There have been many posts on the subject which imply that teamster's offices move product. They do not. Teamster's move products.

There have been many posts which imply that teamster's offices need to be near product outputs so the teamsters employed there can serve them better. They do not. Teamsters will find "something" to do based on where they happen to be. If their basic needs are met, that "something" we can call "work", but it may or may not be moving product.

Let's first look at what a teamster does when they move product. They go to a building with output on the loading docks. They fill their little wheelbarrow and then decide a location. That location may be an input to another building or it might be the docks themselves. They then start running at double speed pushing their little wheelbarrow full of goods until they either get there or until they come across a garage. If they do, they'll load into a truck and finish the journey in the truck. The destination does not have to be a road connected building to accept a truck, a good example is the marketplace. However if it has a road connection that is not connected, it will not be seen by the teamsters so make sure your buildings are connected if needed and close to a road if not. They will also take shortcuts between buildings so don't count on them always following the roads.

Now lets look at what teamsters do that we can call "work" but it isn't delivering goods. They go and sit in an office until a need for them arises or until it's quitting time. One place they'll do that often is the teamster's office, and if they do they'll be limited in the transport jobs they'll take due to proximity issues. I haven't figured out all of the complexities yet but distance is a prime factor. However if they do get a transport order they'll leave the office in a truck and get there pretty quickly.

The most important place they work however is the garage. Do I see a pattern here? Yes! When you build a production building, make sure it is near a garage, not a teamster's office! Also that teamster isn't going to backtrack so make sure the garages are on the way to the most common destinations. A cement factory on the far side of town needs a garage ON THE PATH to the docks, or the poor guy will push his wheelbarrow all the way there. He won't cross the street to use a garage on the north side of the factory if the destination is south. The easy solution? Make sure your pickup spots have garages roughly surrounding them without saturating the area.

Very important here is that a teamster doesn't necessarily go to an office or any other building before taking a delivery task. They may leave the cabaret and go straight to the logging camp across town for a load. They may conduct 2 or 3 in a row.

There's another aspect of this multi-building employment that works in our favor if we let it; when they look for a job they may take any teamster job in any building. They rotate. That has more to do with non-work amenities but we won't go far into that. Just don't try and isolate your housing in an area, spread it out.

So lets evaluate what we learned so far:
- teamster tasks are loosely related to proximity of where they currently are assigned to work.
- teamster tasks may follow other teamster tasks, so one might deliver some corn, work at a garage, deliver some pineapples and then go and deliver some lumber. They don't necessarily go to a teamster building before or after accepting a delivery.
- Garages are only considered if they are on the way to the pickup or delivery site, so they should be plentiful.
- Each garage adds 2 teamsters who will be in the general area, and those two teamsters may change so their work/home/needs situation will be different.

What does this mean?
Teamster's offices tie up teamsters by forcing them to work in a congested location with 5 other teamsters, and insuring that at least some of the time they'll be making a trek to the office so they can sit and watch porn rather than going directly to a delivery task. Garages on the other hand spread out your teamster assignment locations, provide enhanced load carrying speeds and each one adds just two teamster positions, about perfect for the area served by a single garage. In short you shouldn't need a second teamster's office; just set the first one on easy-does-it and build your network of roads and garages and the deliveries will happen. I've carried this idea out to populations greater than 400 and never had an issue with product movement as long as I had full teamster employment in the garages. The old canard about needing a teamster's office near every industrial center is false, and in fact it causes more problems by overstocking teamster labor and causing workforce shortages which are the main cause of transport issues. They also add to traffic congestion at the extreme end, and they cost money for upkeep on a non-production building.