Thanksgiving Travel Postmortem: Amtrak Sets the Bar

Many of you have been wondering how my air travel fiasco last week resolved.  Last Tuesday night, I slept for two uncomfortable hours on the cot at Midway, and awoke to the sights and sounds of early Wednesday morning travelers gawking at those of us who were living something out of The Terminal.  (I also developed the first symptoms of a cold that night, and am just now getting over the bug.)

The Southwest Airlines flight I ultimately caught to LAX was smooth; I enjoyed an empty middle seat next to me, another hour of sleep, and a view of the morning light hitting the Grand Canyon.  We arrived into LAX on-time, which is to say our 9:25 AM arrival made me 10 hours late—10 hours tardy on a trip that should have taken seven hours total.  To my knowledge, no Amtrak delay is ever that severe and rarely that unpleasant.

Indeed, fortunately, Amtrak was the highlight of my Thanksgiving weekend.  On Saturday, I took northbound Coast Starlight train 14 from LA to San Jose.  The on-board service crew was a pure delight, and the turkey special dinner in the diner was one of my most memorable Amtrak meals in recent memory.  We also arrived San Jose a very tolerable six minutes late.

Last night, I used the Amtrak Capitol Corridor to get from San Jose to Oakland Airport, to catch my return flight on ATA Airlines (OAK-MDW-DCA).  The OAK-MDW flight departed slightly late, but schedule padding ensured that I comfortably made my 35-minute connection in Midway.  The senior flight attendant on the MDW-DCA flight was the same as on my ill-fated flight the other direction last week.  He immediately recognized me and asked how the connection to LA turned out!  I gave him the bad news and he profusely apologized.

In any case, the captain announced that today is ATA’s final day of operations at Reagan National.  As the New York Times noted over the weekend, margins on domestic economy tickets are razor-thin, and “financial challenges” at ATA have apparently doomed this service.

It is probably safe to say that much larger shifts are in store for the domestic airline industry as unrealistic public expectations for low fares further the degradation of service quality and threaten the viability of certain carriers.  A more extensive passenger rail system would undoubtedly provide an attractive alternative in many markets.  But horror stories like mine—situations that pillows and peanuts could not remedy—are bound to repeat as working folks traveling cross-country to visit family for the weekend continue to put up with the weather, ground congestion, and other issues plaguing an ailing system that make air travel unreliable and even downright nasty.  A robust, well-maintained transportation system will still fail from time to time due to external factors.

There’s no doubt that the time to repair our nation’s transportation infrastructure was yesterday.  It is our job as advocates to advance the expansion of passenger rail as a high-value investment and an attractive adjunct to any Band-Aid approaches that might not necessarily save our roads and air facilities from reaching the breaking point in the long run.

—Matthew Melzer