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Comment by evo_9 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. He should look at data from Japan, along with other countries. When I was in Tokyo the trains and buses were all spread out and things ran on-time; you can literally watch the train arrive as the est. time of arrival clicked down to zero. Buses were similarly on-time and never bunched up. Not once did I see this pattern while I travelled around Japan for 15 days.

When I arrived back in Denver the first thing I noticed were 2 light-rail trains that arrived about 5 seconds apart from each other. Buses also get similar bunched up.

Denver isn't anywhere near London's density; I wonder if this is more related to the system in place and ethnocentric factors such as the pride that Japanese operators seemed to have at running everything as precisely as possible.

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My dad always causes a ~90 second delay for the Denver light rail, because the operator has to activate the wheelchair ramp for him. How do they handle that sort of thing in Tokyo?

(Also, I often see multiple light-rail trains bunched up after sporting events.)

I'd imagine that the platform on most light-rail trains is built so that a ramp is unnecessary?

There's a ramp inside the train that needs to be deployed to bridge the gap to the ramp at the platform.

Sounds like a strange design to me. On most of the train-based public transit I've seen (and even some of the "rapid" buses), the floor of the car is aligned with the floor of the boarding area, such that ramps are unnecessary.

they're aligned, but there's a small gap that needs to be bridged.

From what I found in a cursory investigation is that many stations:

A station attendant will They will ask about your destination and escort you from the ticketing area to the appropriate platform and set up the ramp (if necessary) ahead of time. When arriving at a station, there will be an attendant there with the ramp set up for you to disembark.

They also have wheelchair accessible escalators - an attendant will halt the escalator and merge several steps into one flat one, with a lip.

Perhaps they just speed the train up to bridge the time gap. That seems like the simplest solution. Do light rails run on a set speed?

That's sort of the elephant in the room, as far as I'm concerned: you don't construct schedules assuming the best possible circumstances and maximum speed.

At least for light rail, it's quite normal to have trains stop for a good few minutes in certain stations. If there are delays, I'm sure that time gets cut.

I thought the "estimated time of arrival" was based on GPS tracking of the trains and not the pre-defined schedule. At least here in Toronto, the displayed time to arrival system is tied to the actual distance of the next train from the station.

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