Workers and Resources is a complicated game, when you are new (or newish) it is very easy to struggle with basic things like getting public transport working.
There are video tutorials but not only do you have to invest 10 minutes or even as much as an hour, but they might never mention or just gloss over the specific thing you wanted to know. The simple series provides bite-sized chunks of information that you can skim through in a minute to get what you want to know.
The simple series often provides a single opinioned way to do things. not because it is the only way or even the best way, but just because it is easy to explain concisely.
Road Distribution Offices
Road distribution offices vs wait until loaded/unloaded
Distribution offices are a better solution in a majority of cases, so they should be the default.
There are some cases where wait until loaded/unloaded is more useful, so use them if you think it makes sense.
Source % and destination % examples
A food factory holds 25t of food while a warehouse holds 650t of any covered good.
Source: 0%, Destination: 100% => Send a truck as long as the food factory has some food and the warehouse isn’t full
Source: 10%, Destination: 90% => Send a truck if there is at least 2.5t of food in the food factory and less that 585t of food in the warehouse
If you want storages to hold multiple items use the limit amount checkbox
For example, if you want a warehouse for your shopping centres and pubs then you should set the warehouse limits at 25% for each of food, clothing, electronics and alcohol.
When you set the distribution office to make sure that the warehouse is at least 50% full of food, that 50% only applies to the 25% you have allocated to food e.g. 80t of food instead of 325t of food.
Long distance should be storage to storage
Imagine you had a food factory several miles away from shopping centre. If you use a distribution office to transfer the food directly, it might sent 1t of food in 10t truck all the way.
If you build a storage outside of the city then the distribution office will be sending full trucks 90% of the way there. You can use another distribution office with smaller trucks to deliver to the shopping centre.
This is called “last mile delivery” in the real world.
Train Distribution Offices
Train distribution offices vs wait until loaded/unloaded
Train distribution offices are more expensive, and your first few trains will be simple export trains so you’ll probably not have to build a train distribution office until your second or third industry.