Regional rail authority celebrates bullet train journey times while data shows average passenger spends longer reaching the departure point than riding the train itself
Asia’s High-Speed Rail Is Faster Than Every Alternative Except Getting to the Station on Time
TOKYO — The Asia-Pacific High-Speed Rail Coordination Council released its annual performance report Monday confirming that the region’s bullet train network had achieved average journey time reductions of 73 percent compared to conventional rail on equivalent routes, 61 percent compared to car travel, and 44 percent compared to domestic air travel when airport dwell time is included. The report also contained, in an appendix that the council confirmed had “not been the primary focus of the communications strategy,” a supplementary study finding that the average passenger on a high-speed rail journey spends 34 percent more time travelling to the high-speed rail station than they spend on the high-speed rail itself, a ratio that the council described as “a first and last mile consideration that falls outside the council’s primary mandate but which we document comprehensively.”
“The train is fast,” said Dr. Nakamura Toshi, the council’s Director of Network Performance, presenting findings at a briefing where a large graphic behind him showed a shinkansen in motion and a smaller graphic in the bottom corner showed a taxi queue. “On the Tokaido Shinkansen corridor, the 515-kilometre journey takes approximately two hours and 20 minutes at top speed, compared to four hours by conventional rail and approximately five to six hours by car depending on conditions. These are remarkable numbers and they are the numbers we are here to discuss today.” He paused. “The appendix addresses a different set of numbers. I will take questions on the appendix after we have completed the discussion of the remarkable numbers.”
What the Appendix Found
The supplementary first-and-last-mile study tracked 4,200 high-speed rail journeys end-to-end, from the moment the passenger left their origin point to the moment they arrived at their final destination, including all transit legs. The median end-to-end journey time was 4.1 hours. The median in-train time was 1.8 hours. The remaining 2.3 hours — 56 percent of total journey time — consisted of travel to the origin station, station dwell time including ticketing, security, platform waiting, and the specific category the study labeled “confirmation anxiety dwell,” defined as time spent at the station earlier than necessary because bullet train punctuality statistics have produced a passenger culture in which missing the train is experienced as a personal moral failing rather than a logistical inconvenience.
The study found that confirmation anxiety dwell averaged 23 minutes per journey, meaning the average high-speed rail passenger arrives at the station 23 minutes earlier than necessary beyond their own stated buffer time, producing a total average station arrival of 41 minutes before departure. The study noted that the trains are, in fact, on time to the degree that this anxiety is “statistically unwarranted” and that a passenger arriving 18 minutes before departure would, by the network’s own punctuality data, make their train in 99.7 percent of cases. Dr. Nakamura confirmed this was accurate and said he had personally arrived 38 minutes early for his shinkansen to this briefing, “because I wrote the punctuality data and I still cannot make myself arrive later.”
The Station Access Problem
The travel-to-station leg, averaging 47 minutes across the surveyed journeys, is the component over which the rail authority has the least control and the most consistently optimistic assumptions in its promotional materials. High-speed rail time savings are typically calculated city-centre to city-centre, a measurement that the council’s promotional materials use and that researchers studying real journey behaviour have described as “accurately representing the train portion of the journey and optimistically representing the other portions.” City-centre calculations assume a level of transit connectivity between origin and station that the study found was achieved by 34 percent of surveyed passengers on their departure end and 41 percent on their arrival end, with the remainder relying on taxis, ride-hailing, or what one respondent’s journey log described as “an optimistic assessment of my walking pace that proved incorrect.”
The Asian Development Bank’s analysis of regional urban transit connectivity notes that high-speed rail stations built outside city centres — a common outcome in markets where central land costs prohibited station siting — produce the largest gaps between promotional journey times and experienced journey times, as the transfer from station to actual destination adds a distance leg that can exceed the train journey itself in elapsed time. Japan’s high-speed network, with stations primarily in or adjacent to existing city centres and served by comprehensive metro and bus connections, achieves the lowest gap between promotional and experienced journey time in the council’s data. Markets with newer high-speed networks, where stations were located on available land rather than at existing transit nodes, show the highest gap.
What Passengers Actually Think
The study’s passenger satisfaction component found that high-speed rail users were, by consistent margin, the most satisfied transport users in the surveyed markets: 87 percent described their train journey as positive, compared to 61 percent for air travel and 44 percent for car travel. The primary satisfaction drivers were punctuality, comfort, and what respondents called “the feeling of forward motion without stress,” a description that several transport psychology researchers contacted by the institute said was “capturing something real about the cognitive experience of train travel that is genuinely distinct from other modes and worth taking seriously as a feature rather than a marketing claim.”
Satisfaction with the end-to-end journey, including all access legs, was lower at 71 percent. The primary dissatisfaction drivers were station access cost, station dwell time, and what the study’s open-ended question category surfaced as “the taxi queue at the destination station at 6 PM on a Friday, which is a known problem that has been a known problem for the full duration of my use of this service,” a response received in 47 variants from respondents in seven countries and which Dr. Nakamura’s team classified as “consistent feedback that has been noted and is being noted again now.” He confirmed the council was “engaged with destination city transit authorities” on the access question and that progress was “ongoing,” a word he used with the measured optimism of someone who has been saying it for several years.
