Problem with truck station zones and vehicle AI

Question

Truck station area of pick up/unload should be more restrictive, since poor vehicle AI and pathing makes it often so that if you don't keep truck stations VERY separated, they have a high risk of picking up resources from a vehicle on the way to or while trying to leave another station. I got plenty of good examples on my current main save file for this, with vehicles such as the tractor not following the recording as intended and thus entering other truck station zones at times, clogging the system. This was fixed with makeshift fencing, around 1/5th of a foundation in thickness with conveyor poles. Now, this becomes a problem when you don't use the tractor but the actual unit, the truck. These trucks on the other hand, their cockpit or w/e can clip through said fencing and clogg another station anyways, I tried doubling the fence thickness at the cost of manoeuvring space for the truck AI, but even at that point it still managed to reach the other station. This all happens mostly since the AI always wants to move forward and doesn't track backwards driving, this in combination with the size and leniency of the truck zones makes compact vehicle drop off points aggravating to deal with.
The solutions to this would be simply to make the drop off/pick up requirements for a truck less lenient, zones being smaller to some extent, possibly even a requirement of the truck being more centered in the zone or having at least the majority of its mass within it to even be considered a potential target for any action in regards to a truck station. In my personal scenario it'd be appealing if the trucks could track backwards movement which would also solve the issue for my perhaps more fringe scenario. But I stand more so by the truck station suggestion in terms of making them less lenient in their restrictions simply put.

Comments

I would also like to be able to program the specific item pickups for trucks and the stations. That way it wouldn't matter if your trucks clip into the wrong station.

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This would obviously help greatly as well yes, would be the cleanest and simplest solution for it all for sure!

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An easy fix would be to only load/unload a truck that's stationary.

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I think one thing that would DRASTICALLY improve AI driving is for the AI to pay attention to not just the direction I'm driving, but also the SPEED.  For example, I've got a long bridge over a lake, followed by a 90 degree turn once back over land.  When I drive it, I go full throttle over like 90% of the bridge, then hit the brakes, take the turn carefully, then start accelerating again.  When the AI drives the same route, it tries to FLY around that turn, at best hitting the rail and having to sort itself out, at worst flipping itself completely off the highway and requiring manual correction.  You can get around this to some degree by adding "pause" waypoints in your AI path, but if a route requires a lot of turns, that can drastically increase the time it takes for a truck to go the full loop.

If the AI actually paid attention to the SPEED I was going when recording the loop, it would do a much better job of driving like me, rather than driving like Evel Knievel with a death wish.

As for your specific issue, I've found a decent workaround is to set up my truck stations back-to-front instead of side-to-side, with the truck stations in the middle of the enter/(un)load/exit loop. That way the stations themselves act as dividers between their own loading zones.

You've still got to worry about trucks trying to take turns WAY too fast, but you can get around that by not putting more than 4-5 truck stations on the same straight line.

Here's an MSPaint diagram of how I've got my truck unloading depot setup.  Orange outlines are stations, solid orange is loading zones, blue are truck routes, black is my foundation.