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It's getting worse year by year. In 2018, 71% of trains arrive on time. In 2025, it became 58% (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Cannot confirm from the DB reports which put it at about 90% punctuality overall.

But this got me to look up the UK statistics - when I was growing up it was always a stereotype that UK trains sucked and German trains were great. Today, the three minute punctuality of UK trains is 85%, and the 15 minute punctuality is 98%. From that we could subtract cancellations, which are at around 3-4%.

DB breaks it out by regional and long-distance trains though (long-distance is much worse, less than 70% on these reports)

https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passenger-rail-performance/

https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2025/de/konzern-zwischenlagebericht-ungeprueft/qualitaet-und-sicherheit/puenktlichkeit/

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (3 children)

    Their metric for punctuality isn't realistic. If your train is late by just a couple minutes you could already be missing your connecting trains, or suffer so much stress your day is ruined before it can properly begin.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    A couple of minutes delay almost never causes a missed connection in the UK, because connection times that the route planning service uses are more generous than that. You'd have to be quite unlucky: probably a combination of a connection from one end of the station to another and a mobility issue. Connection times are built around this scenario, but I don't think they build in slack for it.

    I get travel anxiety but have never had my day "ruined" by a couple of minutes delay. It sounds like you might mean that the metric isn't useful for the very narrow scenario of someone who will get crippling anxiety from that, which is fair enough, but that doesn't make it "unrealistic".

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)
    1. Trains aren't late if they don't arrive according to their metric.
    2. I constantly had connecting trains where I only had a couple mins of downtime. Yes it might be quite specific but for some routes it happens 100% of the time a train is late.
    3. Congrats on not getting anxious I guess?
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