Punctuality is an important aspect of train operations, highly valued by passengers. Both Swedish and Norwegian railways have introduced frameworks to systematically improve punctuality in their systems, inspired by an extensive literature on Total Quality Management. After about a decade with these frameworks, we can see that punctuality has risen by about 2–3 percentage points. However, this pace of improvements is slower than desired. We propose that there is a gap between what most individual improvement efforts deliver, and what can be detected by directly monitoring punctuality. This gap stifles the desired culture of constant improvements. We instead propose a methodology for how to monitor punctuality improvements, by focusing on the constituents of a train trip. Using 20 years of data from commuter trains in three metropolitan regions (Stockholm, Gothenburg & Malmö), we show the frequency of runtime and dwell time delays is directly related to punctuality. These delay frequencies are also easy to measure and target, and more easily capture the intended effects of specific improvement efforts. Our hope is that this framework and measures such as these will better enable systematic efforts to improve railway punctuality.

中文翻译：

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一种监测铁路准点改进的方法

准时是列车运营的一个重要方面，受到乘客的高度重视。受全面质量管理的广泛文献的启发，瑞典和挪威的铁路都引入了系统性地提高系统准点率的框架。在使用这些框架大约十年后，我们可以看到准时率提高了大约 2-3 个百分点。然而，这种改进的速度比预期的要慢。我们建议，大多数个人改进工作所提供的效果与通过直接监控准时性可以检测到的效果之间存在差距。这种差距扼杀了不断改进的理想文化。相反，我们提出了一种方法，通过关注火车旅行的组成部分来监控准点率的提高。我们使用来自三个大都市地区（斯德哥尔摩、哥德堡和马尔默）的通勤列车 20 年的数据，显示运行时间和停留时间延误的频率与准点率直接相关。这些延迟频率也易于测量和确定目标，并且更容易捕捉特定改进工作的预期效果。我们希望这样的框架和措施能够更好地系统地努力提高铁路准点率。