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
yearsdecades 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.
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 think you're both right
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.
There is also the infamous <insert-name of current minister of infrastructure>-Wende (turnaround). In order to not be late anymore some trains just turned around two or three stops short of the actual destination.
France does the same, a cancelled train isn't delayed according to SNCF.
The American auto industry effectively killed trains here. I’d love to have often-late high speed trains instead of “you want to go from Texas to Chicago? Fly, drive, or go fuck yourself.”
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.
Who is "we" in that sentence?
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.
There will be more road. Similarly to the US tho, the (former) infrastructure is falling apart as road infrastructure is also underfunded (partly due to new construction like lane addition or construction of new Autobahnen).
Fun fact: German ICEs (high-speed trains) are not allowed to enter Switzerland if they are delayed too much so they don't disrupt the Swiss schedule. This year more than 10% were not allowed to continue.
It’s super funny because at swiss train station they always say
“Train X is delayed by Y minutes, this is due to delays in France/Germany and not the Swiss railways” on the megaphone LOL
In Austria they're not as direct as this, but usually say "because of delays abroad" which is easily decipherable as these trains usually travel from Germany.
Yeah, but the integrated timetable for Germany is just around the corner. 2070 😭
The Swiss railway network is nuts. From Not Just Bikes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPcHs-E4qc
I went to switzerland two times via train the last few years (usually I go with my dad by car), and both times this happened. Once we had to sleep there overnight, because after we got in with another train, there were no more trains through the mountains.
German long distance trains are 64% on time because up to 5 minutes delay are not counted for the statistics and guess what? Trains that never arrive (due to being way too late to continue their journey or because of technical problems on the trains or track system) are not included in the statistics either!
The infamous Scheuer-Wende.
For the non germans: say a train is supposed to go from Munich over Hamburg to Kiel, and then return back to Munich. If that train accumulates so much delay that it could not even start the return trip on time, it might just stop in Hamburg, dump all the passengers, and turn around heading to Munich.
Now the skipped stops don't count as delayed, since the train never stopped there, the train is on time again for the return trip, and hundreds of passengers are pissed off and stranded somewhere they never wanted to be.
There is not much long distance in Switzerland... Can we have that normalized for average length of continuous rail?
Ah yes, the 12 countries of Europe.
Yeah Is Slovenia the worst in europe or 12th best? Most probably it's just random which countries are in the graph.
Well we do suck in the train department bit I do think there are worse offenders.
In Belgium trains are considered on time when up to a 6 minute delay, but what really schews the statistics is that cancelled trains are not counted. Even so, the number in this overview is completely incorrect. It was 87,5% on time in 2023.
I'm pretty sure Germany uses the exact same logic.
trains that are "cancelled" are not counted in germany, at least by train companies and politics, everyone else counts them as betrayals. sometimes trains are cancelled officially, just to arrive later with the same engine, wagons, staff and guests but under another train number just to not show up as that bad delayed any more, because its officially (renamed to) another train then!! that seems to happen on very few routes only, however, trains that are late would regulary never arrive at their final destination but be told to turn around and skip some stops to catch up with their time schedule at those stops the train is counted as cancelled => which is not counted then. bonus: the company knows the delay sometimes hours before that turn around to skip some stops, while people at those stops are left olone thinking that train will arrive until shortly before it should arrive only to be told that it will never arrive. sometimes trains show up as arriving in 2 minutes, then 1 ... then now ... and its gone! ... without any train passing by (mainly at remote locations with only 2 platforms or trams do that regulary too) guess those ghost trains are good for statistics, counts as in time, but does not use any space nor repairs, neither energy, and cannot be delayed by broken tracks or engine failures, also company does not have to pay for the driver of ghost trains. sometimes when the arrival platforms are changed for a train, someone through the speaker says, the train will arrive on platform 7, while the displays show it to have been changed to platform 2, and you have 1,5 minutes to get it after the first note from the company (bonus: sometimes both platforms told to you are wrong, then the train arrives (maybe) on the original platform that is empty bcs all ran to either 2 or 7)
when visiting other countries in europe, nearly everywhere i love how good public transport works (maybe in spain not that much) but in gemany its way too many lies delays, absurd rules a.s.o.
Read again , it's say long-distance trains.
So TGV/Eurostar only I'm guessing.
Het woord dat je wil gebruiken is "skews", landgenoot.
TIL Train punctuality is the art of lying with statistics
In Germany's defense, if you miss a train connection due to delays, you just board the next connection without needing to have your ticket re-issued for another connection, which is cool.
