This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"
> so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"
New York’s Metro-North and LIRR have 95%+ on-time rates [1]. (EDIT: On time is defined as less than 6 minutes late [2].)
> I bet, however, it's not uniformly distributed and some lines are late more than others
Sure. But "with a nearly perfect on-time performance of 99.3% on Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven Lines," there isn't much room to hide problems. (LIRR is 96.3%.)
The point is we have systems that have been well built and well maintained. They just don't get coverage because they just work. (The LIRR is far from perfect, mind you. But it's apparently outperforming the DB. You have to get to some of the worst routes during peak conditions to get in the neighbourhood of DB's systemic numbers.)
As JumpCrisscross asked the definition of on-time is important. Most Euro countries define "on time" as "within 5 minutes" with something like 90%+ of their train being on time.
SBB CFF FFS has similar numbers, except it defines "on time" as "within 3 minutes"[1] which is of course harder to achieve.
BART's on-time definition is "within 5 minutes of scheduled arrival at final station". I recall in NYC's Metro that trains would frequently "go express" and start skipping stops at arbitrary moments. Do these systems do this as well and have that definition? I think I now understand why they do this stuff: they're trying to juice metrics because skipping stations speeds up the train a lot.
In practice it does feel like basically every single Amtrak is delayed after just a few stops, so I would be shocked if the situation is worse in Germany. However to put some numbers on it, here are Amtrak's own stats: https://www.bts.gov/content/amtrak-time-performance-trends-a.... In the flagship northeast corridor (that's Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - DC) the "on-time" percentage is around 80%, where on-time is within 20 minutes.
In the rest of the country Amtrak blames freight companies for most delays (https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance), and frankly I am inclined to agree with them. Amtrak does not own those lines and does not have priority on them, and the freight companies don't give a shit about anyone. See for example https://www.propublica.org/article/trains-crossing-blocked-k... and the rest of ProPublica's excellent series on the industry.
Agreed, I just think it's worth mentioning because a lot of the discussion in this thread is about how much Deutsche Bahn sucks, and while Amtrak also sucks, it doesn't suck quite as much as experience would lead you to believe. Much of the blame is on America as a whole, not specifically Amtrak.
Or to put it another way, it sounds like DB has a lot of problems that it could fix, but Amtrak has a lot of problems that are out of its control.
The Swiss rail lines are used close to capacity. If a train is too much late, it has follow-on effects on other trains, and the whole railway system can start to run into problems. So for the whole system to work, there can't be any overly late trains. This applies to all trains, not just German trains.
So this doesn't really have anything to do with that single train not being on time, or with differences in culture or something like that, it's about keeping the system running. If you have a system that isn't used at capacity, then it doesn't matter much if individual trains run late, the system itself will still keep on running.
It's absolutely crazy to me! I can see my uber driver on my phone stopping to pick up a pretzel from the convenience store, but I can't see where the bus is or get any kind of estimate of when it's going to arrive at the busstop.
On vacation this summer in europe, all tram stops had estimated arrival times. Ridiculous, 5-10 minutes out at worst, they wouldn't even need the electronic signs, just a placard that says "just skim your phone for a bit, it'll come".
You are describing a well-off high density city in Western Europe.
I unfortunately live in "we used to have trams, most of them were scrapped in favour of bus lines, then the bus lines were scrapped because they were not profitable enough, go buy a car" Europe.
Portland Oregon as well. There are a variety of apps that use the API to get arrival info from Tri Met, and all train stops, and many bus stops, have displays.
I've taken transit in a few US and Canadian cities. Most of the time there was some app that reported the live location of the busses and trains in transit.
Often I could get the data through Transit, but sometimes they have their own app.
Trams and buses tend to be more unreliable because they use the same streets as cars (sometimes they get extra lanes, but not always). Metros tend to be more reliable in my experience, I can usually trust what it says on the electronic sign (one big exception is Cologne where the metro isn't a real metro and runs on the street half of the time).
However in Cologne, to my big surprise, trams, despite running in the streets and in a real maze of crossings underground, manage to always be on time when I use them. S-Bahns on the other hand, seldom are...
Stadtbahns use the "U" sign for U-Bahn when only part of their network is underground; I guess this is to avoid confusing riders.
You might have been lucky. The "metro" in Cologne is notoriously unreliable, to the point that there's even a word "KVB minutes" to explain why sometimes the train will be arriving in 2 minutes for about 10 minutes.
This was belgian coast (long story), trams have dedicated right of way and don't share the street with the cars. Peak tourist season too, which may explain the subway-like frequency.
