AutoTrain Lowest Priced Fare for May 3rd

Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum

Help Support Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Status
Not open for further replies.
Joined
Nov 24, 2009
Messages
3,621
Location
Hillsborough, NJ
My uncle who is quite elderly decided to take the AutoTrain to Florida on May 3rd. He is a cripple, so he called to book the accessible bedroom with an agent by phone. He booked the May 3rd trip for him, his girlfriend, the accesible bedroom, car transport etc etc for a total of only $417 (one way).

This fare is lower than any fare that we have received in our trips on the AutoTrain so I am wondering why the price was so attractive. I can only guess that they give the crippled a break as they are not as fortunate as normal people are.
 
No, that's about right for low bucket on everything with a roomette. And by everything I mean the room, the rail fare, and the car fare.
 
One-way coach fares range from $93 per person to $228. Roomettes and bedrooms are also available, at a cost of $219 to $1,024 per traveler.

One-way fares for vehicles range from $152 to $304 for standard automobiles; up to $339 for oversized cars; and up to $225 for motorcycles.

Other discounts may apply.
 
Very interesting. I look online to book and the best price I can get is $464. So, yes, there is about a $47 savings that he is getting which is pretty good. Were there any other discounts that applied? AAA would have brought it down to $446 and Veterans Advantage would have brought it down to $437. Other discounds could have applied as well.
 
A bit of history - when Congress adopted the Americans With Disabilities Act, the idea was to remove as many artificial barriers as possible to the disabled (not crippled please)

this means making accomodations equally available and priced to the "Mobility Impaired".

In coaches this was easy, but sleeper was trickier. Placing a bedroom at the end of the Superliner solved the major problem, but what about an equally lower priced roomette? The solution was to label the space as Roomette priced for a qualified Mobility Impaired passenger.

Additionally, zny qualified disabled passenger can get a 15% discount which cannot be combined with any other.

The room charge and the discount is your answer.-
 
Just an FYI - The terms crippled and not like normal people are highly offensive. Those of us in the field of serving people with special needs - in my cause young children with autism - have a duty to let people know just how hurtful comments like that can be. I have worked with older children with autism who do browse and are members of internet forums.

I am sure you meant no offense and I mean no offense to you. Having taught 8th grade, I can tell you the term normal people is a relative term anyway.
 
Just an FYI - The terms crippled and not like normal people are highly offensive. Those of us in the field of serving people with special needs - in my cause young children with autism - have a duty to let people know just how hurtful comments like that can be. I have worked with older children with autism who do browse and are members of internet forums.
I am sure you meant no offense and I mean no offense to you. Having taught 8th grade, I can tell you the term normal people is a relative term anyway.
Excuse me, I don't know who you are talking about, but there is a difference in my mind between having a disability or impediment, and being crippled. And in general, that has to do with the spirit of the person in question. I have met people with very similar situations some of which I'd call disabled and some of which I'd call crippled.

I have been having, over the past year, increasingly hard times getting myself up the stairs because of problems in my knee. When its bad, I pull myself up stairs using the bannister if needed. I have a disability, but I am not going to let myself be crippled.

The person who looses a leg and determines to themselves that they are going to go ahead with their lives, going to do whatever they can, and to hell with the missing leg, they have a disability. But they are not crippled. But... the person who sits there at home, feeling sorry for themselves, resigning to themselves that they just have to accept that they can't do anything because they lost a leg- they are crippled. And I don't feel bad that they are, because they choose to be.

I'm not saying that having a disability can avoid reducing what you can do simply by deciding that. It can't. A long time ago, I set out to prove to myself that a doctor saying I could never walk or run was, in fact, an idiot. I proved that to myself by running the New York Marathon. I didn't win, nor come close, but by God, I finished. It took two years training and striving and over working myself. But I did it anyway. Since then, my problems have gotten worse. I couldn't do that again if I did all I could.

I accept that. That's ok. Likewise, problems with my flexibility resulting from the same source means I can't bend over easily anymore with irritating regularity. That's ok, too. I have my girlfriend to help, and I have a pair of grabbers when she isn't around.

Those people who are what I'd define as crippled? I hope I bloody well do offend them. I hope I bloody well do hurt them. I hope I bloody well instill them full of great rage and pain. Maybe, just maybe, it will inspire them to stop sitting there convinced of their own patheticity, get off their arse, and give life a shot, if just to spite me.

