From the Scottish Daily Mail today:
As readers will have come to expect, the article is entirely free of any figures by which readers could gauge whether 1000 was a high number or not. So as usual, we’ll have to do it for them.
ScotRail runs close to 760,000 trains a year:
So if 1000 are cancelled, that’s 0.13%. If you make a return train journey every single day of your life, you’ll suffer slightly less than one cancellation every year to either your outward leg or the return one.
Which will doubtless be a pain, and might make you a bit late, and you’ll probably be a touch hacked off about it, quite reasonably. But compared to the number of times you’d be held up in traffic jams or suffer a breakdown if you went by car or bus instead, it’s not exactly a national scandal. Which is why the Daily Mail doesn’t want you to know that 99.87% of scheduled trains do in fact run.
When there’s an obviously pertinent fact missing, readers, there’s always a reason.
