Comment by yorwba
5 days ago
If you take a train to work five days a week and it's "on time" (not delayed by 6 minutes or more) 85% of the time, you'll be late on at least one day most weeks. Hardly very punctual.
Personally, I think they should just abandon timetables, run trains as fast as they can, and if you need to be somewhere by a certain time, you give the planner a target reliability and it uses a probabilistic model of the entire system to tell you when to leave so you can arrive on time (0 minutes delay, or earlier) with that given probability.
true, the actual word used is less important to me than the distinction between long distance trains and regional trains, since those get conflated quite a bit in this discussion.