201–210 of 240 posts
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Paying train workers what they are demanding is expensive
British train drivers are the best paid in Europe by a staggering amount. https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/12/23/train-strikes-the...
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CTA never did that; I don’t think they could if the wanted to. Metra did it, I’m 99.9% sure they stopped years ago. But yeah, there would be a person at the platform when the train arrived downtown with a piece of paper saying that the train was delayed. A late slip. Nowadays, you have real-time location tracking of the train. If it’s late, you can tell your employer what train you’re on and they could verify it. At…
>CTA never did that; I don’t think they could if the wanted to. >Metra did it, I’m 99.9% sure they stopped years ago. But yeah, there would be a person at the platform when the train arrived downtown with a piece of paper saying that the train was delayed. A late slip. Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't 100% sure about who the relevant agency was (as I mentioned, I don't live there -- although I do have family th…
I think we should also make it common practice to share grocery lists with your employer, as well as the date and time of sexual acts. This is even more justifiable than the status of the train that takes you to work.
I mean, trains are late not often enough to make any significant difference. Whereas unhealthy diet, or say, sleepless nights of lovemaking, can dramatically affect a worker's productivity almost permanently.
I expense all my work travel, and get to keep delay repay payments for myself. My number one trick to getting the payments: get the tightest connection possible. For the journey I take frequently, the train arrives into the main station at 8:52pm, my connection is at 9pm; picking up just 8 minutes of delays means I'll miss the connection. The next train is at 10pm, which triggers delay repay.
Maybe I've underestimating the amount of money we are talking about but I'd much rather be where I'm headed on time than travel for free, especially on a regular basis.
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The optimal amount of train delay is non-zero. You need high redundancy to avoid many causes - and their knock on effects - and redundancy is antithetical to efficiency.
That’s only true if your goal is to optimize for profit instead of passenger satisfaction.
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I think by and large this doesn’t play out with trains. American trains tend to be much less frequent, slower, and less comfortable than most European trains. I road a swiss train a couple years ago that was something like 5 minutes late. To me (American) it was “on time” but the conductor came on the PA and apologized. He did make a point to clarify the delay was because they’d been stuck behind an off schedule Germ…
It would be so great if the rest of the world could take inspiration from Switzerland and Japan regarding train management. Also perhaps Ukraine. I heard they had stepped up during war time to the point of being more punctual than many other European countries.
I would be glad to hear more about their success in the train management. Probably starting with one of the most important parameters - the cost of travel per kilometer per passenger (taking into account all subsidies, infrastructure and operating costs, and everything else)
>Also perhaps Ukraine. I heard they had stepped up during war time to the point of being more punctual than many other European countries.
Probably they have simply returned to the good old Soviet tradition of compiling beautiful statistics. Brought back bad statistics? Perhaps you and your male relatives will be more useful in the trenches. Complaining about train delays instead of productive work? Such active people and their male relatives are exactly what are needed to storm Russian fortifications! And voila - the statistics went through the roof.
> if the baseline chance of delay is 10%, engineering works add 25%, strikes add 35%, and bad weather adds 20%, then when all these problems happen, there's a 90% chance your train will be delayed. What if signal failures "add" 15%? Then all factors combined would mean that there's a 105% chance your train will be delayed! Adding up probabilities like this doesn't make sense. If you simplify these things as independe…
For small probabilities it works :) 1-(1-p1)(1-p2) = p1+p2-p1p2 and a similar formula holds for more terms. so neglecting terms of order p^2 gives the form in the article
But adding 10%, 20%, and 35%, is already a pretty bad start. The error rate becomes huge. (in the article example, the 10% estimate of chances of being on time is ~3.5 smaller than the actual 35% correct result).
Being wrong by half an order of magnitude, is being quite wrong :)
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I agree that it's a dire , expensive mess. But it doesn't seem like low hanging fruit at all... Anything that will improve the situation will be expensive and/or take a long time to achieve.
I mean there’s pretty low hanging fruit mentioned in the article. If rail strikes are frequent enough to feature in the formula, end the strikes by paying the workers well.
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Oh it gets so much worse. Train is now parked up just outside Manchester with zero power. Another 10mins is worth £35 at this point
Did you get there in the end?
(For the benefit of British transport police, the above is satire)
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>The trick is that when you travel on a business card your company pays, but you get the reimbursement when delayed. TBH that sounds just like fraud to me, and on discovery could (probably, IANAL) justify immediate lawful termination. It's a nice loophole though, if you don't give a f*.
My company has an enterprise arrangement with the train company. All employees have a business card. This is the correct and legitimate use of said system.
The reasoning goes that it's a compensation, not a reimbursement. It seems to depend on company policy though, and whether you're travelling on paid time or not.