It turns out, science has an answer.
It was 7:11 a.m. last Friday when Japan’s national railway embarrassment took its “inexcusable” course, causing “great inconvenience,” as officials later acknowledged. A full 25 seconds before its scheduled departure time, at 7:12 a.m., a train left the station after its conductor was unable to spot anyone on the platform — essentially the Japanese railway version of someone going rogue.
And this isn’t even the first time: In November, a Tsukuba Express conductor triggered a similar apology after he departed 20 seconds early, raising social media laughter and eyebrows around the world.
Anyone who has ever dealt with trains in the United States or Europe might wish they had some more of Japan’s so-called problems. But why is it that Japanese trains are so much more punctual than ours?
It turns out, science has an answer.
Low U. S. infrastructure spending on its railway network — that has at times resulted in horrifying accidents — is certainly part of it. But European countries with far higher dedication to their own national railway networks have similarly struggled to implement the Japanese lessons at home.
The most prominent example of this is the Netherlands, which has been in touch with Japanese authorities for years to try and learn its lessons on punctuality and performance. Within Europe, the Netherlands has some of the most reliable train services, as a visualization of publicly available data comparing Amsterdam with other E. U. capitals show.
This visualization shows 28 European cities and the distances Europeans can travel within 22 hours by train. Passengers moving around the Netherlands and neighboring countries will get much farther within a shorter time than Eastern European travelers.
(Peter Kerpedjiev/Swiss Public Transport Agency. Graphic by Lazaro Gamio/The Washington Post)
And yet, the Dutch railway operators won’t be able to match their Japanese counterparts anytime soon — or perhaps ever.
