And as someone who lived in Moscow for a long time I can attest it is the gold standard. It's the second busiest (or top-3) and just always works as scheduled. One rare thing one could rely on that comes from the government.
If you dont have one, how do you measure performance of the system?
One could make the argument that a train showing up ten minutes late vs one on time doesn't really matter to a person so long as it shows up within a reasonable time of them getting to the station and it still takes them to their destination on time. If the headways are five minutes and every single train is running at the same speed just five minutes late, this is a distinction that doesn't matter to the passenger.
- due to all the merging in and out throughout the system, trains need to be in the right place at the right time or merging delays will cascade throughout the system
- for purposes of employee scheduling, you need to make sure that the right employees are in the right place at the right time; generally a train leaving a terminal is being driven by a crew that had to come in from somewhere else.
Passengers transferring to other lines or transit modes may also appreciate predictability.
Depends on the line and destination.
https://www.mta.info/press-release/nyc-transit/new-full-year...
I regret to inform you that the NYC subway has many more problems than you experienced. Before the pandemic I traveled between Brooklyn and Manhattan and problems were common. Much more common was just random slowdowns, sitting between stations, etc. that makes it a lot more difficult to know when you'll arrive at your destination.
It happened in Paris more than "extraordinary" number of times, so I have to put extra 15 mins to every important travel.
OTP sounds like: the train is scheduled at 3:25, it arrives at 3.26. Correct me if I'm wrong here. But if the normal margin is 5 mins for total time of travel, making it 15 mins is not nice.