The front page lead of today’s Scottish Daily Mail:
As alert readers of this site will know, the Mail has a particular fondness for presenting statistics bereft of any context so that people have no idea how big or small they really are. So is 1,600 passengers a week receiving compensation for delays a lot or a little? Let’s find out.
These are the very latest stats from the Office of Rail and Road:
They tell us that ScotRail passengers made just shy of 24 million journeys in the past three months. That’s 2 million a week. So 1,600 is 0.08% of passengers suffering delays serious enough to warrant compensation (ie more than 30 minutes).
Or put another way, 1 out of every 1,250 passengers suffers such a delay each week. If you take a ScotRail train, there’s a 99.92% chance you WON’T be delayed for half an hour or more, a performance the Mail describes as “dismal”.
(And bear in mind that if a SINGLE train is delayed for that much time, everyone on it will be entitled to compensation, so 1,600 individuals probably represents a maximum of a couple of dozen trains out of the 14,000 or so ScotRail runs every week.)
Of course, there’s nothing people like more than complaining about public transport, so there’s very little mileage in providing some perspective on figures. If you’re on a late train you don’t care whose fault it was or how many things can go wrong to disrupt railway services – from mechanical failures to extreme weather to some poor sod throwing themselves on the tracks – you just want to rage, quite understandably, that you didn’t get to your destination on time.
But given that making people angry about train delays is pushing at an open door anyway, there’s even less excuse for tenth-rate journalists hiding the truth about the scale of the problem.
