Train was 8 minutes late this morning and 3 lines were stopped. Probably due to the Typhoon yesterday causing scheduling problems but even on normal days Japanese trains are not the paragons of time-keeping the west seem to make them out to be
(Although they ARE miles better than anything I have seen in the UK for instance.)
[EDIT] Note: Previous poster downgraded the conviction of his statement after this comment was posted.
Nothing is perfect, not even Japanese trains, but in my experience, the grandparent poster is closer to the truth than you are: Japanese trains are paragons of time-keeping ("paragon: a model or pattern of excellence or of a particular excellence").
Obviously right after a typhoon is a bad time to measure anything, but in normal operation, Japanese trains are extremely punctual, to a degree that's downright astonishing to anyone used to trains in most other countries. Arriving more than a minute late is unusual (less than that is hard to judge because the timetables don't include seconds).
The only real exceptions are situations where it's almost impossible to do better—cleaning up after a suicide (and here they're still many times faster than in the U.S., for instance), or operating in inclement weather so severe that attempting normal operation would be dangerous.
These exceptions do happen often enough that anybody who lives in Japan will be inconvenienced occasionally (with suicides being the main offender), but 99% of the time, you can set your watch by train arrivals.
More to the point, there seems little they could do to make punctuality much better, unless they can figure out how to cheer up the population to the point of discouraging suicides (and of course they are actually working on this issue by moving to platform doors on some lines, not to mention more wacky methods like the blue lights underneath the ends of platforms).
If something is so good that there's little practical room for any improvement, doesn't that make it a pretty good candidate for being called "a paragon"?
Slightly off topic, but when my brother was young he became obsessed with preventing train suicides and we actually came to the conclusion that placing an airbag on the front of the train would most likely (help to) resolve this issue.
Based on our calculations it should be feasible to prevent death in at least a few percent of cases.
Given that the biggest draw for train suicides is its near 100% success rate that would probably quickly reduce train suicides by a very significant factor.
I also thought this is an almost impossible problem to solve, until a friend pointed out that on the Jubilee line extension (London Underground), it is solved.
The edge of the platform at the newer stations is walled off from the track by glass. The platform doors line up with the train's, and open/close at the same time. So there's no access to the track at any point, hence no opportunity for "person under train".
They have those doors in many places in Asia also, but most of the trains people are jumping in front of in Japan are above ground and the stations are literally just platforms with a roof.
Platform doors are certainly possible above ground too.
Usually in Tokyo, they use chest-height barriers/doors for above-ground lines, e.g. currently the Meguro-line has these, and in the future, the Yamanote-line will. This doesn't make suicides impossible, but makes them more difficult to a degree which will certainly discourage many people (you can't just fling yourself off the platform at the last moment). [Some subways, e.g. the Fukutoshin-line, use these as well.]
A more problematic issue is stations which handle many disparate types of trains on the same platforms, which makes it much more difficult to achieve the consistent door positioning you need for platform doors.
As a guy sitting in a soba joint in Tokyo right now...I cannot imagine how much it would cost to put those doors on all the JR and Metro stations. It's certainly in the realm of prohibitive.
They do end up saving some money too, though, not only by reducing suicides and accidents, but because platform doors seem to be considered a prerequisite for "one-man operation" (ワンマン運転) on most lines, and that can help reduce staffing costs.
Most Tokyo stations also have high enough ridership that such capital improvements are a lot easier to swallow than they would be for "concrete slab in the countryside" stations.
Luckily, it's the sort of thing they can do incrementally in the places where it makes the most sense; no need to do every line and every station immediately. I imagine they'll probably continue to do it slowly, just as they're slowly adding elevators and other accessibility improvements to even minor stations.
What is considered late there? If a train arrives within 6 minutes of schedule and departs within 11 it's considered 'on time' in my part of Australia.
Sorry, previous commenter said something along the lines of "Trains always on time to the second" which prompted my response.
I don't know the exact numbers they use for their statistics (I think it used to be 1 minute).
If a train is delayed by 10 minutes you can ask for a ticket to take to work to show your boss that being late was not your fault.
Don't get me wrong, the punctuality is much better than most European countries I have lived in and quite a lot of the time the are perfectly on time, but the west has raised the Japanese public transport system to near mythical status.
In August 2012, 99.1% of all stops happened within fifteen minutes of the scheduled time, 94.2% happened within five minutes. Looking only at long-distance trains, 75.8% of all stops where reached within five minutes of the scheduled time and 90.5% of all stops were reached within fifteen minutes of the scheduled time.
Not true. Today morning "We appologize bla bla", last Saturday evening "We appologize bla bla aprox. delay 60 min". In the end it was about 120 min. In Germany trains do have delays a way TOO OFTEN.
I don’t think you should respond to data with anecdotes. That’s not very useful.
You might be using a train connection that – for whatever reason (construction work, etc.) – is consistently late. Sucks for you, doesn’t mean train in Germany are in general late. Most are on time.
Depends on what type of train I guess. Probably no bullet train (shinkansen) has even been more than 59 seconds late (under normal circumstances that is). Naturally any type of bad weather like blizzards, typhoons or earthquakes will cause delays but most likely due to a complete cancellation of service.
Local trains are more prone to delays, for example the Yamanote line in Tokyo being the most notorious due to ahem, being the preferred line used by Tokyoites to say bye-bye to this world.
For local city train lines a delay of more than 5 minutes will result in the driver profusely apologizing on and on, and the line to start issuing "certificates" that people can get to show their employers blaming the lateness on the train line.
Sometimes they arrive 1 or 2 minutes late due to stuff like urgent track inspection/maintenance. This is generally not considered a big deal, although the conductor will still announce it and briefly apologize for it.
Leaving 6 minutes (let alone 11) later than the schedule is definitely considered late. If you're changing lines, which in practice most people have to do when commuting in Tokyo, a 5 minute delay can result in an even bigger total delay (e.g. if the next train you take is an express one, and it comes every 15min).
Delays longer than that are usually due to bodily accidents which is an euphemism for "someone just jumped in the tracks", and typhoons and other natural accidents. The former is more common.
What I found more amazing when I fist came is that buses also come on time! Although of course short delays are more common than with trains, they're pretty much on schedule. The flip side is that they run very slowly and stop every other block. When I used to commute by bike I often kept up with buses for long stretches.
For frequent trains like like loop lines and subways in major cities, you can generally expect them to arrive when scheduled. These arrive every few minutes, so anything longer than a minute is perceived as a delay. These will be reported and apologized for.
For trains like JR that run longer distances and less frequently, delays of 15-20 minutes due to accidents or weather can happen. This seems to happen once every few months or so.
When there isn't a typhoon on, they pretty much arrive on time to the second. Anything later than a few minutes results in the platform staff handing out notes to that effect so that employees can prove to their companies that the train was actually late.
Train was 8 minutes late this morning and 3 lines were stopped. Probably due to the Typhoon yesterday causing scheduling problems but even on normal days Japanese trains are not the paragons of time-keeping the west seem to make them out to be
(Although they ARE miles better than anything I have seen in the UK for instance.)
[EDIT] Note: Previous poster downgraded the conviction of his statement after this comment was posted.