Beyond Punctuality: Appropriate Measures for Unreliability in Rail Passenger Transport

The Dutch Railways are held accountable by the Ministry of Transport for the so-called ¿punctuality¿ of trains, measured at thirty-five important rail interchange points in the Netherlands. A train is considered to be punctual if it arrives within three minutes of delay. It is questionable whether such a process-oriented approach of reliability corresponds very well to the customer-oriented ambitions of the Dutch Railways. The punctuality indicator does not account for the size of the delay, or the travel time variation. Furthermore, unreliability on departure is ignored. This paper addresses these issues by identifying and comparing six different indicators and specifications. Based on a correlation analysis two clusters of indicators could be identified. Those that place specific weight to extreme delays and those that do not. Results from a series of regression and correlation analyses indicate that the two indicators in the latter cluster, i.e. the punctuality indicator as used by Dutch Railways and an alternative indicator based on the average size of the delay, are most closely related to the customer experience of travel time unreliability, in particular when an arrival-based specification of unreliability is used. For the other four indicators, which do place specific weight on extreme delays, a departure-based specification leads to better results.

BRONS Martijn;  RIETVELD Piet; 

2011-11-28

Springer-Verlag

JRC57557

978-3-642-21191-1,   

http://www.springerlink.com/content/h7185137w075pp68/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC57557,   

10.1007/978-3-642-21192-8,