North American trains have a huge amount of level crossings, which, predictably, cause tons of accidents when oblivious drivers get hit by trains. Although most of the world considers high speed trains to be incompatible with level crossings, the recently built Brightline in Florida has several level crossings and has already hit many cars. [0][1]
Caltrain routinely has delays due to accidents involving grade crossings. Despite spending decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, they still haven't managed to fully grade separate the line. [2]
Fun fact, Canada's Turbotrain was one of the earliest examples of high speed rail in the world in the 1960s and was even faster than the Shinkansen at the time. However, it hit a truck only one hour into its debut run. This is often cited as the main reason why there's no high speed rail in Canada despite the density and proximity of Toronto and Montreal being ideal for such a line. [3]
Not sure why you'd want to lump all of America in to one category of failure when it's demonstrably untrue. Quick example - BART in the Bay Area has a 92-93% on-time rate.
There must be some definitional trick here (like canceled trains not counting, or something) because my memory of BART (as a daily multi-commuter: home to work, work to sports, sports to home) was frequent moments of "10 CAR SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT / MILLBRAE TRAIN IN FOR-TEE MINUTES" and shit like that. Enough of that in the year 2019 led to me switching to e-bike/car and frequently this is a much faster trip than the train.
Swiss trains define on-time as within 3 minutes of schedule, and this includes all mechanical issues, suicides, etc.
And this includes multi-hour intercity train lines, double-decker trains, trains that stop inside of airports, local trains, everything. If you have just a couple lines in a single city, under a single jurisdiction, with no interdependencies and no freight on the same lines, then of course it gets a lot easier.
The issue is that trains need tracks. Tracks are very expensive and a limited resource. The stricter you are about time the more trains you can pack into a given amount of trackage.
A bus uses a road and doesn't have a problem like that because there is far more road than the buses need.
The Dallas Area Raipd Transit on-time rate is about the same as this Swiss train system at 93%. The Trinity Railway Express is 97%, so higher on-time rate than the Swiss system.
The Trinity Railway defines on time performance for trains as arrival within 5 minutes of schedule[1]. It's not materially different from the Swiss standard.
Does the US not have an extensive network of Greyhound busses, similar to our FlixBus system? Or is that just something I saw in the movies? (I'm not American)
Here in bc Canada we had profitable intercity rail (bc rail), a previous conservative government were elected with the promise they wouldn’t sell it, they instead leased it for 99 years cheaply and that was the end of passenger rail for most the province. Greyhound took up the slack but 10ish years ago they pulled out leavings nearly no way to get between cities without a car. There are now some private bus companies but as I understand it they are really expensive with terrible schedules.
It’s honestly sad how public transport was left to rot/fail/or sold off in North America.
And how people now go “it won’t work here! Europe is more dense! Things are too far apart” Ignoring it did and was (at least in bc) a few short decades ago
I'm happy with European rail. For instance, it is 36 hours by FlixBus from Amsterdam to Porto, but if you use high-speed rail (Eurostar, TGV, Iryo) it is only 23 hours, faster than going by car.
Traveling 2,000km in the US would take me like 5 hours including an hour in the airport each way. Even if you made it two hours on departure that's six hours of total travel time. Compared to a 23 hour train trip.
Distances like that, trains just don't make sense IMO.
Sure they do when you have proper high speed rain. That journey could be 10 relaxing hours at 300kph. No security, no awful plane noise and seats. Quiet comfy and relaxing (or overnight and you can sleep)
It’s also far better for the environment, and should be cheaper if you take plane subsidies and apply them to trains.
Also your math is wrong 5 hours with 1 hour each side (generous) is 7 hours. With 2 hours each side that’s 9 hours.
Either way I would much rather take a comfortable train for 10 hours then suffer in a plane for 5.
(The reason 2000km takes so long for op is its 7+ train changes, if you made 7+ plane changes it would be very long too)
> Also your math is wrong 5 hours with 1 hour each side (generous) is 7 hours. With 2 hours each side that’s 9 hours.
Its a three-hour flight not a five hour flight. Five hours is including the one hour on each side. And you wouldn't have two hours on the arrival side, you're not having to wait through security. Chances are on the arrival side its less than an hour. Sure, maybe customs slows you down, but I've never had customs take as long as security and the consequences of being a little slow are much less. But there are no customs flying domestically, and I'm not sure what customs are like flying within the eurozone anyways.
> Either way I would much rather take a comfortable train for 10 hours then suffer in a plane for 5.
It's not 10 hours on the train, its 23 hours on the train. And it's not 5 hours on a plane, its three hours. The person said they were taking HSR. Its a 23 hour ride taking HSR.
