I've been wanting them to have an api for years with a TOS that you cannot resell tickets or make any additional fees from the sale to discourage SEO snakes from hijacking things.
A more reasonable front-end could be made without much effort and a very low monthly overhead to host since it's mostly a proxy
Require the same upsells with the insurance and credit card offer I don't care, that's not the problem I have with the site.
API only access where a frontend is currently available should be a legal requirement. For one thing, not doing so is prejudicial regarding accessibility.
I really yearn for a world where we stop making people deal with all these garbage frontends. Especially in the coming age of personal LLMs on device - anyone should be able to create their own frontend for any service and drive their own version specifically tuned to them. Make the standard frontend as simple and accessible as possible (minimal scripting - I think you could have a government agency set this as a regulatory limit in terms of KB of JavaScript) and just cut the fat and the abhorrent waste.
Clients will ship with defaults. Most people's personal tunes will not deviate much from each other at all. But people who actually care can make it as interesting as they want. Instead what we have now is a system that incentivizes people to make the default too interesting to justify their own employment. It's rare to come across a frontend these days that doesn't scream absolute garbage.
I'd like to see this across the board as part of effective anti trust enforcement. Big tech is flagrantly tying the use of their proprietary client apps (whether delivered over JS or an app store) with whatever actual backend services they offer. These need to be declared two separate markets/products, and broken up.
Youtube the webapp/mobileapp versus Youtube the hosting service. Facebook webapp/mobileapp versus Facebook the blogging service. Xitter the webapp/mobileapp versus Xitter the messaging service.
All of these services could have a competitive market of clients - imagine terminal clients, lightweight web clients, whole messages simply going to your email, choose your own feed/recommendation algorithms, etc - but for the anticompetitive tying and associated legal bullying when someone does succeed at making a competitor. The attacks against yt-dl, newpipe, nitter, etc should all be prosecuted as restraint of trade.
Ideally, this requirement would apply to all services with a public frontend, not merely to government services or whatever the proper term for the middle ground Amtrak occupies is.
But yes you are correct, this occurred to me earlier that someone might point this out. From my perspective these classifications are increasingly dubious anyway, given the glut of corporate welfare and the increasing confluence of the public and private. More of the economy should be more accurately seen as a public/private partnership across the board. I'm not sure picking out where exactly Amtrak falls in that minutia is the salient point.
The point is the government should use its higher leverage over Amtrak to enforce/test such a policy, on the theory its success and wider adoption would be a public benefit.
Yeah all fair points. I feel with all my issues with Amtrak and other rail where the government should intervene the website and any API or something is fairly low on my list but I agree
You can't just wrap an API in a T0S and expect people to behave. The lowest rung of morality is 'do not break the law' and a lot of people just ignore it.
To actually answer your question, I would be highly surprised if the amtrack ticket booking system had much technical overlap with what led to the ground stop.
At one place I worked, the two releases that made us the most nervous went out on Friday the 13th, and Halloween (IIRC). The reasons that they made us nervous had nothing to do with the release dates. We were nervous that what we did had hidden bugs, and even after testing, we were still somewhat nervous.
If you have a month pass it frequently forgets at the end of the month, and you have to repeatedly look it up. When you look a ticket, it doesn't remember it in the app, so you have to look it up again for your return trip.
It also periodically forgets all of your tickets locally and needs to resync from the network. It doesn't matter if you were just looking at the ticket three minutes ago. This ie especially annoying if your train is underground after leaving the station, and they are collecting tickets while you have no Internet access.
I have attempted several times to book a train through the Renfe website. At some point I had to fill in a passport number and the entire website just froze the moment I started typing. Disabling Javascript to make it stop spinning my CPU didn't work, different browsers didn't work, having family members try it didn't work.
They also have massive data consistency issues. Things like stations missing because they were under construction the last time anyone looked at the database.
Even with the delays to air travel today, Amtrak would still be slower. Amtrak is not a service you use if you need to be somewhere at a particular time.
Having grown up on the East coast, and now living on the West Coast: LA to SF Amtrak is so bad compared to DC to NY. Granted it's at least partly apples-to-oranges as it's 100 miles longer and those extra 100 miles are very sparsely populated compared to the Northeast Megalopolis.
DC to NY is maybe the only good piece of passenger rail in the US. The NEC from NYC to Boston is rarely worth it, unless you really need to pop out in NYC at Moynihan specifically
I don't know. Last year I was trying to buy bullet train tickets for an upcoming trip to Japan, only to find that the booking website operated only during daytime work hours (Japanese, of course). Then there was me trying to buy train tickets from Mt Fuji area to Tokyo. I could buy them, but they could only be picked up in Tokyo, not Mt Fuji! That was a pretty major wtf, given Tokyo was our final destination.
