Timetable Coordination Key to Faster Train Trips

Anyone travelling by train across Europe spends a surprisingly large portion of the trip not on a moving train. Today, about 25 percent of travel time is given over to long transfer times, layovers at train stations, which are consequences 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 first author of the study. Their analysis is based on train services between more than 31,000 train stations in Europe.

Until now, the typical way to improve train travel is to reach faster top speeds by high-speed infrastructure, new vehicles, and development of new railway routes by improving links such as tunnels, which all lead to shorter travel times between individual stations. Far less attention has been paid to the question of how well the various train services are coordinated at system level in the timetable. This impacts all (unavoidable, for many trips) transfers that are encountered on the network. For the first time, this latest study considers actual large-scale timetable data to assess how much time travellers spend as a result of poorly coordinated timetables.

A quarter of the travel time is wasted

To make it possible to measure timetable coordination across Europe, the researchers developed a metric for travel time efficiency. It compares the actual travel time with a hypothetical scenario in which the current transfers between train services are optimally coordinated. In this comparison scenario, no trains go faster than current service already does; it assumes that current travel times can be kept also in if the timetable is reorganized, and that enough railway infrastructure capacity is available. The key finding is that travel time efficiency currently averages about 75 percent across Europe. In other words, travel times could be reduced by a quarter if timetables would be perfectly synchronized.

Countries with periodic and integrated timetables perform particularly well. These include Switzerland and Germany. In Europe's peripheral regions, such as the Iberian Peninsula or parts of Southeast Europe, there is much greater room for improvement. There, infrequent services and poorly coordinated transfers often result in long waiting times.

New timetables, not just new routes

This research challenges the widespread assumption that infrastructure investment on high-speed lines along European corridors is the only way to making rail travel more attractive. The findings suggest that improved timetables could yield a comparable degree of time savings as many expensive infrastructure projects which take years to be operational.

In the researchers' view, both are needed in the long term: expanded infrastructure and greater coordination of timetables, which most of the time require international scope. If the infrastructure expansion projects planned up to 2050 are combined with better synchronisation of European railway services, travel times on long-distance routes could be reduced by about one-third. The study provides a new foundation for the difficult task of better coordinating timetables across national boundaries in future.