The Shinkansen system is rarely late, that is true. Part of the reason for that is that they are running on their own, isolated tracks. Downside here is that they are quite expensive. Flights between, let's say Tokyo and Osaka, are often faster and cheaper.

The trains that normal people take every day to get to work, are, depending on city and line/owner of course, partially late every single day during rush hour. They don't even show the time or kind of the next train that will come.

The commuters of course know this and just leave the house a bit earlier, so in practice it's not a huge problem.

I don't think the author's hypothesis, that complaints scale with utilisation, holds.

Germans travel fewer kilometers per year per capita by passenger rail than Japan, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, France and Korea [1]. The two topping that list–Japan and Switzerland–also have exceptional systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...

You will usually have an announcement like "Alle Anschlusszüge werden weiter erreicht werden" oder "Zug nach $ort wartet auf uns" here.

It just doesn't propagate to traffic within a federal regional (Bundesland) a lot which sucks but is somewhat understandable (the frequency there is supposedly high enough although connected journeys kinda break this).