But the joke is real, I was coming back from Spain to Poland by train recently and everything was fine, until my VERY FIRST STATION IN GERMANY where I got my first delay.
I just read that every 10th train voming from Germany into Switzerland is late, and they don't wait anymore, because they mess up the rest of the route.
Yes, there is a standby train in Basel, for when the ones coming from Frankfurt are delayed again.
Switzerland has an integrated cyclic schedue, and relatively tightly planned line utilization so delays can cascade pretty strongly.
Its better for the system at whole to send the standby within the scheduled slot of the German train, have that train return from Basel to Frankfurt directly (making up time in the process so the way back is regular), and people who wanted to go to Zürich have to get off and use the next train to Zürich half an hour after the standby, in the next regular slot.
The downside is cost of the standby train and situations like this: Last time I had to change in Basel myself, and had to guide an older lady and carry her suitcase, because she was quite confused by the sudden unplanned change of trains. Then she talked my ear off on the way from Basel to Zürich :-)
The punctuality of trains in CENTRAL Europe.
Zugfinder doesn't cover it all.
What's funny to me is that the Dutch people I know complain about their trains as much as the Germans I know.
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.
I fucking love your OV. In Germany it's shit (especially in Schleswig-Holstein). I'm super jealous.
I already commented here, but I think this deserves its own comment. I'd like to see how this stacks up against Japan and China. I can already tell you how the US stacks up. On top of fifty-to-seventy years of rail underinvestment, the freight rail companies have been deliberately fucking with Amtrak for years now by making their trains too long to fulfill their legal obligation to pull off onto side tracks and yield to passenger traffic. And yes, you read that right, the vast majority of Amtrak's alignments are shared with freight rail.
And yes, you read that right, the vast majority of Amtrak’s alignments are shared with freight rail.
Isn't that kinda normal, though?
My understanding is that most passenger rail in Europe and Asia runs on dedicated tracks. I misspoke, I should have said tracks, not alignments. It would be much less of an issue if Amtrak had its own tracks on a given freight alignment. Instead, they share tracks, and regularly get delayed, speed capped at lower speeds than they could safely operate at otherwise, and generally jerked around by the freight operators.
I am suspecting that the major reason why trains are so often so late in germany is because the car industry saw itself threatened by effective public transport.
I have absolutely no proof to back up this claim. I'm not even sure that it is that way, but it's the only explanation i can offer for why the germans can't have a working railway system.
UK: hold my room temperature beer
Where the hell are you getting room temperature beer Certainly not in a pub.
From a room
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.
oh nice! I assumed it was taking from national statistics.
Having lived in both Austria and France, I would definitely have guess Austria be more punctual than france.
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.
Bitching about the cff/sbb is a national sport in Switzerland
Yeah but to be fair, people start bitching after a 2min delay... But it's totally ok to bitch about the prices
Can we please stop excluding the UK from these charts? Its still geographically European and acting like it isn't just feeds the brexiters... also because it'd be funny to have a country with -37 as its punctuality value on here.
Is a train late if it still hasn't arrived?
For Germany, I can answer that: No, that's not included in the official DB stats.
There is only 12 countries on the list, it's not complete. But of course the UK was purposefully "excluded", must be because of brexit. 🙄
So you say Slovenia’s trains are slovenly?
Where's Japan?
Edit: yeah, I'm dumb. Wasn't paying attention.
Japan is just east of China, across the Sea of Japan and a hair north of the East China Sea. You can't miss it.
In Asia 😉
Dad, who has the most punctual trains?
The Swiss! Watch!
Also, their flag’s a big plus.
happy swiss noises
In Finland the national railway company "Valtion Rautatiet" is abbreviated "VR", which gets sometimes jokingly(?) opened as "Venaa Rauhassa" which can be roughly translated to "wait in peace"
how did germany come to this, they have such a rep for keeping shit orderly, investing in infrastructure etc. did the merger of east and west back in the 90s fuck things up or?
how did germany come to this
Neoliberal policies: austerity fetish, privatization of public infrastructure and the expectation that rail has to be 'profitable' led to massive under-investment.
thanks for the feedback!
Germany has an extremely strong automobile lobby. They're very dependent on the car industry. So politicians taking the money from these companies, which is a lot of them, sabotage infrastructure programs, and instead pump more money into cars. Similar issue to America really, and it's an issue caused by America having a massive presence in Germany and playing a big role in West German law & reconstruction.
