36C3 - BahnMining - Pünktlichkeit ist eine Zier - english translation
media.ccc.de3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2023
talk · general · 2020–2023 on HN
David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in an English translation, analyzes a year of scraped Deutsche Bahn data covering every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It explores delays and how punctuality is actually measured.
HN brings it up in any thread about German or European rail as a data-driven, entertaining analysis of why trains are late.
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6 comments from Hacker News
Obligatory mention of a great talk on the topic: "David Kriesel: BahnMining -- Pünktlichkeit ist eine Zier" (2019) English translation: ▶ this video Edit: Note: And that was still with better numbers than lmm posted.
There was this really great talk on the Chaos Communication Congress some time back on the punctuality of German trains. I searched for it and even found the English voice over translation [1]. [1]: ▶ this video
The was a CCC talk about why the Deutsche Bahn has so many delays: [1]. It turns out that East Germany has great on-time performance, probably because all the infrastructure is new. But overall, Germany has to invest more in upkeep of its existing infrastructure. 1. ▶ this video
Don't expect German "Pünktlichkeit" on German railways, though.[0] The Austrian and especially the Swiss railroad systems are far superior. Since the "Bahnreform" of 1994 the infrastructure progressively deteriorated from the passenger's perspective. One hard fact: about 20% of the railroad network has been dismantled since 1994 (44.600km to 33.400km [1]). Way too much. Reasons for this are a confluence of excessive bureaucracy, brutal management style, powerful industry interests (think e.g. "Autobahn"), lobbying. Today's "Deutsche Bahn" as an entity is split into eight distinct divisions [2]; DB Schenker (global logistics and freight transport company) is by far the most profitable of the bunch and single-handedly lifts the whole DB group out of the red on the regular basis, it accounts for about 50% of the total revenue.[3] [0] ▶ this video [1] link [2] link [3] link
At Chaos Computer Club a few years back, David Kriesel presented an analysis of the on-time performance of the Deutsche Bahn, based on a systematic scraping of their API.[0] One of the surprising things he explained: if a train never arrives at a station, it's not late, according to the Deutsche Bahn. 0. ▶ this video
German Rail did that: translated presentation from German: ▶ this video (with a translator that sadly breathes into the mic...)