jis
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Why oh why does everyone take an extreme all or none position on this issue I don't understand.True, but you'll still run into seat maximization issues. There's a very clear parallel to the airlines. They can get away with allowing seat assignments because most flights run non-stop, everyone piles off, and then it becomes a new flight. But, the one airline that loves to make stops (Southwest) does festival seating. Why? Seat maximization. You buy the rights to a seat on Southwest, not a particular seat. Same principle applies on Amtrak.
All over the world a part of the total inventory is sold assigned seat often for an additional fee, and the rest is unreserved. There is nothing so special about the US that makes this unworkable. There is no seat maximization issue unless one insists on making all reserved seats assigned seats, and even then mostly it is a contrived issue. As a matter of fact one could argue that Amtrak is actually leaving money on the table that it could have in the form of an assigned seat fee that it could charge to augment its revenue stream, just like the beloved of some, Southwest does too.
i just don't get this obsession of US railfans with defending Amtrak's indefensible position.
Heck the much more heavily used Indian Railways LD trains can manage all this without a huge seat maximization issue. Almost every railways system in the world is able to handle it on trains that make far more frequent stops than any Amtrak LD train. Railroads in US 60 years back could handle it without an issue, using those quaint daisy-wheel paper slips based reservation system. Suddenly now that we have IT systems that can handle all of that a hundred times better and faster, there is an issue making it impossible to do this? Give me a frickin' break!