Making trains run on time

IT IS A myth that, whatever his faults, Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, made the trains run on time. He didn’t. If even a man with dictatorial powers cannot enforce a railway timetable, what hope is there in a messy democracy? In India a third of trains are held up. Seven out of ten are late during the rush hour at some of Britain’s busiest stations. Nor is the fabled reliability of Japan’s railway always what it seems, with a number of commuter lines into Tokyo experiencing hold-ups.Plamen Angelov of the University of Lancaster, in Britain, has an idea that he hopes will make train delays rarer. Often, Dr Angelov observes, the problem is not the inefficiency of operators but the behaviour of passengers—the “platform-train interface”, to use railway parlance. When trains arrive, passengers crowd around the doors waiting to board, restricting the flow of those getting off. When they are about to depart, people often hold doors open, delaying that departure. (A recent study by Japan’s Railway Bureau found that passengers attempting to board trains after their scheduled departure times accounted for almost 50% of delays.)