My memory from a few months of commuting on LIRR is that on-time is within ten minutes of schedule.

CURRENT TIME: 9:45

NEXT TRAIN: 9:42

STATUS: ON TIME

In your example a train arriving at 9:45 scheduled to arrive at 9:42 would still be on-time in Switzerland.

The correct comparison in this case is probably Amtrak, which has much lower on time rates.

In practice it does feel like basically every single Amtrak is delayed after just a few stops, so I would be shocked if the situation is worse in Germany. However to put some numbers on it, here are Amtrak's own stats: https://www.bts.gov/content/amtrak-time-performance-trends-a.... In the flagship northeast corridor (that's Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - DC) the "on-time" percentage is around 80%, where on-time is within 20 minutes.

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.

i mean the end result for customers is the same no matter whose fault it is, which just makes it not a dependable mode of transport for riders.

Agreed, I just think it's worth mentioning because a lot of the discussion in this thread is about how much Deutsche Bahn sucks, and while Amtrak also sucks, it doesn't suck quite as much as experience would lead you to believe. Much of the blame is on America as a whole, not specifically Amtrak.

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.

That seems... poor? A one in twenty trains late stat will basically mean every person will have to deal with a late train roughly every week?

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.

> I bet, however, it's not uniformly distributed and some lines are late more than others

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.)

That is a lot better than the 62% on-time statistic for Deutsche Bahn inter-city travel.

I deal with late trains around two-thirds of my trips. Sometimes up to two hours of delay.

Isn't the LIRR more of a commuter rail than intercity?

If true it would beat the 92.5% statistic for Swiss trains that was mentioned in the article.

As JumpCrisscross asked the definition of on-time is important. Most Euro countries define "on time" as "within 5 minutes" with something like 90%+ of their train being on time.

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...

BART's on-time definition is "within 5 minutes of scheduled arrival at final station". I recall in NYC's Metro that trains would frequently "go express" and start skipping stops at arbitrary moments. Do these systems do this as well and have that definition? I think I now understand why they do this stuff: they're trying to juice metrics because skipping stations speeds up the train a lot.