Hacker News Reader

Comment by terminous | Hacker News Reader

To counterpoint: in the height of summer tourist season 2023, I spent a week in Switzerland taking trains and booked several supersaver tickets in advance with 15-30 minute connections. I was told stories of the efficiency of Swiss trains, and that I could book 5-10 min connections with no problems, but chose to be safe and do 15-30 mins. Well, I missed 3 of these connections due to delays on the incoming train. I had to queue at the ticket booth to get it endorsed for the next train.

View on HN

There's no need for anecdotes as the data is published. Only ~1% of connections are missed: https://reporting.sbb.ch/punctuality?=&years=1,4,5,6,7&scrol...

~93% of trains are punctual with a VERY strict definition for punctual: within 3 minutes of the scheduled time.

If you experienced worse, you were in an unlucky minority of people.

What your link shows is that train punctuality in 2022 was 92.5 %. That is shocking bad. Back in 2018 at least 10 countries were doing better than Switzerland.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255048/punctuality-regi...

Can’t tell from that link but historically the Swiss punctuality standard is three minutes where other countries use five or more, Japan being the notable exception.

I'm not sure how Statista got their info, but most other countries define "late" as being more than 5 minutes behind schedule. In Switzeland that limit is lower with only 3 minutes not counting as late.

Here is a recent perspective.

[1] "Why Swiss trains are less punctual — and what is being done about it" - https://www.thelocal.ch/20220110/why-swiss-trains-are-less-p...

Once more a variation on how to lie with statistics... It does not matter if the overall statistics show a somewhat high value, mostly driven by predicable and frequent travels between Cantons in the mountains, where there is maybe just one track. What matters is the experience of the majority of commuters on urban centers. From [1] in 2022, the year of most recent statistics.

"The punctuality values in the last three months on some major intercity routes are below the threshold:

Zurich HB - Bern: 73.5 percent of on-time arrivals and departures

Lausanne - Geneva: 71.5 percent

Basel - Zurich: 67.5 percent

Zug - Zurich HB: 76.1 percent

Olten - Lucerne: 66.7 percent "

But you are doing the same thing. Switzerland has a high standard of 3min is late. What actually important if you make your connections. In Switerland you make your connection like 98ish% of the time.

This article picks out some of the worst lines over a very short time period. You can do that in most networks. Some German ICE lines have 23% on time.

I ride some of those city to city pairs and those numbers don't line up with my experiance over the last couple years.

If your train is not too late, the connection will wait for you. If it can't wait, they will tell you about the alternative.

My experience in Germany is that the connection does not wait, and you just end up having to find your way yourself. It's a bit weird when not used to it, and it seems to mean that you can basically take whatever train you want that you believe goes towards your goal.

> you can basically take whatever train you want that you believe goes towards your goal.

That's a big difference between Germany and Switzerland. Full fare tickets let you take any route, but reasonably priced tickets are specific to a schedule of trains. If there is a delay causing a misconnect, you have to queue at the ticket window to get it endorsed for a later specific train. And my ticket inspectors on the train seriously inspected the endorsement each time.

The Swiss don't use those super saver tickets, or at least I don't think so: they either have GA or Halbtax to start with, and apps like Fairtiq mean that they get the best price for the route(s) they take automatically, as calculated by the end of each day (this makes it possible to get switched to a daily ticket on the fly if you travel so much that it would cost you less in the end).

I know it's unfair towards tourists, but Switzerland is a very expensive country - if you need a "super-saver" ticket you'd probably be better off visiting any of the neighbouring countries anyway.

If the incoming train was first going through Italy or Germany the punctuality statistics are much much worse. I regularly book 5-8 minute overlaps and I don't remember the last time I missed a connection, but this is Zürich into the mountains mostly.

Summer 2023 was a particularly bad time for SBB. Summer in general is the worst time of the year for traffic (both car and public transport) anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com