If you mean the Fuji Excursion it's because the Kawaguchiko side isn't the same agency so it's not like JR has machines there. JR's intended solution is digital tickets but I think this doesn't quite work with JR Pass.
In other countries, even those with competing private companies, there are either electronic tickets or you can collect the tickets from any company's machine (e.g. in the UK).
There are electronic tickets and I just said so. It's just that it doesn't work with the all-you-can-ride plan and that's a significant part of user friction.
That was the one. I get the reasons sort of, but as a traveler it sure was strange that I could buy the one-way ticket, but could only retrieve it at the destination and so couldn't board. Anyways, we ended up taking a bus instead.
Yeah, unfortunately this is one of the most common JR Pass traps. If it makes you feel better, I think bus (without traffic jams) is actually superior to Fuji Excursion, in terms of time and comfort. It's a bit of a stuttering train ride.
At least this tracks with the overall quality of the rail service they provide, providing a foreshadowing of the quality of the service you're likely to receive.
Not because I doubt you but Europe is pretty disparate.
Amtrak from NYC to Philadelphia cost as much as a flight to continental Europe, and the experience was abysmal, truly awful I couldn’t even get the tickets for hours and took a bus instead.
Perhaps I’m “spoiled” by UK and Swedish trains but UK is pretty terible
It depends hugely on when you book--both time in advance and time of year--as well as any sales going on. Which can vary a TON in Europe as well. I almost always take trains within Europe but they're no bargain.
Right. I'm not going to NYC for now but I saw the end-of-year sale in my inbox recently. Pricing varies a lot. (And I usually don't book Acela on my own dime absent a bargain; the transit time isn't much different from the regional.)
A lot of travel generalizations assume you're going more or less going downtown to downtown. There are some limited suburban stations for both NYC and Boston but, generally speaking, a lot of train transportation advantages over air go away if you're not traveling more or less downtown to downtown and become liabilities.
In my case, there's an out-of the way but otherwise convenient south suburban station outside of Boston and I'm basically always going to Manhattan so I train unless I'm just changing planes in Newark.
> Fair point about refunds for delays in general, its so awful I normally don’t do it
That's one thing in which DB - the German rail company - excels: their refund process is easy and often quite smooth. It is unfortunate that this is probably because they have had so much practice running it given than around 70% of their long-distance services are delayed but still, it works and I tend to get my 25% or 50% refund for 1+ and 2+ hour delays within a few weeks, sometimes days.
The year is 2019. I wanted to book a ticket on GWR. Couldn't, site didn't work with iOS. Figured I'd buy a ticket at the station. Couldn't, no staff. Figured I'd use the TVM. Couldn't, most were out of service. After I managed to buy a ticket staff mysteriously came out of hiding.
The trip itself was grand until the train (Class 800) broke down and staff started blaming passengers.
The refund process was quite smooth as soon as I replied to the initial denial and pointed out that yes being stranded for an hour qualified for a full refund under their stated policies.
Amtrak's been more reliable for me and I've never had problems booking a ticket. Never had problems with them while they were running Caltrain either. I get the joke but I think Amtrak does quite well with the constraints they're required to operate under. The UK doesn't really have that excuse.
Also amtrak booking system experiences major issues on every other day. Also amtrak trains experience major issues never showing up, not notifying people of where they are, and not giving estimates of when they will arrive.
You know, I try not to be conspiracy theorist, but coincidences pique my interest. This seems like the kind of thing a cyber warfare attack, from let's say Iran, might try to shutdown. Probably not if they aren't claiming any credit and the issues were fixed relatively fast. But it is an interesting thought experiment.
I think it's best to apply Occam's razor in situations like these, and there are far more plausible explanations... like for example planes suddenly stop working, driving a lot of traffic to the train booking site as people check if there are alternative routes to their destination. The train site isn't built for such a sudden surge in traffic causing issues.
Possible, but has this occurred during other ground stops?
No, because in 2001 you think Amtrak was running? (No, Amtrak suspended service until at least the evening hours of 9/11.) And the other stop was so short as to probably be a non-issue.
Now that US AI psychoses is reaching pandemic levels, I wonder if governments outside the US will accelerate their migration plans. Too bad we can't socially distance ourselves, wash hands and wear masks.
