now the problem is "too long of a commute" but it could quickly escalate into "I can't commute at all"