Poor Timetable Coordination Wastes a Quarter of European Train Travel Time, Study Finds

Anyone travelling by train across Europe spends a surprisingly large share of the trip not moving: about 25% of travel time today goes to transfers and layovers at stations because timetables are poorly coordinated, according to a study by a team led by Francesco Corman, professor of transport systems at ETH Zurich, with MSc student Matthias Benjamin Andrews García as first author. The findings, based on train services between more than 31,000 stations across Europe, are published in the Journal of Transport Geography.

Improving train travel has usually meant reaching faster top speeds through high-speed lines, new vehicles and new routes such as tunnels, which shorten travel time between individual stations. Far less attention has gone to how well different train services are coordinated at the system level in the timetable, which affects the transfers that are unavoidable on many trips. This is the first study to use actual large-scale timetable data to measure how much time travellers lose to poor coordination.

The researchers built a metric for travel time efficiency that compares actual travel time with a hypothetical scenario in which current train services are perfectly coordinated, without any trains running faster than they do today. The key finding: travel time efficiency currently averages about 75% across Europe, meaning travel times could be cut by a quarter if timetables were perfectly synchronised, using existing trains and existing infrastructure.

Countries with periodic and integrated timetables, such as Switzerland and Germany, already perform well by this measure. Europe's peripheral regions, including the Iberian Peninsula and parts of southeast Europe, have much more room for improvement, where infrequent services and poorly coordinated transfers often mean long waits.

The researchers say the results challenge the assumption that high-speed infrastructure investment is the only way to make rail travel more attractive: better timetables can yield time savings comparable to expensive infrastructure projects that take years to build. Combining the infrastructure expansion projects planned through 2050 with better synchronisation of European rail services could cut travel times on long-distance routes by about one-third, the study found.