When I get back to the office on Monday I'm going to start making steps to make sure that skill atrophy gets limited so that we don't fall into the same helpless incompetence.
I've been wanting them to have an api for years with a TOS that you cannot resell tickets or make any additional fees from the sale to discourage SEO snakes from hijacking things.
A more reasonable front-end could be made without much effort and a very low monthly overhead to host since it's mostly a proxy
Require the same upsells with the insurance and credit card offer I don't care, that's not the problem I have with the site.
No government service should require a frontend.
API only access where a frontend is currently available should be a legal requirement. For one thing, not doing so is prejudicial regarding accessibility.
I really yearn for a world where we stop making people deal with all these garbage frontends. Especially in the coming age of personal LLMs on device - anyone should be able to create their own frontend for any service and drive their own version specifically tuned to them. Make the standard frontend as simple and accessible as possible (minimal scripting - I think you could have a government agency set this as a regulatory limit in terms of KB of JavaScript) and just cut the fat and the abhorrent waste.
Clients will ship with defaults. Most people's personal tunes will not deviate much from each other at all. But people who actually care can make it as interesting as they want. Instead what we have now is a system that incentivizes people to make the default too interesting to justify their own employment. It's rare to come across a frontend these days that doesn't scream absolute garbage.
I'd like to see this across the board as part of effective anti trust enforcement. Big tech is flagrantly tying the use of their proprietary client apps (whether delivered over JS or an app store) with whatever actual backend services they offer. These need to be declared two separate markets/products, and broken up.
what's an example of this?
Facebook, X, Google, TikTok
Youtube the webapp/mobileapp versus Youtube the hosting service. Facebook webapp/mobileapp versus Facebook the blogging service. Xitter the webapp/mobileapp versus Xitter the messaging service.
All of these services could have a competitive market of clients - imagine terminal clients, lightweight web clients, whole messages simply going to your email, choose your own feed/recommendation algorithms, etc - but for the anticompetitive tying and associated legal bullying when someone does succeed at making a competitor. The attacks against yt-dl, newpipe, nitter, etc should all be prosecuted as restraint of trade.
Amtrak isn’t a government service though
Yes fair enough but it's close enough.
Ideally, this requirement would apply to all services with a public frontend, not merely to government services or whatever the proper term for the middle ground Amtrak occupies is.
But yes you are correct, this occurred to me earlier that someone might point this out. From my perspective these classifications are increasingly dubious anyway, given the glut of corporate welfare and the increasing confluence of the public and private. More of the economy should be more accurately seen as a public/private partnership across the board. I'm not sure picking out where exactly Amtrak falls in that minutia is the salient point.
The point is the government should use its higher leverage over Amtrak to enforce/test such a policy, on the theory its success and wider adoption would be a public benefit.
Yeah all fair points. I feel with all my issues with Amtrak and other rail where the government should intervene the website and any API or something is fairly low on my list but I agree
Lol T0S. If we have laws, how come we still have crime? It's just not detectable or enforceable in this day and age. Agents even have browser use now.
Wait, what is your suggestion? No laws anymore?
You can't just wrap an API in a T0S and expect people to behave. The lowest rung of morality is 'do not break the law' and a lot of people just ignore it.
Always fun to live through a “textbook example” of something; in this case it’s a cascading failure (1) in transportation infrastructure
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure
While the most likely, what’s the chance this is all some serious patch being applied in stages across a huge swath of infrastructure?
There’s a lot of people who needed to get from A to B.
Without planes, lots of them probably just tried to rush to Amtrak and they received a volume they’ve never seen in a very short order.
I doubt there is anything more complicated than that.
Which is why I started with “while most likely”
To actually answer your question, I would be highly surprised if the amtrack ticket booking system had much technical overlap with what led to the ground stop.
On a Friday (the 13th), who's brilliant idea was that.
At one place I worked, the two releases that made us the most nervous went out on Friday the 13th, and Halloween (IIRC). The reasons that they made us nervous had nothing to do with the release dates. We were nervous that what we did had hidden bugs, and even after testing, we were still somewhat nervous.
Both releases were clean. Go figure.
Amtrak's site has always been the worst example of a national rail website
I use the app frequently and I actually love it. Pick two stations, pick a train, apple pay, done. It’s not flashy, but I appreciate the simplicity.
I use the app daily and I ~hate it.
If you have a month pass it frequently forgets at the end of the month, and you have to repeatedly look it up. When you look a ticket, it doesn't remember it in the app, so you have to look it up again for your return trip.
