Compare and contrast
March 31st, 2005
BBC News reports:
Train punctuality ‘is improving’
The firm which operates Britain’s rail network has beaten its punctuality targets for the first time.
Network Rail has this year cut delays on its services by 16%, the equivalent to 2.2 million passenger minutes.
It said 83.5% of trains arrived within five minutes of their due time - beating the Rail Regulator’s target of 82.8% of trains. […]
Sounds promising, yes? However, later on today I read but she’s a girl’s latest post about her visit to Japan:
[…] As we left the station, I looked at my watch and commented with mock horror that we were a minute late leaving. In fact, it turned out that my watch was a minute fast, and we left precisely on time.
It’s almost incomprehensible for someone used to the British rail system, but the average delay for the shinkansen over a year is less than one minute. Unbelievably, that also includes times when the service has been stopped for an hour or more because of a typhoon or earthquake. It’s like another world. […]
It doesn’t bear thinking what the Network Rail statistics would look like if they had to cope with typhoons and earthquakes on top of the wrong sort of snow etc.
April 1st, 2005 at 5:23 am
You don’t have to go to japan, the French system is very good, I hear as is the italian. That said I’ve never really had any problems with the trains (on the few occasions I’ve used them) or the tube, I’m either really lucky or only the most vocal end up getting problems.
April 1st, 2005 at 7:04 pm
I think that occasional rail users (like me) don’t really appreciate how bad the system is: it’s the people who use the rail network to commute on a daily basis - and especially those who happen to find themselves with little choice but to use a ‘problem’ line - who bear the brunt of the problem.