Amtrak’s unfortunate trip planner
Hi, Brendan here. I’m Trillium’s data engineer and I love working on this side of transit, the side that figures out new ways to make using public transit a convenient joy. Being able to use the bus or train even if you primarily use other forms of transportation can be a freeing experience. Which is why I’ve found Amtrak’s trip planner to be so frustrating.
Recently, I tried to plan a trip to Seattle, WA from Portland, OR. I typed in “PDX” as my origin and “Seattle, WA” as my destination and filled in the dates. The screen below was what I got as my result.
At first I thought that there were no trips available that day. This would most likely lose some users who were not committed to taking the train and had other transportation options. After clicking around a bit more and searching through the Amtrak national station list, I realized that there are two stations in the Seattle area and the one that returns when a customer searches for “Seattle, WA” is not served by the Starlight or Cascades routes, two of the most popular in the area. After choosing the other Seattle station, the trip returned fine, but Amtrak just added multiple customer-losing steps between a potential train rider and their ticket.
It seems like a major oversight, and it is, but it is not the only time that this has happened with the Amtrak trip planner. It’s even worse with the San Francisco Bay Area, which has more stations than Seattle. It seems like common sense to show a customer all the possible trips for their query area, as nearly all trip planners, from airlines to Google Maps, do. Amtrak doesn’t do that, though. What Amtrak ends up doing is providing a great example of the problems an organization creates and the revenue it loses when they design a customer interface without the customer in mind.
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.
What a great entry. I’ve had trouble using the Amtrak Trip Planner too.
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!
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!
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.
Not to encourage national stereotypes, but the Germans are very organized. 🙂 Our best experience with trip planning sites is the DB web site http://www.bahn.de I’m a programmer myself, and when we compared the DB site to Amtrak or the NYC area sites (in which, of course, NY and NJ services are totally disconnected despite sharing major terminals and half of the NJ services being focused on NYC as a destination), I was *embarrassed*. If the US wants people to leave their cars at home, we have to make it easier. (Of course, sidewalks and things would help too, but that’s another story.)