It also periodically forgets all of your tickets locally and needs to resync from the network. It doesn't matter if you were just looking at the ticket three minutes ago. This ie especially annoying if your train is underground after leaving the station, and they are collecting tickets while you have no Internet access.
Yeah the mobile app is excellent
Renfe in Spain is awful
Renfe works quite well for me - simple, easy. Could use better train status.
Maybe you were running into the vague messaging around 'those dates aren't for sale yet'?
I have attempted several times to book a train through the Renfe website. At some point I had to fill in a passport number and the entire website just froze the moment I started typing. Disabling Javascript to make it stop spinning my CPU didn't work, different browsers didn't work, having family members try it didn't work.
They also have massive data consistency issues. Things like stations missing because they were under construction the last time anyone looked at the database.
Their new frontend seems to function alright.
The app hasnt started for me in months. It just crashes
Even with the delays to air travel today, Amtrak would still be slower. Amtrak is not a service you use if you need to be somewhere at a particular time.
I think it’s a very bifurcated service
- the majority of routes are luxury/holiday roofs, with an emphasis on multi-day trips
- but, the majority of passengers take commuter routes such as NYC/DC, or OAK/SAC
Not true for dc to nyc
Having grown up on the East coast, and now living on the West Coast: LA to SF Amtrak is so bad compared to DC to NY. Granted it's at least partly apples-to-oranges as it's 100 miles longer and those extra 100 miles are very sparsely populated compared to the Northeast Megalopolis.
DC to NY is maybe the only good piece of passenger rail in the US. The NEC from NYC to Boston is rarely worth it, unless you really need to pop out in NYC at Moynihan specifically
I don't know. Last year I was trying to buy bullet train tickets for an upcoming trip to Japan, only to find that the booking website operated only during daytime work hours (Japanese, of course). Then there was me trying to buy train tickets from Mt Fuji area to Tokyo. I could buy them, but they could only be picked up in Tokyo, not Mt Fuji! That was a pretty major wtf, given Tokyo was our final destination.
If you mean the Fuji Excursion it's because the Kawaguchiko side isn't the same agency so it's not like JR has machines there. JR's intended solution is digital tickets but I think this doesn't quite work with JR Pass.
That's an explanation, but it's not a reason.
In other countries, even those with competing private companies, there are either electronic tickets or you can collect the tickets from any company's machine (e.g. in the UK).
There are electronic tickets and I just said so. It's just that it doesn't work with the all-you-can-ride plan and that's a significant part of user friction.
That was the one. I get the reasons sort of, but as a traveler it sure was strange that I could buy the one-way ticket, but could only retrieve it at the destination and so couldn't board. Anyways, we ended up taking a bus instead.
Yeah, unfortunately this is one of the most common JR Pass traps. If it makes you feel better, I think bus (without traffic jams) is actually superior to Fuji Excursion, in terms of time and comfort. It's a bit of a stuttering train ride.
ofuku-kippu is your friend.
At least this tracks with the overall quality of the rail service they provide, providing a foreshadowing of the quality of the service you're likely to receive.
Spoken like someone who has never tried to book on IRCTC.
Are you sure??? Because some of the ones I’ve used in Europe and Asia are god awful
We should compare.
Not because I doubt you but Europe is pretty disparate.
Amtrak from NYC to Philadelphia cost as much as a flight to continental Europe, and the experience was abysmal, truly awful I couldn’t even get the tickets for hours and took a bus instead.
Perhaps I’m “spoiled” by UK and Swedish trains but UK is pretty terible
It depends hugely on when you book--both time in advance and time of year--as well as any sales going on. Which can vary a TON in Europe as well. I almost always take trains within Europe but they're no bargain.
Re: when you book, for the East Coast trains time of day matters greatly.
If you book a train from NYC to Philadelphia on Dec 9, there are four trains leaving before 6am with coach tickets for $10.
NYC to Boston has similar early morning prices.
Right. I'm not going to NYC for now but I saw the end-of-year sale in my inbox recently. Pricing varies a lot. (And I usually don't book Acela on my own dime absent a bargain; the transit time isn't much different from the regional.)
Great if you're in Manhattan. Less great if you're not.
A lot of travel generalizations assume you're going more or less going downtown to downtown. There are some limited suburban stations for both NYC and Boston but, generally speaking, a lot of train transportation advantages over air go away if you're not traveling more or less downtown to downtown and become liabilities.
In my case, there's an out-of the way but otherwise convenient south suburban station outside of Boston and I'm basically always going to Manhattan so I train unless I'm just changing planes in Newark.