> The reason 2000km takes so long for op is its 7+ train changes, if you made 7+ plane changes it would be very long too
Sure, but generally speaking you don't have to when flying You often don't even need to change planes once. That's the whole point. Rail is great for certain distances, but past that there grows a lot of complexities. You're not going to take a single shot HSR trip 2,000km practically anywhere. You're going to have times where the train stops. You're probably going to have to change trains, potentially even change to a non-HSR for a leg of the trip. Meanwhile planes don't need to change 7 times to go 2,000km.
> should be cheaper
Sure, if you value two days of your vacation at nearly $0. Or two days of seeing your family while gone on a business trip at $0. Personally, two days of travel would have to be radically cheaper for me to think it worth it.
Sure, but people lament the lack of trans-national US trains. If even taking high speed rail in a region of the world known for good trains (Europe), a normal-ish kind of travel pattern would take 23 hours versus 5 hours, why would people choose the train?
Don't get me wrong, I'm generally pro-train. I'm super excited for the prospects of the Texas bullet train. Trains can make a lot of sense to a certain distance. But why would you pick it for a 2,000km trip?
There is a network but in my experience it's not the most reliable and with no accountability. I tried to use it twice so far but experience was not too good.
First time bus was just cancelled with no explanation (my guess is not enough passengers) so I had to take pretty expensive last-minute 1h flight. They refunded the ticket but kept credit card processing fee.
Second time it bus was late for 1h and it didn't even stop where it was supposed to. I had to pay for an Uber and since bus company refused to refund my ticket I had to charge back.
Maybe I was just unlucky but I don't plan to try them again.
Fairly recently (maybe in the last five years or so), Greyhound in some cities has been selling their city-center land and moving their stations to much less convenient places. Near me it's a side-of-the-highway industrial area with occasional local buses downtown.
There are even FlixBusses in the US. I see them pretty often.
There are a number of nation-wide and regional inter-city bus systems. They're just not extremely popular since car ownership is typically pretty high, fuel costs are generally low-ish, and chances are when you get to your destination you'll need a car anyways.
It's dwindling. If the movie you saw was It Happened One Night, the fact that the bus breaks down is indicative of the state of Greyhound today. FlixBus recently bought Greyhound. We'll see if they have have a positive effect.
We do have a pretty extensive greyhound network in the US (it was recently bought by flixbus, but I think they're keeping the greyhound branding). But it is a totally different experience than long-distance buses in Europe.
I've taken a number of flixbuses in Europe and they were decent. Most cities had some sort of bus terminal where you could sit and grab food before the trip, the bus was clean, the advertised power outlets worked, seat assignments were respected, and they'd make stops at places with clean restrooms.
I've also taken a few flixbuses in the US west and wouldn't recommend people do that. The cleanliness is poor, the on board amenities like power outlets/wifi are frequently broken (or don't exist), paid seat assignments have never been enforced, bathroom stops are disgusting, and there is a lack of order/safety on board. And the bus terminals simply don't exist - in Los Angeles you stand in an uncovered parking lot outside the central jail and there is no notification of which bus goes where. Everyone just runs (literally) up to each bus as it arrives, preventing passengers from disembarking, and asks the bus driver where it's going, and then tries to cram on immediately because that's the only way to avoid getting an undesirable seat.
Safety is a huge issue on these buses. I conduct most of my life on foot and by public transit in southern California and there's some sense of safety from knowing you could avoid/move away from people acting dangerously. But on the bus you're stuck, and I often arrive with my nerves frayed by the behavior of other passengers. They don't publish stats on this but my friends who have taken these buses also reported they also feel extremely unsafe, with one telling me they were on a trip where a stabbing occurred.
I regularly take the Amtrak from San Diego to LA to see friends and family, and during the track closure last year I tried flixbus a few times. After 4 tries, I simply stopped discretionary travel to LA for the better part of a year because it was such a bad experience.
Videos I've watched of people's experiences. Things like having a driver be at their max hours, maybe due to unforceen traffic and delays, and Greyhound having no replacement driver ready, causing them to be late. Not hit pieces, just travel vlogs. Everyone has to get off the bus, sit in a sometimes crappy terminal at 2 am, often with no amenities while it's sorted out.
I'm a bus advocate, you can see it from another post this week. But Greyhound is not reliable if time is sensitive.
Are watching videos of people's negative experiences really an unbiased way to understand the actual statistics on how often busses are on-time? People probably post videos when things go wrong, do you think a similar rate of videos get uploaded when nothing notable happens?
I see videos of fights breaking out on airplanes, hear about horror stories of being stuck on a plane and not allowed getting off. I take it that's what happens in the majority of flights then?
