If you have a month pass it frequently forgets at the end of the month, and you have to repeatedly look it up. When you look a ticket, it doesn't remember it in the app, so you have to look it up again for your return trip.
It also periodically forgets all of your tickets locally and needs to resync from the network. It doesn't matter if you were just looking at the ticket three minutes ago. This ie especially annoying if your train is underground after leaving the station, and they are collecting tickets while you have no Internet access.
Even with the delays to air travel today, Amtrak would still be slower. Amtrak is not a service you use if you need to be somewhere at a particular time.
I don't know. Last year I was trying to buy bullet train tickets for an upcoming trip to Japan, only to find that the booking website operated only during daytime work hours (Japanese, of course). Then there was me trying to buy train tickets from Mt Fuji area to Tokyo. I could buy them, but they could only be picked up in Tokyo, not Mt Fuji! That was a pretty major wtf, given Tokyo was our final destination.
If you mean the Fuji Excursion it's because the Kawaguchiko side isn't the same agency so it's not like JR has machines there. JR's intended solution is digital tickets but I think this doesn't quite work with JR Pass.
That was the one. I get the reasons sort of, but as a traveler it sure was strange that I could buy the one-way ticket, but could only retrieve it at the destination and so couldn't board. Anyways, we ended up taking a bus instead.
Not because I doubt you but Europe is pretty disparate.
Amtrak from NYC to Philadelphia cost as much as a flight to continental Europe, and the experience was abysmal, truly awful I couldn’t even get the tickets for hours and took a bus instead.
Perhaps I’m “spoiled” by UK and Swedish trains but UK is pretty terible
It depends hugely on when you book--both time in advance and time of year--as well as any sales going on. Which can vary a TON in Europe as well. I almost always take trains within Europe but they're no bargain.
Right. I'm not going to NYC for now but I saw the end-of-year sale in my inbox recently. Pricing varies a lot. (And I usually don't book Acela on my own dime absent a bargain; the transit time isn't much different from the regional.)
I've been wanting them to have an api for years with a TOS that you cannot resell tickets or make any additional fees from the sale to discourage SEO snakes from hijacking things.
A more reasonable front-end could be made without much effort and a very low monthly overhead to host since it's mostly a proxy
Require the same upsells with the insurance and credit card offer I don't care, that's not the problem I have with the site.
API only access where a frontend is currently available should be a legal requirement. For one thing, not doing so is prejudicial regarding accessibility.
I really yearn for a world where we stop making people deal with all these garbage frontends. Especially in the coming age of personal LLMs on device - anyone should be able to create their own frontend for any service and drive their own version specifically tuned to them. Make the standard frontend as simple and accessible as possible (minimal scripting - I think you could have a government agency set this as a regulatory limit in terms of KB of JavaScript) and just cut the fat and the abhorrent waste.
Clients will ship with defaults. Most people's personal tunes will not deviate much from each other at all. But people who actually care can make it as interesting as they want. Instead what we have now is a system that incentivizes people to make the default too interesting to justify their own employment. It's rare to come across a frontend these days that doesn't scream absolute garbage.
I'd like to see this across the board as part of effective anti trust enforcement. Big tech is flagrantly tying the use of their proprietary client apps (whether delivered over JS or an app store) with whatever actual backend services they offer. These need to be declared two separate markets/products, and broken up.
Ideally, this requirement would apply to all services with a public frontend, not merely to government services or whatever the proper term for the middle ground Amtrak occupies is.
But yes you are correct, this occurred to me earlier that someone might point this out. From my perspective these classifications are increasingly dubious anyway, given the glut of corporate welfare and the increasing confluence of the public and private. More of the economy should be more accurately seen as a public/private partnership across the board. I'm not sure picking out where exactly Amtrak falls in that minutia is the salient point.
The point is the government should use its higher leverage over Amtrak to enforce/test such a policy, on the theory its success and wider adoption would be a public benefit.
To actually answer your question, I would be highly surprised if the amtrack ticket booking system had much technical overlap with what led to the ground stop.