As for them not being like normal people... Well, a normal person is someone who categorically fits into the normal curve within a distance of three standard deviations. Abnormal people are, generally speaking, crazy. Disabled people make up a considerable percentage of our population, certainly more than the 0.2% that fall out of that range of "normal".

Now, that they are not like most people? Well... that's just being honest. They simply aren't like most people. Most people are lucky. They aren't burdened going through life with serious additional burdens. Like your students autism, or my CP, psychosis, vision problems, and on and on. God decided to gift upon me many, uh, disadvantages. He placed what I consider to be a particularly efficient thought processing center in my head and then screwed everything else up to make up for it. I think I'm a better person for it.

I'm not like other people. For better or worse, I probably qualify quite sincerely as abnormal. But that's ok. I can take it. I can take most things.

I can take most insults, too. I can take that bloody fool Neil from GB insulting me left, right, and center. It runs like water off my back. Because along with everything else, I had to grow up living with insults, emotional abuse, and a good dose of physical abuse. Fortunately, I was happy to respond in kind.

But what I can't take is people who try to treat physically disabled people in a coddled manner, simply by getting people around them to stop referring to the fact that they are, uh, physically disabled. Or mentally disabled. Or both. If I went around pretending that I'm perfectly average, boy would I be in for a surprise. Disabled people have to accept their disability, in their mind, in their heart, and in their soul. Then they have to develop the will to work twice as hard as everyone else to overcome it.

Now, I am not saying that making fun of such people is right. Malicious insults are never right. But on the opposite side, neither is mollycoddling.
 
I don't think I am coddling anyone. I work my butt off teaching skills and teaching my kiddos to have as much independence as possible. I will sit there for 10 minutes waiting as my kiddo tries to learn to put on a shirt. Why didn't I do it for her? Because 1) She needs to learn how and 2) She kept trying and wasn't frustrated. I use verbal prompts and physical assistance as little as possible. I help and redirect only as a last resort and fading the prompting at the first opportunity. This is what I do. I help them learn the skills and I encourage (and often wait patiently) while they use the new skill, both life skills and in the case of autism, behavioral and communicative skills. Will my kiddos be rocket scientists? I have no idea how far they can go but I know this I will continue to help and encourage them to push their limits. Just as I do my own kids.

On the other side, I have seen just how people with special needs can be treated. Parents keeping their kids away, people walking away in stores and stares. In the cases you describe, the term crippled could be changed to the term lazy or unmotivated (if you want to be politically correct). I am passionate about changing the views about people who have special needs (physical or mental). In any case, I think the OP was not using cripple in the same way you are describing. I feel passionately about my chosen field (see bacb.com, if you are interested) and the OP's post leaped out at me.

BTW, I don't know who Neil from GB is but now I am curious........
 
Last edited by a moderator:
As for them not being like normal people... Well, a normal person is someone who categorically fits into the normal curve within a distance of three standard deviations. Abnormal people are, generally speaking, crazy. Disabled people make up a considerable percentage of our population, certainly more than the 0.2% that fall out of that range of "normal".
Absolutely. I've seen statistics showing that as high as 1 child in 7 in Pennsylvania has some sort of special needs during their K-12 education. They run the gamut from mild autism to severe intellectual disabilities, from dyslexia to blindness, from mild palsy to paralysis, and everything in between and many, many things in completely different from these. That's over 14% of children -- about 70 times the population who are statistically "outside the range of normal". That's not to say that some disabilities aren't statistically abnormal. Full blindness in school-age children, for instance: 55 million K-12 children nationwide, and 93,600 are fully blind, which works out to under 0.2%. That's a disability which is "outside the range of normal". But many specific disabilities are far more prevalent than blindness, and certainly taken as a whole, the set of all people with disabilities is a sizable percentage of the population!

Moreover, look at the number of children with extremely mild impairments that can easily be corrected by, say, eyeglasses. At a guess, I would say that by age 30 over 50% of Americans use some sort of vision correction in their daily lives! Are we "not normal"? Well, by one (very wrong) definition, yes -- by virtue of requiring some sort of special need or assistance to function "normally". By another (defining "normal" in the weakest possible sense as "majority", still quite useless) definition, we are the normal people, and those with perfect vision are the minority! Really, "normal" and "abnormal" are not the right way to conceptualize disabilities.

GML, I totally agree with your idea that being a "cripple" is mental, not physical. Personally, I wouldn't use it as an insult, but I see and agree with your distinction.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top