I mostly only see videos of car accidents. I guess most people get into car accidents every day. Or maybe people don't bother uploading the hundreds of hours of non-interesting dashcam clips.
I think you're misunderstanding. GP isn't saying "drawing randomly from all videos of unsafe situations, a large fraction of them occur on long-distance buses". They're saying "drawing randomly from all long-distance bus videos online, a large fraction of them have unsafe situations".
There are a number of travel vloggers who do a trip exactly once and report on what happened. The same vlogger will make videos about taking ships, trains, airplanes, and long- and short-distance buses, in a variety of countries, on a variety of budgets. Among these vloggers, it is generally agreed that long-distance buses in the USA are the worst form of transit in the developed world. Their videos on other forms of travel rarely (if ever) show the kinds of unsafe experiences they have on long-distance buses in the US.
I'm also a numbers person and I've looked around to try and find stats for how dismal the safety and on-time performance of US long distance buses are for you, but none are published. I can just report that the cancellation rate is well over 10%, the on-time performance is maybe around 50%, and personally speaking the experience is frequently unsafe and miserable.
I don't mean to make this personal, but if you're in the US, consider driving to the local greyhound station/pick up and just waiting there for particular bus. It's really one of the worst experiences you can have in a city.
Read my other comment. I have ridden inter-city busses in the US on many occasions and picked up people at the stations. They've generally been on-time. My personal experiences have been pretty alright. A few times the WiFi didn't work but that was about it when it comes to my own negative experiences. The bus stations haven't exactly been in the nicest parts of town, but I've never experienced anything like violence there. Outside of chartered trips I haven't done a multi-day bus trip, most have been straight city pairs. Houston <-> Dallas. Dallas <-> Austin. Austin <-> San Antonio. Etc. But I'm not then saying that's always typical, to actually judge the performance I'd look at the larger statistics.
> the on-time performance is maybe around 50%
I posted Greyhound's on-time statistics which was 90%.
> who do a trip exactly once
What a way to collect statistics. I just stepped outside. It wasn't raining. I guess it'll never rain.
> drawing randomly from all long-distance bus videos online, a large fraction of them have unsafe situations
Well yeah, once again, are there really going to be a lot of popular videos of "I took a five day bus ride, nothing happened, here's an hour-long video of the travel!" And are those really random videos or ones the algorithm have bubbled up to the surface? Think a video with crazy stuff happening would bubble up in the algorithm rather than an hour long video where nothing of note happens? Maybe analyzing statistics by one-off example YouTube videos made for clicks isn't the best way.
You watch travel vlogs where fights break out on planes? I'd love to see those channels!
I suspect not. I suspect you don't watch actual vlogs, rather you see 1 minute long clips we all see.
Sometimes we want to watch the whole unedited experience to get a sense of what it's like, rather than for 1 minute entertainment bits. I've watched Tesla Self Drive from SF to LA over several days to see what it's like for example (it's jerky on streets I'll tell you that).
There's bias in every single thing. But the alternative is to be blind to all media, which no one is doing. I've given you the context, and you've drawn up a red herring--1 minute news clips, which I'm not talking about.
I could tell you about a 14-hour flight I took between Dallas and Charleston (lots of storms, lots of reroutes, crew timed out, etc.). I could have made that a 14-hour long video for you to watch. Is it indicative of the typical trip between these two cities or just a single example and potentially a massive outlier? Should you assume it normally takes 14 hours to fly that distance in the US and that's a typical experience of a flier?
Personally every time I've taken an inter-city bus its been a smooth trip and pretty much on-time, I can't think of a time I was over 15 minutes late. Every time I've been on a chartered bus it was on-time. Every time I've picked someone up at the bus terminal they were within 5 minutes. That's a little over dozen experiences over the years in total. Admittedly, a bit luckier than average looking at the actual statistics. How many vlogs have you watched? How many times have you actually taken a Greyhound or similar?
Thanks for sharing these numbers. I'm actually baffled to see the on-time performance so high and the passenger injury rate so low. I wonder how these numbers would look if they broke it down into greyhound vs. other operations, and whether cancellations are factored into their on-time performance. I've seen verbal aggression on so many of these buses and stations that I can't square it such a low injury rate. Maybe I've just been a major outlier in my travels.
They are quite shit and you still need to get dropped off and picked up from them.
Anybody who mentions it online is only trying to win an argument and literally never uses it because it’s shit. You only use it if you don't have a car.
That's like Italian trains, but it's more like "nobody knows what platform it's gonna be at; keep a look out and run when you see it; also, screw you".