At one place I worked, the two releases that made us the most nervous went out on Friday the 13th, and Halloween (IIRC). The reasons that they made us nervous had nothing to do with the release dates. We were nervous that what we did had hidden bugs, and even after testing, we were still somewhat nervous.
Now that US AI psychoses is reaching pandemic levels, I wonder if governments outside the US will accelerate their migration plans. Too bad we can't socially distance ourselves, wash hands and wear masks.
When I get back to the office on Monday I'm going to start making steps to make sure that skill atrophy gets limited so that we don't fall into the same helpless incompetence.
Amtrak's site has always been the worst example of a national rail website
I use the app frequently and I actually love it. Pick two stations, pick a train, apple pay, done. It’s not flashy, but I appreciate the simplicity.
I use the app daily and I ~hate it.
If you have a month pass it frequently forgets at the end of the month, and you have to repeatedly look it up. When you look a ticket, it doesn't remember it in the app, so you have to look it up again for your return trip.
It also periodically forgets all of your tickets locally and needs to resync from the network. It doesn't matter if you were just looking at the ticket three minutes ago. This ie especially annoying if your train is underground after leaving the station, and they are collecting tickets while you have no Internet access.
Yeah the mobile app is excellent
Even with the delays to air travel today, Amtrak would still be slower. Amtrak is not a service you use if you need to be somewhere at a particular time.
Not true for dc to nyc
Renfe in Spain is awful
I don't know. Last year I was trying to buy bullet train tickets for an upcoming trip to Japan, only to find that the booking website operated only during daytime work hours (Japanese, of course). Then there was me trying to buy train tickets from Mt Fuji area to Tokyo. I could buy them, but they could only be picked up in Tokyo, not Mt Fuji! That was a pretty major wtf, given Tokyo was our final destination.
If you mean the Fuji Excursion it's because the Kawaguchiko side isn't the same agency so it's not like JR has machines there. JR's intended solution is digital tickets but I think this doesn't quite work with JR Pass.
That was the one. I get the reasons sort of, but as a traveler it sure was strange that I could buy the one-way ticket, but could only retrieve it at the destination and so couldn't board. Anyways, we ended up taking a bus instead.
ofuku-kippu is your friend.
Spoken like someone who has never tried to book on IRCTC.
Are you sure??? Because some of the ones I’ve used in Europe and Asia are god awful
We should compare.
Not because I doubt you but Europe is pretty disparate.
Amtrak from NYC to Philadelphia cost as much as a flight to continental Europe, and the experience was abysmal, truly awful I couldn’t even get the tickets for hours and took a bus instead.
Perhaps I’m “spoiled” by UK and Swedish trains but UK is pretty terible
It depends hugely on when you book--both time in advance and time of year--as well as any sales going on. Which can vary a TON in Europe as well. I almost always take trains within Europe but they're no bargain.
Re: when you book, for the East Coast trains time of day matters greatly.
If you book a train from NYC to Philadelphia on Dec 9, there are four trains leaving before 6am with coach tickets for $10.
NYC to Boston has similar early morning prices.
Right. I'm not going to NYC for now but I saw the end-of-year sale in my inbox recently. Pricing varies a lot. (And I usually don't book Acela on my own dime absent a bargain; the transit time isn't much different from the regional.)
We were talking about the websites, and the OP was saying it’s the “worst example”. Cost and experience weren’t being discussed.
Yes, I meant I had a bad experience with the website, as in, it didn't work at all and I had to go to a service counter.
They acted like I was committing a crime at the service desk too tbh. I’m not sure how they are in business.
Yea and in France when the only train for the day broke down I couldn’t get a refund because “you might come back to France one day”.
Sorry, as an American Amtrack’s website isn’t even in my top 5 of worst train websites.
not getting a refund is a lot different than not even getting a ticket imo.
Fair point about refunds for delays in general, its so awful I normally don’t do it. Not with trains, busses nor airlines.