Former East Germany generally has significantly better urban design & public transit infrastructure than former West Germany, but the government neglects the east part of the country as well as implementing the car-ification I mentioned before, plus the AfD (basically the modern Nazi party) is becoming in-charge there, so it's getting worse over time.
interesting details. Sad to see the US isn't the only country fucked by car culture bullshit.
A bunch of stuff. First of all the merger between east and west german railways happened in 1994 that was due to a lot or rail connections having to be rebuilt and a number of high speed lines were built or improved to Berlin. That however cost a lot. Then the German government was thinking about privatizing the railways. To do that a stock company was formed with the goal of turning a profit. So they stopped maintaining tracks and avoided new investment as much as possible for quite some time. In the meantime both passenger and freight railway demand in Germany increased a lot, while very little to no new track was opened. Also the ICE service was increased and unlike most everywhere else, it is run for the most part on improved old track and not new lines. Regional rail and freight run at roughly the same speed, if you consider the regular stops of regional rail. HSR runs faster, so other trains are either in the way or they have to move to the site.
As a result most of the German mainlines are at capacity or above it. As in there is demand for more trains, but the tracks do not have the capacity for it. So if anything goes wrong on any train, it results in a traffic jam, which causes delays for everybody else on those sections. However since long distance trains go through the entire country, nearly all of them do have to cross those sections.
The obvious solution is to built more railway and especially add high speed rail lines in parallel to the current lines. However NIMBYism is strong in Germany and when combined with a strong car lobby, it makes building new lines nearly impossible. Every single project ends up in a decades long planing stage, with mulitple law suits and even with construction you end up with stops, due to legal problems. For the most part the construction work is doing just fine, it is really just politicans being corrupt.
TY for the insight
I honestly don't even believe the numbers given here are real, it's much worse than that IME
Does being early count as being punctual?
Yes, unless they also depart early.
Wtf! France is not that bad!! Would have though that it would have been way worse
Perhaps they don't count strikes
Me when my train was 67 minutes late... dont even aks... btw in sweden
Italy should get better now that there is Giorgia /s
I appreciate the humor of not even including Poland.
Norway: Would you like some bus for train?
I’m just a silly American here, but how does Luxembourg have long distance trains?
And even Switzerland is tiny compared to most states in the US. It’s only a little bigger than Maryland, which takes about two hours to pass through on the interstate (and has some of the worst traffic in the country near Washington DC).
Trains can cross borders
I live in Luxembourg and I have the same question!
I suspect it is trains going outside of the country but it's funny to see nonetheless. I think most trains originate from Luxembourg (when travelling to other countries over anything that would be considered a long distance which I suspect gives them a scheduling advantage).
Yeah, way less stations for trains to arrive at late as well, which was actually my less facetious question, since I assumed the long distance trains would be leaving the country pretty quickly.
Regarding Switzerland:
From Zürich you can go to Hamburg, Venice, Paris, Budapest etc. without changing, so there are plenty of long distance connections that just end in Switzerland.
But we have a lot of intercity lines internally too. Some of the longest are:
- Geneva Airport to St. Gallen is about 4h,
- Lugano to Zürich is only 2h these days thanks to the longest rail tunnel in the world,
- Zürich to Visp is also 2h.
But the most important are probably Geneva-Lausanne-Bern-Zürich and Basel-Zürich and Bern-Basel because those are our big economic centers. They are called intercity here as well.
Not sure if you count any of those from an American perspective.
Long distance trains usually go to neighbor countries. Also a lot of people prefer to take a train (where your can relax, read, watch a movie, work or whatever) instead of driving for 2 hours. Most European cities are built around train stations and have very good public transport, so it's very convenient.
I don't know what long distance means in this regard, but i suspect everything on the level of an IC. We do have some routes that take over 4 hours though, lots of mountains to go around ;-).
I'm intrigued by what they class as a long distance train, are they counting domestic only services? I wonder if the size of the country plays into it as well as most of the top ones in that list are relatively small, so presumably less long distance routes, and they are presumably shorter routes as well so maybe less chances for delays.
elron is the national operator here in skypeland, ORANGE TRAIN
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.
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, @[email protected] is surely more qualified to argue than any of us.
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
Sure, but the diagram compares train services of different countries against each other, however their scheduling standards are not comparable.
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?
I am just saying that the graphic compares apples and oranges. No value judgement involved.
When you know that in Switzerland train are due late after 3 minutes when it's 5 minutes in the other countries. And, Switzerland uses its network at >95% with clock face timetable. It actually is making impossible possible.
Democratic Socialism FTW
