Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelscott | Hacker News Reader

The point is that Switzerland maintains this level of punctuality in addition to connecting the entire country, down to the village. That "down to the village" bit is the part that very few other public transport systems in the world have managed to get right, including those alternatives in your list.

Of course, as you say this is about trusting the published statistics from the country itself. In the case of Switzerland, I can say from anecdotal experience that 92% is probably very close to the truth, if that helps?

View on HN

I think GP's point was also that the Swiss look middle-of-the-league only when comparing their strict definition (>3m is counted as a delay) with the looser definition used by other countries (>5m is counted as a delay). Presumably, if trains with a 4- or 5-minute delay were not counted as delayed, more than 92% of Swiss trains would be on time.

Fun fact, if a train is cancelled in Belgium, it doesn't count in the delayed statistics :)

Because they way Switzerland is structured both in terms of administration and geography I don't think that a village in Switzerland is equivalent to a village in most other countries. Presumably the canton system results in more smaller cities and large villages, and the terrain means they are in a limited number of places. The largest cities are all within 100 km of each other. While a single trip in a large country can be longer than the entire length of Switzerland. It will of course be easier to match a timetable with short predictable distances at lower speeds.

> The largest cities are all within 100 km of each other.

They're not.

Zurich is 225km from Lausanne and 125km from Bern. Geneva is 254km from Basel, 371km from Lugano, 265km from Lucerne and 277km from Zurich.

I think the opposite of your claim is closer to the truth (though it also has exceptions) than your claim.

I think there are pros and cons to both structures. Villages in Switzerland are well separated by geography that is physically difficult to overcome (i.e. mountains), even if the distances are not big. It's way easier to lay down a flat, long rail between 2 cities in, say, the US or Mexico than it is to do the same in Switzerland.

The structure would probably need to change for larger countries though, it's true. But you could keep a lot of it; create long distance rails between major cities with stops along these rails for smaller towns to feed into. Some European countries have this type of structure, Italy for example, though it does get very tricky for the very smallest villages

The really smaller villages in the mountains are only connected by postal bus. The villages in the valley and what I could call small towns are connected by train, but it is far from ubiquitous.

True, the density gets much lower in the villages and especially those in the mountains. But for the average person in _most_ of the Swiss villages there is some connection they can take to get to where they need to go (though it may not always be the fastest, depending on where you live)

200km/h is "lower speeds"? That's the nominal speed of IC trains between Swiss population centers.

And Switzerland is quite a tiny country, so more than 200kph isn't worth it. Regular rail connected by wire will require much more maintenance going faster.

It's thus probably also worth counting the number of trips - I don't have numbers, but I have a feeling that SBB runs much more passenger trains daily than Polish or other systems do.

The trains run more often and go to more places than any other place I've ever been to.

As an American living in a suburban Swiss village taking the bus into Geneva, I don’t think the bus was more than 1 minute late once every hundred days. And I was pretty far along on the line. It was staggeringly punctual.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com