Passengers seem to always go the absolute nearest option for what ever their needs are. Most passengers are going to choose shopping/ food based on their available income (i.e. everyone is not going to go the the priciest shop or food option) Also if there is a line for a bathroom most people will move on and use one later. The craziness that occurs with a bathroom by check-in counters is nuts.
Would be nice to implement a bit more randomness to how the passengers interact with the airport in general.
I hope the dev’s already have something in mind for Alpha 34 concerning passenger behaviour. Even with a couple of thousand of passengers at my airports, usually only those restaurants and shops are out of scale frequently visited that are located either near a train station or the baggage claim area. All others are barely visited. Especially within the secure zone the demand for food and shopping is far too low, I can hardly run a single 2-star shop or restaurant with enough customers to reach the sales target and that’s with almost 20 medium stands and 100% PAX ratio. Looking at the tremendous amount of shops at any bigger airport IRL this aspect definitely needs some adjustment.
On a similar note, all PAX always tend to follow the same path; the quickest path. This might seem logical but because the PAX seemingly don’t collide with each other, this behaviour creates a single line of passengers through the entire airport as they move from certain places to other places.
It would be nice to have a sort of randomiser. Where not all PAX would follow the same path, but have a 50% chance to offset the node they follow by 1 or 2 nodes, creating some variety in the paths.
Alpha 34 has some minor improvements relating to the issues you’re describing but it mainly targets franchise balancing. Alpha 35 is the terminal update and will feature some proper passenger behavior balancing.