I find those comparisons always a bit odd, because what you are measuring against is an arbitrary schedule. Any train service can reach near 100% punctuality by adding sufficient slack in the schedule so that most trains are able to reach their destination even before the scheduled time of arrival.
A train service with a lot of slack isn’t a successful one though, as it would make them not that competitive in comparison to other means of transportation, by A- the journey looking longer than otherwise and B- the extra slack means that trains are circulating less, and are less profitable
Except they don’t do that. And just expanding the schedule does not work when you need to juggle passenger trains as well as freight trains. Planning for more time between the trains means less throughput and therefore less money. But as a dispatcher, @ZonenRanslite@feddit.org is surely more qualified to argue than any of us.
Germany has ruined the railways through austerity. Thanks, Ministry of Transport.
I thought the blame was on DB, a private company, for taking the profits without any investment on the infrastructure (I just realize, the infra is state/ public?).
You say that like it’s a bad thing, but being honest about the schedule sounds like an absolute plus - for some reason, organizations within some countries have schedules they cannot meet, and I doubt they aren’t well aware already. It might be because realistic schedules make them look bad, so they just fudge the numbers to make themselves look better?
Anyone who might be surprised that Germany is so low here, Germans are always surprised people think it would be very high.
There is a simple reason, too: Auto-Lobby. Our car manufacturers are very powerful in politics and public infrastructure is heavily underfunded.
Funnily enough, highways and other roads are also crumbling, so good luck to the car makers when there is less and less road to drive those precious machines on.
I would say the root cause of the DB issues is rather the failed attempt to privatise it, which caused years decades of infrastructure underinvestment to cook the books to make it look more attractive to private investors.
But of course the strong car lobby also played a role in that.
Yes, hence me saying “failed”. They cooked the books because they wanted to put it up for sale on the stock market, but in the end that never happend for a lot of different reasons.
But they are organised as and run like a private company and driven purely by short term profits and will pay big time bonuses to their executives (usually ex polititians) every year.
This is the main reason. While the car lobby is no doubt dangerously powerful they are also heavily dependant on the cargo department of DB. A massive amount of industrial commodities is moved by the railway network and not the ubiquitous trucks. If they worked to defund the railway infrastructure they would eventually hurt their own supply lines.
I mean you are still building massive highways. Most european countries aren’t building highways anymore.
Not really. It’s mostly maintenance and only a few new projects due to shifting demand.
America is much the same in that regard. We have probably the most laughably terrible train network, both in terms of freight and passenger, for any western country, especially relative to any meaningful metric like GDP. It’s down to a noxious mix of car lobby, racism, and stupid policy choices (single family housing exclusive zoning, parking minimums, etc) all applied consistently over 70 years. In spite of all that, and in spite of increasingly enormous re-investment packages, our roads never really seem to get much better. I hope it’s the same in Germany, but I’ve noticed that having better mobility solutions than cars and planes only is quickly becoming a pretty mainstream position in the US.
Additionally, the number presented is most likely too high, since it’s more important to tune the numbers than to provide good service.
Example: a late train can be taken out of service and replaced, or even not. Voila! Not late anymore.
I wish this wasn’t the reality.
I spent nearly a quarter century working for a German company.
The Germans think about the Swiss the same way we think about the Germans.
What’s funny to me is that the Dutch people I know complain about their trains as much as the Germans I know.
From my experience, their problems are just of a different nature. Dutch trains are punctual, but the carriages are often in a filthy state.
People really underappreciate trains in the Netherlands. Not only are they relatively punctual (even in a worldwide ranking), but having that in addition to having a dense schedule is really pretty impressive. In that sense, only Japan truly has us beat, I think.
I think the Swiss beat you aswell. They run a rather dense network too. Not dense like NL in the urban sense of the word, but Swiss connections are very well frequented and they run through some quite difficult terrain adding to the difficulty of running it all smoothly. The Swiss and Dutch network has quite some resemblance actually in how it is ran, both more perceived as a transfer model with rather easy to read, logical timetables (“runs every half hour”: 13u00 13u30 14u00 etc), both barely having any real high speed lines.
From having travelled with trains in Europe, i’ld intuitively say in Europe Swiss wins, followed by the Netherlands and then perhaps the Austrians or the French. Belgium up there is this ranking is just lies and deceipt, in my experience the Germans the Belgians are about as reliable (not), but the germans do still win from Belgium because they are (often but not always) more fair in the communication and they hand out “request a refund”-forms in delayed trains.
The Swiss network is amazing as well, and I was considering mentioning them too. It really is quite a feat to have it run that well given the terrain, but given that the busiest routes in the Netherlands have trains running every ten minutes, I leaned to limiting it to Japan - but can definitely live with Switzerland at #2 as well.
(I’ve also had more delays than I like in Germany, and more often than not on those delays I’ve not been handed those forms, in which case it wasn’t clear how to request a refund :/ )
This stat is kind of weird. Punctuality is defined differently in every country.
In Switzerland 3+ minutes delay is counted as unpunctual, while france needs a 15+ min delay. I think in Austria it is 5+ min but unsure. So these numbers aren’t really comparable because they aren’t defining delay the same.
Zugfinder seems to use a consistent definition of anything below 5 minutes being punctual. So those are in fact comparable values.
In Belgium it’s 6 minutes and only the arrival at the final destination is checked. Cancelled trains are also not included in the statistics, which has lead to trains being cancelled to increase punctuality: instead of starting it’s journey 10 minutes late, the train starts “on time” 1 hour later. Travellers missing connections is also not included in the statistics.
So put these 3 together and the actual delays of travellers are much larger than the statistics would like us to believe.
And to add insult to injury, to increase their “punctuality”, the train operator seems to increase journey times with every schedule revision. So not only are trains less punctual than they were a few decades ago, journey times are also often significantly longer.
So according to the statistics, Belgian trains are doing fine, but the actual travellers disagree.
No argument with the other points that you made, but I would much rather that they make the journey times longer and accurate, than shorter, but unlikely. Once a train is running behind and off-schedule, it only gets more and more late.
It’s a cop out, a way to temporarily relieve the problem without actually solving the problem. Every year the trains run a tiny bit slower and every year reliability is as bad as the year before.
Especially for small trains and shorter journeys it has gotten silly imo. Journeys that used to take about ~15 minutes now take ~30 minutes. And at the time when it took that train 15 minutes, they were really punctual and reliable, while now they’re not. I found an article from 2014 which remarked that Mechelen-leuven was going to take 26 minutes while it only used to take 16 minutes. Now in 2024 that same line is 25-31 minutes with an acceptable error margin of +6 minutes.
From my personal experience, those slower trains are not driving slower and being more punctual, they’re just spending a lot more time standing still. My small commuter train to Brussels would always spend 10 to 50 minutes waiting in the same junction. In the case of the 50 minutes, I think it was just pretending to be a later train so that it could arrive on time.
The punctuality of trains in CENTRAL Europe.
Zugfinder doesn’t cover it all.