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. Use Google Transit for use public transportation between a street address in Portland and one in Eugene. (Its a Transit planner, not a Transportation planner)Īs you are an Oregonian, try a simple test. Google Transit also fails to be “integrated” in this way. The problem you have discovered is not limited to Amtrak Try booking a flight where you swap airlines en-route! 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. 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. It’s even worse with the San Francisco Bay Area, which has more stations than Seattle. 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. 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. 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. This would most likely lose some users who were not committed to taking the train and had other transportation options. Search results for query "PDX" to "Seattle, WA"Īt first I thought that there were no trips available that day. The screen below was what I got as my result. I typed in “PDX” as my origin and “Seattle, WA” as my destination and filled in the dates. Recently, I tried to plan a trip to Seattle, WA from Portland, OR. Which is why I’ve found Amtrak’s trip planner to be so frustrating. Being able to use the bus or train even if you primarily use other forms of transportation can be a freeing experience. 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.
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