We were talking about the websites, and the OP was saying it’s the “worst example”. Cost and experience weren’t being discussed.
Yes, I meant I had a bad experience with the website, as in, it didn't work at all and I had to go to a service counter.
They acted like I was committing a crime at the service desk too tbh. I’m not sure how they are in business.
Yea and in France when the only train for the day broke down I couldn’t get a refund because “you might come back to France one day”.
Sorry, as an American Amtrack’s website isn’t even in my top 5 of worst train websites.
not getting a refund is a lot different than not even getting a ticket imo.
Fair point about refunds for delays in general, its so awful I normally don’t do it. Not with trains, busses nor airlines.
> Fair point about refunds for delays in general, its so awful I normally don’t do it
That's one thing in which DB - the German rail company - excels: their refund process is easy and often quite smooth. It is unfortunate that this is probably because they have had so much practice running it given than around 70% of their long-distance services are delayed but still, it works and I tend to get my 25% or 50% refund for 1+ and 2+ hour delays within a few weeks, sometimes days.
Spoiled by UK rail? lol
The year is 2019. I wanted to book a ticket on GWR. Couldn't, site didn't work with iOS. Figured I'd buy a ticket at the station. Couldn't, no staff. Figured I'd use the TVM. Couldn't, most were out of service. After I managed to buy a ticket staff mysteriously came out of hiding.
The trip itself was grand until the train (Class 800) broke down and staff started blaming passengers.
The refund process was quite smooth as soon as I replied to the initial denial and pointed out that yes being stranded for an hour qualified for a full refund under their stated policies.
yeah. thats the joke.
UK train service is abysmal, but Amtrak is worse.
Amtrak's been more reliable for me and I've never had problems booking a ticket. Never had problems with them while they were running Caltrain either. I get the joke but I think Amtrak does quite well with the constraints they're required to operate under. The UK doesn't really have that excuse.
It was really great 10 years ago. They had to put in a huge effort to make it as shit as it is today.
while the website was completely broken, the mobile app worked fine
Also amtrak booking system experiences major issues on every other day. Also amtrak trains experience major issues never showing up, not notifying people of where they are, and not giving estimates of when they will arrive.
Yea, I was about to say the same as a frequent traveler on the Northeast corridor. This is just a normal day on Amtrak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planes,_Trains_and_Automobiles
You know, I try not to be conspiracy theorist, but coincidences pique my interest. This seems like the kind of thing a cyber warfare attack, from let's say Iran, might try to shutdown. Probably not if they aren't claiming any credit and the issues were fixed relatively fast. But it is an interesting thought experiment.
I think it's best to apply Occam's razor in situations like these, and there are far more plausible explanations... like for example planes suddenly stop working, driving a lot of traffic to the train booking site as people check if there are alternative routes to their destination. The train site isn't built for such a sudden surge in traffic causing issues.
Possible, but has this occurred during other ground stops? I can't remember it happening.
Possible, but has this occurred during other ground stops?
No, because in 2001 you think Amtrak was running? (No, Amtrak suspended service until at least the evening hours of 9/11.) And the other stop was so short as to probably be a non-issue.
The word of the day is: cascading.
Coming soon: car rental sites, hotel booking sites, food delivery services, taxi and ride share services.
FAA and Amtrak are managed by the federal government. None of the things that you named are.
Indeed, but they don't have to be for cascading failures to occur.
It's not like anyone predicted the apocalypse would happen today.
As usual, Australia got lucky thanks to the fact that most prophecies neglect to specify the timezone (It's currently the afternoon of the 14th here).
Wow almost forgot about that. Hmm... naa we'll be fine!
(context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50482379)
Jensen Huang making sure he takes the country down with him?
Maybe he left-padded CUDA.
The FAA hug of death
Now that US AI psychoses is reaching pandemic levels, I wonder if governments outside the US will accelerate their migration plans. Too bad we can't socially distance ourselves, wash hands and wear masks.
When I get back to the office on Monday I'm going to start making steps to make sure that skill atrophy gets limited so that we don't fall into the same helpless incompetence.
At least in the EU, we already are. The US government, and therefore reliance on US tech, is a threat to our society.
Planes, trains… automobiles are next!!!
Mine is internal combustion.
And is not connected to the internet.
It's clear now. All these systems are glued together using Microsoft Outlook.
I mean I can barely get the Amtrak site to work on a good day.
Our systems are collapsing under the weight over our own vibes.