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Japanese trains are scheduled to within 0.19 seconds

submitted by SFOGuy

1 decade 1 month ago

This is sort of disorienting for an American. This Discovery documentary shows Japanese commuter trains being human-driven to within 19 hundredths of second precision at a transit stop---as if they were musical instruments in a symphony. Nothing I've ever used as mass transit can remotely claim that level of repeatable timing precision.

Japanese transit is apparently so precisely scheduled that an entire genre of detective fiction apparently exists in which the reliability of the train schedules establishes alibis, guilt, and the opportunity for murder most foul...

From Gawker; a Discovery Channel documentary

(Edit: thanks to Radx for pointing out that Discovery screwed up claiming 19 microseconds precision...edited for math accuracy...)