This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"
New York’s Metro-North and LIRR have 95%+ on-time rates [1]. (EDIT: On time is defined as less than 6 minutes late [2].)
[1] https://www.metro-magazine.com/10217862/metro-north-lirr-exp...
[2] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/report-9-2025.pdf
I bet, however, it's not uniformly distributed and some lines are late more than others.
Hopefully that 95% is them being honest about the current state, while they push higher.
Sure. But "with a nearly perfect on-time performance of 99.3% on Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven Lines," there isn't much room to hide problems. (LIRR is 96.3%.)
The point is we have systems that have been well built and well maintained. They just don't get coverage because they just work. (The LIRR is far from perfect, mind you. But it's apparently outperforming the DB. You have to get to some of the worst routes during peak conditions to get in the neighbourhood of DB's systemic numbers.)
I deal with late trains around two-thirds of my trips. Sometimes up to two hours of delay.
SBB CFF FFS has similar numbers, except it defines "on time" as "within 3 minutes"[1] which is of course harder to achieve.
[1] https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/responsibility-society...
CURRENT TIME: 9:45
NEXT TRAIN: 9:42
STATUS: ON TIME
In the rest of the country Amtrak blames freight companies for most delays (https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance), and frankly I am inclined to agree with them. Amtrak does not own those lines and does not have priority on them, and the freight companies don't give a shit about anyone. See for example https://www.propublica.org/article/trains-crossing-blocked-k... and the rest of ProPublica's excellent series on the industry.
Or to put it another way, it sounds like DB has a lot of problems that it could fix, but Amtrak has a lot of problems that are out of its control.
So this doesn't really have anything to do with that single train not being on time, or with differences in culture or something like that, it's about keeping the system running. If you have a system that isn't used at capacity, then it doesn't matter much if individual trains run late, the system itself will still keep on running.
On vacation this summer in europe, all tram stops had estimated arrival times. Ridiculous, 5-10 minutes out at worst, they wouldn't even need the electronic signs, just a placard that says "just skim your phone for a bit, it'll come".
I unfortunately live in "we used to have trams, most of them were scrapped in favour of bus lines, then the bus lines were scrapped because they were not profitable enough, go buy a car" Europe.
Yeah..
Grass is greener I admit.
Not true in New York City. See all the busses and all the stops. Estimated number of passengers and arrival times.
Often I could get the data through Transit, but sometimes they have their own app.
Stadtbahns use the "U" sign for U-Bahn when only part of their network is underground; I guess this is to avoid confusing riders.
Caltrain routinely has delays due to accidents involving grade crossings. Despite spending decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, they still haven't managed to fully grade separate the line. [2]
Fun fact, Canada's Turbotrain was one of the earliest examples of high speed rail in the world in the 1960s and was even faster than the Shinkansen at the time. However, it hit a truck only one hour into its debut run. This is often cited as the main reason why there's no high speed rail in Canada despite the density and proximity of Toronto and Montreal being ideal for such a line. [3]
[0] https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/delray-...
[1] https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/brightline-train-hits-ca...
And this includes multi-hour intercity train lines, double-decker trains, trains that stop inside of airports, local trains, everything. If you have just a couple lines in a single city, under a single jurisdiction, with no interdependencies and no freight on the same lines, then of course it gets a lot easier.
A bus uses a road and doesn't have a problem like that because there is far more road than the buses need.
1: https://ridetrinitymetro.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Serv...
It’s honestly sad how public transport was left to rot/fail/or sold off in North America.
And how people now go “it won’t work here! Europe is more dense! Things are too far apart” Ignoring it did and was (at least in bc) a few short decades ago
I'm happy with European rail. For instance, it is 36 hours by FlixBus from Amsterdam to Porto, but if you use high-speed rail (Eurostar, TGV, Iryo) it is only 23 hours, faster than going by car.
Distances like that, trains just don't make sense IMO.
It’s also far better for the environment, and should be cheaper if you take plane subsidies and apply them to trains.
Also your math is wrong 5 hours with 1 hour each side (generous) is 7 hours. With 2 hours each side that’s 9 hours.
Either way I would much rather take a comfortable train for 10 hours then suffer in a plane for 5.
(The reason 2000km takes so long for op is its 7+ train changes, if you made 7+ plane changes it would be very long too)
Its a three-hour flight not a five hour flight. Five hours is including the one hour on each side. And you wouldn't have two hours on the arrival side, you're not having to wait through security. Chances are on the arrival side its less than an hour. Sure, maybe customs slows you down, but I've never had customs take as long as security and the consequences of being a little slow are much less. But there are no customs flying domestically, and I'm not sure what customs are like flying within the eurozone anyways.
> Either way I would much rather take a comfortable train for 10 hours then suffer in a plane for 5.
It's not 10 hours on the train, its 23 hours on the train. And it's not 5 hours on a plane, its three hours. The person said they were taking HSR. Its a 23 hour ride taking HSR.
> The reason 2000km takes so long for op is its 7+ train changes, if you made 7+ plane changes it would be very long too
Sure, but generally speaking you don't have to when flying You often don't even need to change planes once. That's the whole point. Rail is great for certain distances, but past that there grows a lot of complexities. You're not going to take a single shot HSR trip 2,000km practically anywhere. You're going to have times where the train stops. You're probably going to have to change trains, potentially even change to a non-HSR for a leg of the trip. Meanwhile planes don't need to change 7 times to go 2,000km.
> should be cheaper
Sure, if you value two days of your vacation at nearly $0. Or two days of seeing your family while gone on a business trip at $0. Personally, two days of travel would have to be radically cheaper for me to think it worth it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm generally pro-train. I'm super excited for the prospects of the Texas bullet train. Trains can make a lot of sense to a certain distance. But why would you pick it for a 2,000km trip?
