Comments on: Amtrak’s unfortunate trip planner

By: Amtrak’s unfortunate trip planner — TheTransitWire.com

Amtrak’s unfortunate trip planner — TheTransitWire.com — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:33:48 +0000

[...] From the Trillium Solutions blog, a post about one rider’s frustrating experience using Amtrak’s online trip planner. The bottom line — organizations have to understand the perils of a designing a “customer interface without the customer in mind.” Link to full story at the Trillium Solutions blog. [...]

By: Paul Martin Smith

Paul Martin Smith — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:05:52 +0000

I think we need to be fair to Amtrak here. It was one of the first transport agencies to offer ANY sort of on-line booking system and, knowing the way the system works, was probably given a “minimum bid tender” directive to produce a web site. Once in place, funds for improvements and updates are going to be difficult to find. I’ve never had any problems using Firefox or Chrome on the Amtrak site and it does have some pretty nice features that indicate a degree of imagination by the developers.
Let’s not get into a long debate about quasi-government agencies.

I’ve spoken to the developers at Google about G.T. and they certainly believe that their product is sufficiently open ended to allow inter-city connections to be seamlessly integrated. They are providing the technology tool and its up to interested parties, such as Amtrak(!) or Greyhound, to supply the rich data.

As a comparison, I would suggest a look at the British site:

http://www.transportdirect.info

(funded by the U.K. department of transportation)

I’m impressed by its breadth (you even get a “carbon footprint” valuation of your transport options).
But it did fail to find a direct route between my old home village and my favorite hotel in Vienna!
Still some work to be done.

By: Alek F

Alek F — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:15:48 +0000

Yup,
unfortunately Amtrak has LOTS of glitches on its website,
which I’ve encountered constantly.
Well, what can we expect
when Amtrak is ran by bureaucrats and by poor management in general!
(degraded customer service is another sad example of Amtrak’s mismanagement)
Likewise,
Amtrak website only works with Internet Explorer (I’ve tried Mozilla Firefox, but ended-up rebooting my computer… or – at best – the browser is frozen every single time!).
Hey, Amtrak! Please fix your website to work with other browsers, not just Explorer!

By: Aaron Antrim

Aaron Antrim — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:41:53 +0000

Paul: I am fascinated by the online journey planners for Europe and would like to know a lot more. Any blog posts that you could point me to?

I’d like to draw a distinction between Google Transit and the Amtrak trip planner that I think you overlook. Yes, Google Transit is not multi-modal and is not comprehensive. Even though it includes a lot of big agencies, it is still missing most small, rural, and inter-city services.

However, Google Transit finds service between geographic locations, not just train and bus stations (like the Amtrak trip planner does). On the Amtrak trip planner, if you query between two stations without service that connects them, but that are very near other stations with service between them, the Amtrak trip planner will give you the “Sorry… no service message”. Very misleading.

A lot more agencies are joining Google Transit, so it’s becoming more complete. It doesn’t do everything the European journey planners do, but it has precipitated the availability of data in the standardized Google Transit Feed Specification, which provides one of the building blocks for better (hopefully multi-modal) U.S. travel planners in the future.

Thanks for the comments!

By: Sirinya

Sirinya — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:58:29 +0000

What a great entry. I’ve had trouble using the Amtrak Trip Planner too.

By: Paul Martin Smith

Paul Martin Smith — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:58:04 +0000

Brendan,
The problem you have discovered is not limited to Amtrak; Try booking a flight where you swap airlines en-route!
Google Transit also fails to be “integrated” in this way. (Its a Transit planner, not a Transportation planner)
As you are an Oregonian, try a simple test.
Use Google Transit for use public transportation between a street address in Portland and one in Eugene.
You will get the “outside our coverage area” error even though both cities are fully vested in the dataset and as you well know, the Talgo service runs between them.
This test even fails for two adjacent cities where it would be possible to make an inter-connection.

There are much better examples of public transportation planners in Europe. For instance, if I’m planning a trip
from a small town in England to a hotel in Vienna, I get a multitude of options involving, bus, rail, air and street car. Each option even has its “carbon cost” detailed as well as connecting times and warnings about inter connections involving walking between stations. I even get suggestions to reduce costs by varying my schedule to take advantage of savings plans.

Yes, Google Transit is a great idea and its open, customer driven design is brilliant but there is still a long way to go before we have effective public transportation tools in this country.

Of course, we also need good public transportation, but that is a separate issue.