I don't understand, isn't that how trains work everywhere? Otherwise how are the people in the next city supposed to know when they need to be there to board that train?
Here's the live arrivals board for Manchester Victoria station in England. At the time of posting, the next five trains scheduled to arrive were 15 minutes late, 14 minutes late, 25 minutes late, 8 minutes late and cancelled. This is not atypical.
I live in Midwest USA, and trains and busses here are routinely off schedule. More than say 60% of the time, it will be 5 to 15+ minutes late, and you'll be forced to waste that time just waiting for arrival/transfer. Also, occasionally buses arrive and depart a little bit early, so you can't just arrive on time and be safe either, you have to plan on being at least 10 minutes early to be safe.
If a scheduled departure time is 1:10PM, then a weekly list of actual departure times in the US might often look like : (Monday, 1:15PM, Tuesday, 1:18PM, Wednesday, 1:04PM, Thursday 1:22PM, Friday, 1:11PM, more or less at random). There's no reliable way to plan ahead for that, so realistically you just have to always be 10 minutes early, and expect to wait through to 20+ minutes late, just in case.
This also repeats for every single transfer you might have to make... and most trips require at least one transfer...
That sounds pretty good compared to my Midwest experiences :|
Hourly schedule, literally never fits the times presented so you just go and wait. And sometimes you end up waiting 1.5 hours with nothing, so you call up the station to find out wtf and they have no idea where the bus is. "It should be there soon!" -> it finally comes after 2.5 hours.
This happened at least 4 times in the 30 or so attempts I made to use it to get to college. A mere 3 miles away. Then I gave up and just walked or drove. Eventually attended a town hall, and the higher-ups claimed no knowledge of any of this. Last I heard it was still performing at the same level.
I assume they were either skipping our stops to fake a normal round-trip time, or just disappearing for an hour or two to smoke.
Trains in Japan run very regularly, much more so than in other countries I've visited. Only yesterday I was on a Finnish train and it was delayed by 15 minutes, which lead to some confusion when it did turn up over whether it was the correct train.
If you ride in the first car and look at the timetable the driver uses, you can see the timetable is accurate to the second.
Here's a photo showing a driver's timetable. In the second row is a 20 second stop at Hazama, the train arrival time is 13:25:05 and departure 13:25:25.
That timetable looks like it's on 5-second granularity, not 1-second. Which is still pretty tight -- the UK's working timetables are half-minute granularity. (The UK also demonstrates that it's not merely a matter of having an exact timetable, you also need to be able to keep to it in practice :-))
In many places, the trains are always late, but never early. So you get to the station at the appointed time and just wait. You couldn't tell someone to get off the train at "1:11" in the US.
Well, the train says it arrives at 1:11, which means that it will be there at some time past 1:11, because it will inevitably be late, caused by breakdowns or track maintenance or the weather (in Australia, if it gets too hot, the trains have to slow down).
In Melbourne at least it seems like the system is run exactly at capacity. If one train has to stop at a platform for 3 minutes extra because of a signal fault or a sick passenger, every train on that line (and probably 2 other lines) for the next 3 hours is critically fucked.
It seems like there's no leeway in the timetables to make up lost time, and no extra trains parked in the outer suburbs (morning) or CBD (afternoon) to make up services.
The other day my train had to wait for 5 minutes just outside Flinders St station because didn't have a platform to park the train at. Flinders is a real bottleneck, if the flow starts to stutter there, everything falls to bits.
Upon saying that, Melbourne's trains are usually pretty good, over 90% on time. It's the buses here that I have issues with. The timetable at the stop is completely useless, and the app is not much better. Sometimes the PTV app says the bus will arrive in 1 minute, and it arrives 5 minutes later.
1. Some trains never run. For the commuter this is like a very late train. You need to add the "did not run" numbers to the late trains to get a total effective lateness figure.
2. Some trains run but are so full you cannot get on them. Try catching a train from Prahran to the city at 8am. Nonetheless, this counts as an on time service.
3.On time is defined as anywhere from 1 minute early to 5:59 late. To me six minutes late is not on time.
4. The fraction of late trains is much higher in peak hour, when more people are affected. So the effective late % is higher than it looks at face value.
Anecdotal, sure, but I find about 9 in 10 trains are online and boardable. Frankston and Werribee lines, off peak. I hope the new lines that will bypass the city will help decongestion the network.
For the most part in developing countries. But remember that in Japan, most train stations are minutes apart. So getting off at 1:11 is absolutely stunning.
Also, they have a national radio broadcast that broadcasts time. I think most of their clocks are built to read info from the radio channel and sync to it. So you are usually advised to see the myriad of clocks displayed everywhere.
High speed typically takes single track. One delay causes countless more delays.. domino effect. By using single track, any deficiency is immediately visible. So by moving to the surface any potential for error which could be hidden or diluted, each part of the machine is forced to move at the same rate. This increases system wide efficiency.
Moscow subway has a train every 2 or 3 minutes most of the time, so there's no timetable anywhere visible to the passengers - you just wait for the next train. In rare occurences where trains have different destinations (about only 2 lines have those), you just look it up at the train windshield or listen to the announcement.
