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Guess it depends on what you consider to be shit. Public transport in Belgium is incredibly widespread and affordable, and while trains are somewhat often delay

Guess it depends on what you consider to be shit. Public transport in Belgium is incredibly widespread and affordable, and while trains are somewhat often delayed (but people love to kvetch and exaggerate all the time, https://punctuality.belgiantrain.be/nl/dashboard https://punctuality.belgiantrain.be/nl/dashboard) due to years of neglect of the infrastructure, at least you don't have to pay an arm and a leg as you would for e.g. a short trip between London and Brighton. Public transport in London is pretty good, but doesn't strike me as being way better than it is in big cities in Belgium like Antwerp or Brussels.

elric 5y ago
Their way of calculating punctuality is pretty misleading. It takes into account the predicted arrival at the final destination, without taking into account where passengers actually go. Delays along the route are hidden that way, even though most passengers don't go from origin to terminus, i.e. hardly anyone travels from Liège to Ostend, but the start & end of that 2hour+ journey are what's used to compute delays. If they were to count what percentage of passengers arrived on time, things would look radically different. Adding to that: a 5 minute delay on a 2hr journey is fine, but a 5 minute delay on a 12 minute journey is awful. As for cheap .. I wouldn't exactly call trains cheap in Belgium. Especially if you factor in how uncomfortable they are, how most stations have zero accessibility options, how frequently things go terribly wrong, and how nonexistently awful their customer support is.
- stdbrouw 5y ago
  This is the kind of talk I often hear from people who never take public transport. The question then arises: do they not take public transport because it really is that awful, or do they actually have no idea whether it's truly awful because they don't take it? Or a little of both? :-) One thing you ought to know, though, if you often travel by train, is that trains in Belgium almost never make up for lost time, that's just wishful thinking on the part of the conductor and instead delays just seem to cause more delays, so arrival time at the final destination (together with delays to/from Brussels, which is where most people go) is not a perfect metric but not all that bad. Anyway, just joking around, public transport in Belgium could be better, that's for sure.

elric 5y ago

Their way of calculating punctuality is pretty misleading. It takes into account the predicted arrival at the final destination, without taking into account where passengers actually go. Delays along the route are hidden that way, even though most passengers don't go from origin to terminus, i.e. hardly anyone travels from Liège to Ostend, but the start & end of that 2hour+ journey are what's used to compute delays. If they were to count what percentage of passengers arrived on time, things would look radically different. Adding to that: a 5 minute delay on a 2hr journey is fine, but a 5 minute delay on a 12 minute journey is awful. As for cheap .. I wouldn't exactly call trains cheap in Belgium. Especially if you factor in how uncomfortable they are, how most stations have zero accessibility options, how frequently things go terribly wrong, and how nonexistently awful their customer support is.

stdbrouw 5y ago
This is the kind of talk I often hear from people who never take public transport. The question then arises: do they not take public transport because it really is that awful, or do they actually have no idea whether it's truly awful because they don't take it? Or a little of both? :-) One thing you ought to know, though, if you often travel by train, is that trains in Belgium almost never make up for lost time, that's just wishful thinking on the part of the conductor and instead delays just seem to cause more delays, so arrival time at the final destination (together with delays to/from Brussels, which is where most people go) is not a perfect metric but not all that bad. Anyway, just joking around, public transport in Belgium could be better, that's for sure.