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0 pointssnogglethorpe11y ago0 comments

It's certainly not trivial to closely stick to a schedule (e.g. 95% of trains within a minute or two of scheduled times), but it's obviously possible for an urban railway to do so, because many do, often with far more aggressive schedules and higher volumes than Caltrain has.

Of course, many American systems are operating at a pretty severe disadvantage, being hamstrung by poor equipment and infrastructure, a lack of funding, understaffing, a hostile political environment, and even pervasive cultural attitudes that dismiss railroads as being something worth investing in. I suppose given all that, it's a wonder they do as well as they do...

But still, I think it's important to never forget: it's absolutely possible to do much better.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

superuser211y ago· 3 in thread

The point is that it doesn't matter. Why should a transportation authority move heaven and earth to satisfy some moralistic concern about keeping exactly to schedules?

You don't use CTA (Chicago transit) based on schedules; you go to your stop, read the board with accurate realtime predictions, and wait for a train to show up. It doesn't matter whether the schedule has anything to do with reality, just that you don't have to wait too long.

If you'd prefer not to spend too much time on the platform, then you can check your phone, which is accessing the realtime prediction feed anyway, to figure out when you should head to the station.

No part of normal usage of CTA depends in any way on the preset schedule, so spending money to keep to the schedule would be waste. Not only is it a Hard Problem, it's one that can be worked around very easily by providing realtime train location and prediction data.

snogglethorpeOP11y ago

So far as I know (I haven't ridden it in a few years), CalTrain doesn't have frequent enough service to make schedules irrelevant. [I don't know the generally accepted figure, but I'd say anything with headways of greater than 10 minutes or so is not suitable for just-turn-up-and-go usage.]

Obviously frequent service is good, but there's a large variety of lines and sometimes very frequent service isn't warranted (or isn't possible because of funding/politics/etc).

For a line with non-frequent service, "just look at your smartphone" isn't a good solution, as (1) not everybody has a smartphone available, so it's a bad idea to make a transit service that requires one for decent service, and (2) more importantly, in many cases with less frequent lines not being able to plan can be a significant burden, especially when you need to make transfers along the way (in which case you always have to assume the worst case, and all the required uncertainty padding quickly adds up).

So for user convenience either you want frequent service, so planning isn't needed, or you want scheduling that's at least a little accurate, so planning is possible when necessary.

[There are also technical reasons for scheduling even very frequent trains in some cases, because when trains become frequent enough, the line itself can become a bottleneck, especially with complex services. For instance on many lines in Tokyo, both ordinary, express, and limited-express trains share the same tracks, with the expresses using in-station bypass tracks to overtake the non-expresses. The track network is also in many cases very non-linear, with many different lines sharing portions of tracks in some places, and different operators running onto each others' tracks. To do all this with high frequency services requires a delicate timing dance, and if you screw up the timing beyond some point, the whole thing very quickly falls apart.]

deathanatos11y ago

> you go to your stop, read the board with accurate realtime predictions, and wait for a train to show up. It doesn't matter whether the schedule has anything to do with reality, just that you don't have to wait too long.

I've never ridden CTA, but this is the attitude that I treat Boston's T subway system with. It's wonderful, and like you say, you just don't care. Go to platform, board a train. Time-to-trains are acceptably low that you can go an wait. (looking at a random T schedule, if you arrive on the platform randomly, it's ~2-5 minutes wait on average if things are on schedule.)

That's not CalTrain. Trains are not as frequent (they I transit daily from Mountain View to SF: during the morning rush from 7-9am, trains are anywhere from 7 minutes to 34 minutes apart.) Missing a train also doesn't just mean the time waiting for the next train, but also lost time due to the train itself. (For example, the 8:05 is 7 minutes behind the 7:57 in Mountain View, but 15 behind in SF.)

Exceptional delays are significant, and not that exceptional. Trains hit things, catch up to other trains and follow them at a snail's pace, break down, stop for blocked tracks, can't be boarded due to overcrowding, departed early due to being "full", or are just missing without cause.

That said, if there was good data that just told me when trains would leave and when they would arrive, that'd be nice. I don't know of such a thing, and given the article, what exists looks clunky, complicated, and incorrect.

> Why should a transportation authority move heaven and earth to satisfy some moralistic concern about keeping exactly to schedules?

Because you're wasting people's time?

gkoz11y ago

Isn't average waiting time lower with a regular schedule?

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