I have been paying extra to ride Acela because of the assigned seating. After almost a year of assigned seating many passengers still do not get it. I have, however, never had a problem when I tell someone that he/she is sitting in my seat and point to the assigned seat on his/her ticket. Conductors will usually help with this.
How do you envision this working?
Amtrak does not have the rolling stock to provide for the 5-25% of riders who might prefer a no attendant sleeper car.
It has plenty of Viewliner sleeping cars either sitting around or planned to be refurbished. Those can be used. Or let a private company attach its own cars to an Amtrak train.
Like an airline does it. You’d be put on a standby list and when the train is about to arrive, you’d be notified (in the app) if you can board it or or.
At $0.62 per mile (what the IRS claims is the average operating cost of driving), I think that for one passenger, even tickets on the NEC at current prices are cheaper than driving (not to mention that most of the highways serving the NEC are toll roads.) Once you add a passenger, the calculus changes (also the per-passenger mile emissions and fuel economy get a lot better, too). One thing that mitigated that to some degree that they used to have was "Family fares." Dad paid full price, Mom paid half price, and the kids went at quarter price. Such a thing could take up a lot of seats that could be sold at full price, but it might be a way to fill empty trains.
I think the simplest option would be to put the work on the passenger, by just allowing a ticket to be changed to a train departing within, say, 30 or 60 minutes at the original fare paid for all ticket classes. That would free up seats on the originally booked train without having to deal with the call-and-response of standby.
That is not how reservation system data is transferred from one database to another.
I have seen it done from an old legacy system to a new one at a large airline. Basically once the scripts are set up, it is fairly automatic, both the transfer and post transfer data validation. With the tagged data tools available today for transformation and migration, one does not even have to write one off tools. Just need to set up the data descriptions for the tool to handle most of it.Driving from Point A to Point B might cost 1/2 that of a train ticket in terms of gas expenditures, but driving has a lot of other built-in costs: tolls, parking and maintenance. For anyone taking a regional train to Chicago, for example, the cost of parking alone would make a train ticket automatically cheaper.
That is not how conversions between old and new systems are done in any industry. Scripts and data transformation utilities are used if conversions must be done. Another technique is "sell-over" where you continue to use the old system while any new business is done on the new and you just run the old system out. Both approaches have pros and cons. But manually re-entering an entire system's worth of data is seldom, if ever, done.
One weakness of how Amtrak is currently structured is that regional service outside the NEC is dependent on state support. Indiana and Ohio have tended to be anti rail whereas Michigan is supportive, Therefore we have good service to Detroit and poor service to Indianapolis and Cleveland.
I am really of two minds about the 750 mile rule introduced by the PRIIA Act of 2008. On one hand, it allows states and local entities opportunities to provide services which the public demands and gives those entities a reasonable amount of clout, more than they had under the old 403(b) rules. It has some "put up or shut up" aspects I like. As a Washington resident, I'd rather have WSDOT have the controlling say in our service rather than Amtrak's vastly competent management.
Expanding service? Heck, they took the money and could not even keep the existing fleet inspected.
Has all (or any) of the money from the Infrastructure Bill actually found its way into Amtrak's bank accounts?
Nope. Many people like to cite this in complaints when it comes to the current operating circumstances of Amtrak LD routes but the truth is none of the money has anything remotely to do with operations. The money is for major capital projects, stations, new equipment, major infrastructure, and service expansion - not anything which will show up overnight - stations probably being the first you might see some action on. Day to day ops, equipment servicing, and routine capital projects such as periodic equipment overhauls come out of the normal year to year appropriation.
