Network Rail has released punctuality figures revealing exactly how many of Britain’s trains have arrived at their stations on time in the last 10 years.
Just under 70 per cent of trains pulled up within a minute of their scheduled arrival time in 2011/12 – an improvement on the 46.9 per cent that turned up on time 10 years ago.
Network Rail believes that by making ‘right-time’ data available to the public it is fulfilling its promise to improve transparency within the company and the industry.
The latest figures are the most detailed of any released by the transport industry in the UK or Europe.
The research is also more stringent than the UK’s standard punctuality measure, the public performance measure (PPM), which considers trains to be on time if they arrive within five minutes for a short-distance service and within 10 minutes for a long distance.
Robin Gisby, Network Rail’s managing director, network operations, said: “We are committed to improving punctuality as far as possible but as the numbers of passengers and trains continues to increase, it becomes ever more difficult to do.
“We will be open and honest with the public about our performance and the capacity constraints we’re working under, identifying the investment needed to tackle these constraints and continue to grow and develop the railway into a service of which the British people can be proud.”
Anthony Smith, Passenger Focus chief executive, said: “Publishing ‘right-time’ information is an important and welcome move by the rail industry. Passengers have always been suspicious of punctuality statistics that allow trains to be up to five or 10 minutes late and still count as on time.
“We welcome the commitment to go further in the future by publishing train by train information as well. Passenger Focus looks forward to working with the rail industry to find out how passengers would like this information presented.”
I think that both the “right time” data and the public performance measure figures need to be published.
If you just publish the right time data once a train is going to be more than one minute late then the TOC’s maybe tempted to allow that train to be delayed further to allow other trains to arrive within the 1 minute time slot.
However it is also good to know that a lot of the trains that arrive on time under the public performance measure are not just arriving just under 5 minutes after their scheduled time.