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Comment by bloak | Hacker News Reader

In Japan, is the "departure time" understood to be the time at which the doors close, or the time at which the train starts moving? This is a common debate in Britain:

https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/train-doors-may-close-3...

Personally I think that for the convenience of passengers the doors should not close before the published time, which is traditionally called "departure time" but I don't really care what they call it; the point is that people need to know the time at which they need to be on the train and the easiest way to tell them is to tell them directly without any bizarre offsets.

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This is an unbelievable debate for me as a citizen of a smaller city with a much less developed system. Our system is so far away from being able to accurately time trains like this that asking whether it should be door close or train moving is like debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I travelled to London a few weeks ago and was shocked that the trains would come when the schedule said it would. I'm used to +/-5 minutes on a good day, but with the max delay much worse than that.

Trains should run down to the second in the majority of cases. There should be enough padding in the system that they can finish any segment in 10 seconds less than scheduled time if someone holds a door open. Computers are very good at driving a train at exactly the planned speed, and will also stop with the doors at exactly the same place on the platform. Computers can open doors at exactly the right time. In some old stations you might need a human to verify the doors are safe to close (some stations have curved platforms which means there is a bit of a gap and someone can get stuck in an unsafe place), and hit the ready to go button. You might have a human up front to hit the emergency stop (ie someone on track), but there is no other use for a human driver these days.

The above is about trains. Buses and trams are more complex and cannot run this way.

The problem is with the word "departure". Just call it allaboard time. Its the time when the old timey fat conductor yells "ALL ABOARD" and then the steam starts to whistle out the smoke stack.

I heard a conductor actually yell “BOARD!!!” over the PA system on CalTrain last month. It was delightfully anachronistic!

Yes i think the problem is closing the doors 30-60 seconds early. Why do they do that?

So they can leave on time.

If the schedule depends on the train actually beginning to move at "departure time" then the doors need to start closing before that, because if someone is in the door it will reopen, beep, and reclose.

However, you could have the doors close at the beginning of the minute, and the train leave at the end of the minute and have 59 second leeway.

If your flight leaves at 12:30, do you walk up to the gate a few seconds before that and expect to get on?

Is there anything with a departure time where you expect to be able to get on momentarily before departure?

A bus for example and many trains too. I'm not sure I understand your question.

Buses is fair enough.

Flight departure times are a shitty user interface. Who cares when the plane taxis or takes off?

The time given should ideally be when check-in closes - much easier to plan around.

It is probably the anchor for everything else. The plane had scheduled a flight plan based on that departure time. Check in might close consistently X minutes before that, but sometimes not. I have been at an airport (pre covid) 3 hours early and only just made it on the plane due to airport chaos.

Which varies in my experience. If there's an available window 5-10 minutes early, I've absolutely seen planes take it. And, of course, conversely delays are not infrequent. They presumably won't leave before boarding time (and don't think I've ever observed that) but I have seen boarding time be very close to door closed time. I've had connections that seemed pretty comfortable and I've ended up being pretty much the last person on the plane.

I once saw a plane leave before boarding time. Everyone was in the terminal already and bad weather was coming so the pilots rushed boarding to get in the air before the storm (well they tried: we spent 20 minutes on the taxiway waiting out the storm, but if they had been 1 minute faster they would have been able to get above the storm before it hit)

Airplane tickets have both boarding time and departure time listed.

Things I walk up to momentarily before departure: every mode of transportation except planes. For trains and buses, the two times should be almost simultaneous (as anything else is just adding additional linger time)

Long distance point to point buses yes, shuttle buses yes, local buses certainly not!

Swiss trains.

The London Tube (and I'll bet any subway system).

When the doors open, depending on traffic, they easily spend less than 20 seconds open before closing. I've run for a tube and dove in just in time _so_ many times now.

The reality is that transportation operations involve multiple events, each of which have a specific timing factor and variance.

There's arrival and departure (to the gate, platform, or quay) of the vehicle / vessel itself.

There's ticketing and check-in time, if those are required. Possibly security screening for air travel. And for aircraft, gate arrival time vs. wheels-down / wheels-up, where the latter includes taxi and takeoff queue time. Add to this the reliability or unreliability of actual travel times --- busses and shared-route transit must deal with traffic and delays, aircraft with weather and airport conjestion, ships with dock and pilot availability as well as weather factors, for example.

Schedules are written from several points of view --- the operator (when must vehicles be at specific points or departing from them), passengers, port or terminal operators, etc. Each has different needs. Learning how to interpret the published schedule to your own planning is key to effective use of such systems.

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