Commuters and travellers living on the other side of the Øresund in Sweden are becoming increasingly frustrated by Sweden-to-Denmark trains that pass by Copenhagen Airport despite being scheduled to stop there.
The trains heading from Denmark to Sweden mandatorily stop there due to the ID control situation, but trains travelling in the other direction have skipped scheduled hundreds of stops in 2016, much to the chagrin of passengers going to work or catching a flight at the airport.
“We hear from travellers and our employees that the trains are now skipping us far more than before,” Kasper Hyllested, the head of communications at Copenhagen Airport, said according to TV2 News.
“We have 23,000 employees and many of them live across the Øresund. They can no longer trust the train will stop. And it’s very unfortunate for our passengers. Now they have to factor in the possibility that the train will skip the station when planning their journey.”
READ MORE: More traffic across Øresund despite ID controls
ID control blamed
According to the Transport Ministry, the trains skipped the airport 79 times in 2015, and a staggering 417 times so far in 2016 – 2.6 percent of all planned train arrivals at the airport.
The national rail operators DSB and Banedanmark made a decision to skip the airport if a train is more than six minutes delayed in order to make up time and get back on schedule. The ID control established late last year has been blamed for the increased train delays.
“We do it this way so most passengers have the least amount of bother as possible,” said Tony Bispeskov, the head of information at DSB.
“We have evaluated that this is accomplished by skipping the airport.”