you joke, but the train I get everyday into London is only on time if I'm a minute late. Otherwise it's pretty much always 2-10 minutes behind schedule.
Another archaic, confusing and "retarded" thing the U.S. burdens the world with.
At least the time units are the same the rest of the world uses. Imagine: "Your train is scheduled to arrive in 3 sleeps, 2 bowel evacuations and 30 blinks."
Isn't that a different idea than a timetable? "We're aiming for one train every 10min" and "there's a train at 12.10, 12.20, 12.30" are similar, but not quite the same. You can get your approximation without a timetable though.
He's completely right that the data is messy and sometimes makes no sense at all. Even a passenger waiting for a train, if paying attention, will notice trains appear, disappear and "jump around" on the countdown clocks.
This is an unbelievable debate for me as a citizen of a smaller city with a much less developed system. Our system is so far away from being able to accurately time trains like this that asking whether it should be door close or train moving is like debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I travelled to London a few weeks ago and was shocked that the trains would come when the schedule said it would. I'm used to +/-5 minutes on a good day, but with the max delay much worse than that.
I'm not sure it's any better at all! It's likely also a cultural difference, as I would prefer to use a system that would arrive early. I'm just saying that there are reasons a train system might like its trains to arrive on schedule, rather than early or late. Saying that there are "no reasons" to arrive on schedule is just silly. There are lots.
And it'd be confusing for public transport, too – the District Line in London already has about two minutes difference between its eastern and western termini, and thanks to the extension to Reading Crossrail manages roughly five minutes.
(And of course railways were the initial reasons we switched away from truly local solar time in the first place.)
The buses and underground in central London do have real timetables by the way, but they're primarily for the operators.
If you drive buses or trains you want to know when your service is supposed to start and how long it's supposed to take to get where it's going. But for passengers this is a metro service (except for the first and last services on routes which shut overnight) so they don't care if this is an 1105 running two minutes early or an 1100 running three minutes late.
Having done both, and living in a city with a supposedly functioning public transport system, not being beholden to a time table outweighs all of that so hard that it's not even funny.
I don't understand how a train may not be on schedule. There's two rails on which the train runs in completely deterministic matter, unlike air or car traffic.
I suppose it relies on some slack in the system and everything else moving as expected. Which could also be the reason why they don't want to restart a schedule at mid-day with every active train in a non standard state.
The problem with that is that it means a delay. There is no easy answer for when to delay the train for everyone, or when to keep moving until it is handled with a smaller delay.
Their way of calculating punctuality is pretty misleading. It takes into account the predicted arrival at the final destination, without taking into account where passengers actually go. Delays along the route are hidden that way, even though most passengers don't go from origin to terminus, i.e. hardly anyone travels from Liège to Ostend, but the start & end of that 2hour+ journey are what's used to compute delays.
If they were to count what percentage of passengers arrived on time, things would look radically different.
Adding to that: a 5 minute delay on a 2hr journey is fine, but a 5 minute delay on a 12 minute journey is awful.
As for cheap .. I wouldn't exactly call trains cheap in Belgium. Especially if you factor in how uncomfortable they are, how most stations have zero accessibility options, how frequently things go terribly wrong, and how nonexistently awful their customer support is.
You occasionally see times like 24:15 on European railway timetables. If the train runs only on weekdays, it might make it clearer that there isn't one at 00:15 on Monday.
I haven't noticed 25:00, but I don't often look at printed/PDF timetables nowadays.
> Deutsche Bahn trains are notorious for being late.
Statements like this don't make sense unless you take into account cultural differences in what "late" means.
In Germany people think that a 5-10 minute delay is unacceptable. In the UK trains are so frequently late and cancelled that when a train is 5-10 mins late, it's considered on time.
While I agree with you on the planning part, it still doesn't chsnge the fact thst a train can't reach all the stations on time, despite having a predefined schedule,almost no traffic and etc.
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