Maybe I was just unlucky but I don't plan to try them again.
There are a number of nation-wide and regional inter-city bus systems. They're just not extremely popular since car ownership is typically pretty high, fuel costs are generally low-ish, and chances are when you get to your destination you'll need a car anyways.
See companies like:
I've taken a number of flixbuses in Europe and they were decent. Most cities had some sort of bus terminal where you could sit and grab food before the trip, the bus was clean, the advertised power outlets worked, seat assignments were respected, and they'd make stops at places with clean restrooms.
I've also taken a few flixbuses in the US west and wouldn't recommend people do that. The cleanliness is poor, the on board amenities like power outlets/wifi are frequently broken (or don't exist), paid seat assignments have never been enforced, bathroom stops are disgusting, and there is a lack of order/safety on board. And the bus terminals simply don't exist - in Los Angeles you stand in an uncovered parking lot outside the central jail and there is no notification of which bus goes where. Everyone just runs (literally) up to each bus as it arrives, preventing passengers from disembarking, and asks the bus driver where it's going, and then tries to cram on immediately because that's the only way to avoid getting an undesirable seat.
Safety is a huge issue on these buses. I conduct most of my life on foot and by public transit in southern California and there's some sense of safety from knowing you could avoid/move away from people acting dangerously. But on the bus you're stuck, and I often arrive with my nerves frayed by the behavior of other passengers. They don't publish stats on this but my friends who have taken these buses also reported they also feel extremely unsafe, with one telling me they were on a trip where a stabbing occurred.
I regularly take the Amtrak from San Diego to LA to see friends and family, and during the track closure last year I tried flixbus a few times. After 4 tries, I simply stopped discretionary travel to LA for the better part of a year because it was such a bad experience.
Sounds more like an "America problem" than a Flixbus problem.
I'm a bus advocate, you can see it from another post this week. But Greyhound is not reliable if time is sensitive.
I see videos of fights breaking out on airplanes, hear about horror stories of being stuck on a plane and not allowed getting off. I take it that's what happens in the majority of flights then?
I mostly only see videos of car accidents. I guess most people get into car accidents every day. Or maybe people don't bother uploading the hundreds of hours of non-interesting dashcam clips.
There are a number of travel vloggers who do a trip exactly once and report on what happened. The same vlogger will make videos about taking ships, trains, airplanes, and long- and short-distance buses, in a variety of countries, on a variety of budgets. Among these vloggers, it is generally agreed that long-distance buses in the USA are the worst form of transit in the developed world. Their videos on other forms of travel rarely (if ever) show the kinds of unsafe experiences they have on long-distance buses in the US.
I'm also a numbers person and I've looked around to try and find stats for how dismal the safety and on-time performance of US long distance buses are for you, but none are published. I can just report that the cancellation rate is well over 10%, the on-time performance is maybe around 50%, and personally speaking the experience is frequently unsafe and miserable.
I don't mean to make this personal, but if you're in the US, consider driving to the local greyhound station/pick up and just waiting there for particular bus. It's really one of the worst experiences you can have in a city.
Some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uPDQvqoN4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QGTaGwxxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTpt4tMnDT0
> the on-time performance is maybe around 50%
I posted Greyhound's on-time statistics which was 90%.
> who do a trip exactly once
What a way to collect statistics. I just stepped outside. It wasn't raining. I guess it'll never rain.
> drawing randomly from all long-distance bus videos online, a large fraction of them have unsafe situations
Well yeah, once again, are there really going to be a lot of popular videos of "I took a five day bus ride, nothing happened, here's an hour-long video of the travel!" And are those really random videos or ones the algorithm have bubbled up to the surface? Think a video with crazy stuff happening would bubble up in the algorithm rather than an hour long video where nothing of note happens? Maybe analyzing statistics by one-off example YouTube videos made for clicks isn't the best way.
I suspect not. I suspect you don't watch actual vlogs, rather you see 1 minute long clips we all see.
Sometimes we want to watch the whole unedited experience to get a sense of what it's like, rather than for 1 minute entertainment bits. I've watched Tesla Self Drive from SF to LA over several days to see what it's like for example (it's jerky on streets I'll tell you that).
There's bias in every single thing. But the alternative is to be blind to all media, which no one is doing. I've given you the context, and you've drawn up a red herring--1 minute news clips, which I'm not talking about.
I suspect your travel vlogs don't accurately reflect everyone's experiences and shouldn't be used to judge overall reliability or on-time statistics.
https://www.firstgroupplc.com/~/media/Files/F/Firstgroup-Plc...
I could tell you about a 14-hour flight I took between Dallas and Charleston (lots of storms, lots of reroutes, crew timed out, etc.). I could have made that a 14-hour long video for you to watch. Is it indicative of the typical trip between these two cities or just a single example and potentially a massive outlier? Should you assume it normally takes 14 hours to fly that distance in the US and that's a typical experience of a flier?
Personally every time I've taken an inter-city bus its been a smooth trip and pretty much on-time, I can't think of a time I was over 15 minutes late. Every time I've been on a chartered bus it was on-time. Every time I've picked someone up at the bus terminal they were within 5 minutes. That's a little over dozen experiences over the years in total. Admittedly, a bit luckier than average looking at the actual statistics. How many vlogs have you watched? How many times have you actually taken a Greyhound or similar?
> a low injury rate
Maybe because verbal aggression isn't recorded as an injury?
Anybody who mentions it online is only trying to win an argument and literally never uses it because it’s shit. You only use it if you don't have a car.