I've been wanting them to have an api for years with a TOS that you cannot resell tickets or make any additional fees from the sale to discourage SEO snakes from hijacking things.
A more reasonable front-end could be made without much effort and a very low monthly overhead to host since it's mostly a proxy
Require the same upsells with the insurance and credit card offer I don't care, that's not the problem I have with the site.
No government service should require a frontend.
API only access where a frontend is currently available should be a legal requirement. For one thing, not doing so is prejudicial regarding accessibility.
I really yearn for a world where we stop making people deal with all these garbage frontends. Especially in the coming age of personal LLMs on device - anyone should be able to create their own frontend for any service and drive their own version specifically tuned to them. Make the standard frontend as simple and accessible as possible (minimal scripting - I think you could have a government agency set this as a regulatory limit in terms of KB of JavaScript) and just cut the fat and the abhorrent waste.
Clients will ship with defaults. Most people's personal tunes will not deviate much from each other at all. But people who actually care can make it as interesting as they want. Instead what we have now is a system that incentivizes people to make the default too interesting to justify their own employment. It's rare to come across a frontend these days that doesn't scream absolute garbage.
I'd like to see this across the board as part of effective anti trust enforcement. Big tech is flagrantly tying the use of their proprietary client apps (whether delivered over JS or an app store) with whatever actual backend services they offer. These need to be declared two separate markets/products, and broken up.
Amtrak isn’t a government service though
Yes fair enough but it's close enough.
Ideally, this requirement would apply to all services with a public frontend, not merely to government services or whatever the proper term for the middle ground Amtrak occupies is.
But yes you are correct, this occurred to me earlier that someone might point this out. From my perspective these classifications are increasingly dubious anyway, given the glut of corporate welfare and the increasing confluence of the public and private. More of the economy should be more accurately seen as a public/private partnership across the board. I'm not sure picking out where exactly Amtrak falls in that minutia is the salient point.
The point is the government should use its higher leverage over Amtrak to enforce/test such a policy, on the theory its success and wider adoption would be a public benefit.
Always fun to live through a “textbook example” of something; in this case it’s a cascading failure (1) in transportation infrastructure
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure
While the most likely, what’s the chance this is all some serious patch being applied in stages across a huge swath of infrastructure?
There’s a lot of people who needed to get from A to B.
Without planes, lots of them probably just tried to rush to Amtrak and they received a volume they’ve never seen in a very short order.
I doubt there is anything more complicated than that.
Which is why I started with “while most likely”
To actually answer your question, I would be highly surprised if the amtrack ticket booking system had much technical overlap with what led to the ground stop.
On a Friday (the 13th), who's brilliant idea was that.
At one place I worked, the two releases that made us the most nervous went out on Friday the 13th, and Halloween (IIRC). The reasons that they made us nervous had nothing to do with the release dates. We were nervous that what we did had hidden bugs, and even after testing, we were still somewhat nervous.
Both releases were clean. Go figure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planes,_Trains_and_Automobiles
The word of the day is: cascading.
Coming soon: car rental sites, hotel booking sites, food delivery services, taxi and ride share services.
FAA and Amtrak are managed by the federal government. None of the things that you named are.
It's not like anyone predicted the apocalypse would happen today.
As usual, Australia got lucky thanks to the fact that most prophecies neglect to specify the timezone (It's currently the afternoon of the 14th here).
Wow almost forgot about that. Hmm... naa we'll be fine!
(context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50482379)
Jensen Huang making sure he takes the country down with him?
Maybe he left-padded CUDA.
The FAA hug of death
Now that US AI psychoses is reaching pandemic levels, I wonder if governments outside the US will accelerate their migration plans. Too bad we can't socially distance ourselves, wash hands and wear masks.
When I get back to the office on Monday I'm going to start making steps to make sure that skill atrophy gets limited so that we don't fall into the same helpless incompetence.
Planes, trains… automobiles are next!!!
Mine is internal combustion.
And is not connected to the internet.
I mean I can barely get the Amtrak site to work on a good day.
Our systems are collapsing under the weight over our own vibes.