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.
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!
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.
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.
The punctuality of trains in CENTRAL Europe.
Zugfinder doesn't cover it all.
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.
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
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.
So you say Slovenia’s trains are slovenly?
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"
Does being early count as being punctual?
Me when my train was 67 minutes late... dont even aks... btw in sweden
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).
Norway: Would you like some bus for train?
Italy should get better now that there is Giorgia /s
I appreciate the humor of not even including Poland.
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
Democratic Socialism FTW
