This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Anyone traveling by train across Europe spends a surprisingly large portion of the trip not on a moving train. Today, about 25% of travel time is spent on transfers and layovers at train stations because of poorly coordinated timetables.
This is the conclusion reached by a research team led by Francesco Corman, professor of transport systems at ETH Zurich, with MSc student Matthias Benjamin Andrews García as the study's first author. Their analysis is based on train services between more than 31,000 train stations in Europe. The findings are published in the Journal of Transport Geography.
Until now, the typical way to improve train travel has been to reach faster top speeds through high-speed infrastructure, new vehicles and the development of new railway routes through links such as tunnels. These measures lead to shorter travel times between individual stations. Far less attention has been paid to how well the various train services are coordinated at the system level in the timetable.
This affects all transfers (unavoidable for many trips) encountered on the network. For the first time, this study considers actual large-scale timetable data to assess how much time travelers spend because of poorly coordinated timetables. To measure timetable coordination across Europe, the researchers developed a metric for travel time efficiency.
It compares actual travel time with a hypothetical scenario in which current transfers between train services are optimally coordinated. In this comparison scenario, no trains travel faster than current services do. It assumes that current travel times can be maintained if the timetable is reorganized and that sufficient railway infrastructure capacity is available.
The key finding is that travel time efficiency currently averages about 75% across Europe. In other words, travel times could be reduced by a quarter if timetables were perfectly synchronized. Countries with periodic and integrated timetables perform particularly well.
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