Amtrak Website Problems

[Oldsmoboi]

If you can do the job better, then why don't you join them and do it?

Because I like to eat.

Come again?

I couldn't get paid what I get paid now.

 

[Trogdor]

So then what are you complaining about? That someone who makes less money than you won't do something for your convenience?

 

[Oldsmoboi]

So then what are you complaining about? That someone who makes less money than you won't do something for your convenience?

Isn't one of the points of this website to put together ideas that might...ya know... help Amtrak run better? I realize that it's unlikely that Amtrak would listen, but I see suggestions for schedule improvements, equipment improvements, route changes, etc, thrown around on here.

What's wrong with suggesting a website improvement that would help Amtrak win more customers instead of just saying "you can't get there from here"?

Why am I getting crap, and told to go do it myself, for suggesting a service improvement on Amtrak?

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Don't take it personally Oldmoboi. The Amtrak crowd is full of people who have slowly lost their ability to see past the solutions of the 1970's. Sometimes justifiably, sometimes not so much.

My personal take is that Arrow has become a catch-all term that glosses over many potential solutions. Arrow may be so old that it doesn't have a clean division between the front and back ends, but that doesn't mean Amtrak couldn't have built a better interface between Arrow and the website that took into account more of the options actually available in real service without having to replace Arrow itself. Also, I rarely disagree with Trog but even if Arrow needs to be spoon fed every possible connection why not just have a routine that builds those connections automatically and feeds them to Arrow in whatever format it can use? There appear to be several possible solutions that cannot be fully answered with "Arrow can't handle it" or the like. Native functionality only covers changes to the core application, not to changes in interfaces or front-end solutions that the customers actually see.