Amtrak partners with Google

[Devil's Advocate]

Classic response - totally incompetent. And I agree with your explanation.

Let us not forget Amtrak did revamp the entire website, but instead of fixing basic functionality they built a site for shilling credit cards and monkey points.

 

[Literalman]

The change from Daylight Saving to Standard Time takes place at 3 am (3 becomes 2). So the departure and arrival times for that train leaving New York at 12:20 am would be correct; the train would arrive in Philly before the time change. But the computer seems to be subtracting an hour from the running time even before the time change, giving the trip time of 25 min. And for only $10. I know what I'll be doing on Nov. 3: riding Amtrak from New York to Philly and looking at SpeedView on my phone. ;-)

 

[SubwayNut]

GTFS Fare is under development. Current V2 does not support dynamic fares and is not suitable for Amtrak. It is currently designed for representing transit fares and is used by several agencies.

In any case as you correctly point out, for dynamic fare like used by Amtrak the only truly useful fare is the one provided in a specific offer from the CRS as I indirectly alluded to earlier. All that can be provided statically is a range info and that currently cannot be represented in the GTFS Fare documents.

Correct, as someone who maintains GTFS fares professionally for two transit agencies GTFS only has the ability to display a single fare for a trip (their is a way to program different fare zones, between different areas or stations), so if Amtrak wanted to i guess they could program the highest bucket fare for each segment but I think that would turn passengers away by seeing sky high prices.

 

[Steve4031]

IMHO, the issue is that the bones of Amtrak's technology infrastructure are more obsolete than what airlines use. One example is that the system needs to be reprogrammed city pair by city pair for each potential system-wide city pair when a change is made to the schedules, such as with the Floridian. This led to the inability for passengers to book Alexandria to points west of Washington, D.C. Another example is the number of steps agents need to use to accommodate a passenger asking for a different room in a sleeping car. It takes an experienced agent to prevent the price from increasing.