Punctuality and Japanese railways

[bikkuri bahn]

I have been struggling due to my less than stellar reading skills trying to get through Yuko Mito's Teikoku Hassha, which details the reasons for the punctuality of Japanese trains, but a search of the internets revealed this nice summary of her theories in English.  One interesting bit is that Japanese railways were not particularly punctual until the 1920's.  A good read:

 

The System Behind Japan’s High-speed Rail Network

by Mito Yūko

If the railroad industry were likened to a living organism, the perfect analogue would be plants. Tracks are firmly rooted to the ground, with train lines covering a fixed span of territory. When neighborhoods prosper, so does the industry, with more trains running through them; when they decline, the line also falls into disuse. Train service cannot move to new locales when the number of passengers declines; it continues to live and grow with the community it serves.

 

Rootedness is a common trait of the industry in countries around the world. When the social environment changes, the industry must adapt to the changes or face extinction. Inasmuch as railroad lines cannot “migrate” to greener pastures like animals, they must develop thoroughgoing strategies for adapting to change.

 

The single most outstanding feature of rail transport in Japan is its capacity to adjust the entire system in accordance with the operating environment. The railroad industry integrates countless elemental technologies in building up a mammoth system that assigns precise roles for workers to follow and ensures high performance. Japan’s railroad industry has excelled at painstakingly and thoroughly making such adjustments since its inception.

 

The most notable fruit of such efforts is the clocklike punctuality of Japan’s trains. Shinkansen bullet trains reach their destinations within a minute of their scheduled arrival times around 95% of the time, and the figure for other lines in the Japan Railways system is around 90%.

 

Given that delays of 10 to 15 minutes are not even considered “late” in most other countries but are regarded as being “on time,” the punctuality of rail service in Japan is in a class of its own. The average delay for a Shinkansen train is around 20 seconds; for other trains operated by the Japan Railways group of companies, it is approximately 50 seconds. In both cases, the average delay is less than a minute.

 

complete article:

http://www.japanechoweb.jp/economy/jew0210