Real time map of trains in Japan
demap.info
demap.info
It's not useful at all, but it's a cute visualization and because trains in Japan run very nearly on schedule during normal operating hours, it will be mostly accurate the vast majority of the time.
edit : In the "About this site" link on the upper right, it explains that :
① The site uses the scheduled operating information and displays the location the trains are running on the map at the current time.
② The contents, URL, etc., can change at any time or can be made no longer publicly available.
③ & ④ The site adminstrator takes no responsibility, etc. You are responsible for your own actions.
In the other information section, the author specifies that it's for Japan only and that the icons used are representative for those lines.
It's "real-time" enough in Japan because trains in Japan are almost always on time.
Train was 8 minutes late this morning and 3 lines were stopped. Probably due to the Typhoon yesterday causing scheduling problems but even on normal days Japanese trains are not the paragons of time-keeping the west seem to make them out to be
(Although they ARE miles better than anything I have seen in the UK for instance.)
[EDIT] Note: Previous poster downgraded the conviction of his statement after this comment was posted.
I don't know the exact numbers they use for their statistics (I think it used to be 1 minute).
If a train is delayed by 10 minutes you can ask for a ticket to take to work to show your boss that being late was not your fault.
Don't get me wrong, the punctuality is much better than most European countries I have lived in and quite a lot of the time the are perfectly on time, but the west has raised the Japanese public transport system to near mythical status.
In August 2012, 99.1% of all stops happened within fifteen minutes of the scheduled time, 94.2% happened within five minutes. Looking only at long-distance trains, 75.8% of all stops where reached within five minutes of the scheduled time and 90.5% of all stops were reached within fifteen minutes of the scheduled time.
You might be using a train connection that – for whatever reason (construction work, etc.) – is consistently late. Sucks for you, doesn’t mean train in Germany are in general late. Most are on time.
Every 10th train was late for more than >15min.
Yes, Regios may be better. That doesn't help when, for example, you need to catch a plane in a different city.
Local trains are more prone to delays, for example the Yamanote line in Tokyo being the most notorious due to ahem, being the preferred line used by Tokyoites to say bye-bye to this world.
For local city train lines a delay of more than 5 minutes will result in the driver profusely apologizing on and on, and the line to start issuing "certificates" that people can get to show their employers blaming the lateness on the train line.
Leaving 6 minutes (let alone 11) later than the schedule is definitely considered late. If you're changing lines, which in practice most people have to do when commuting in Tokyo, a 5 minute delay can result in an even bigger total delay (e.g. if the next train you take is an express one, and it comes every 15min).
Delays longer than that are usually due to bodily accidents which is an euphemism for "someone just jumped in the tracks", and typhoons and other natural accidents. The former is more common.
What I found more amazing when I fist came is that buses also come on time! Although of course short delays are more common than with trains, they're pretty much on schedule. The flip side is that they run very slowly and stop every other block. When I used to commute by bike I often kept up with buses for long stretches.
For trains like JR that run longer distances and less frequently, delays of 15-20 minutes due to accidents or weather can happen. This seems to happen once every few months or so.
Obviously right after a typhoon is a bad time to measure anything, but in normal operation, Japanese trains are extremely punctual, to a degree that's downright astonishing to anyone used to trains in most other countries. Arriving more than a minute late is unusual (less than that is hard to judge because the timetables don't include seconds).
The only real exceptions are situations where it's almost impossible to do better—cleaning up after a suicide (and here they're still many times faster than in the U.S., for instance), or operating in inclement weather so severe that attempting normal operation would be dangerous.
These exceptions do happen often enough that anybody who lives in Japan will be inconvenienced occasionally (with suicides being the main offender), but 99% of the time, you can set your watch by train arrivals.
More to the point, there seems little they could do to make punctuality much better, unless they can figure out how to cheer up the population to the point of discouraging suicides (and of course they are actually working on this issue by moving to platform doors on some lines, not to mention more wacky methods like the blue lights underneath the ends of platforms).
If something is so good that there's little practical room for any improvement, doesn't that make it a pretty good candidate for being called "a paragon"?
Based on our calculations it should be feasible to prevent death in at least a few percent of cases.
Given that the biggest draw for train suicides is its near 100% success rate that would probably quickly reduce train suicides by a very significant factor.
I still think it would be a good development on the whole though and hope somebody somewhere will build this...
The edge of the platform at the newer stations is walled off from the track by glass. The platform doors line up with the train's, and open/close at the same time. So there's no access to the track at any point, hence no opportunity for "person under train".
Usually in Tokyo, they use chest-height barriers/doors for above-ground lines, e.g. currently the Meguro-line has these, and in the future, the Yamanote-line will. This doesn't make suicides impossible, but makes them more difficult to a degree which will certainly discourage many people (you can't just fling yourself off the platform at the last moment). [Some subways, e.g. the Fukutoshin-line, use these as well.]
A more problematic issue is stations which handle many disparate types of trains on the same platforms, which makes it much more difficult to achieve the consistent door positioning you need for platform doors.
Most Tokyo stations also have high enough ridership that such capital improvements are a lot easier to swallow than they would be for "concrete slab in the countryside" stations.
Luckily, it's the sort of thing they can do incrementally in the places where it makes the most sense; no need to do every line and every station immediately. I imagine they'll probably continue to do it slowly, just as they're slowly adding elevators and other accessibility improvements to even minor stations.
It's not so much of a problem because there is a high frequency of trains anyway.
Close the dialog box that opens, it's a search for trains or stations on the map.
Some relevant public transportation data sources for Helsinki: http://www.hri.fi/en/data/hsl-reittiopas-api/
For some reason it's ridiculously hard to find as it's not linked to from the pages you usually use to find transportation.
Yesterday's typhoon really messed things up!
I'd really love to know where the data is coming from.
I played[1] with a similar idea a few months ago creating a simple visualization just for fun that is more like a timelapse of the "veins of tokyo" and was curious about the distribution of trains during the day. In my case, I just scraped the tokyo metro site's timetables, but it's quite a bit of work to fit the data (identify the trains with rapid/semi-rapid trains that skip stations, etc) - it's still not easy to know when a train would be waiting at a station, the best I could have done is guess from the average time between stations, which also does vary throughout the day. Eventually only a few lines made it in.
Magic bus is run off of actual real-time data, though, unlike this example.
http://byenspuls.dsb.dk/byens_puls/ByensPuls.html
The colour of the marker reflect its punctuality, thus yellow means 5-10 minutes late etc.
http://uvm.blirpit.com/ (No buses will be active for the next ~6 hours)
I've never found the maps data viz particularly helpful.
The train disappears after some time..