UX Critic: rail travel
Ai took its second team business trip by train this week and came away completely satisfied with the experience.
We took the Acela from New York to Washington, D.C., a strikingly fast ride (2:40) compared with driving (4:15) and even Acela’s own New York-Boston line (12 miles shorter yet an hour longer). Our entire trip was downright pleasant.
What makes the Acela so great?
- Convenience. Train stations in the northeast are located downtown with ample taxi and subway access. (Compare with air travel: no hour-long $40 cab rides out of town.)
- Hassle. Or, rather, the lack of it: no security checks, no traffic, no boarding by zone. Just a queue to get onto the train, and the odd requirement that we sign our tickets for the conductor.
- Comfort. The Acela is roomy: tall ceilings, wide aisles, lots of places to stand and stretch. The snack car is a pleasant walk and is staffed by inviting attendants. We grabbed four-seat work areas with fold-out tables, which allowed us to collaborate, and hang out, as a group. A beverage cart brought us sodas and Entenmann’s cookies (!). The Acela’s seats are on par with most airlines, but with better legroom.
- Access. For three hours, we had respectable connections to the rest of the world via Verizon and AT&T cell phones. Acelas don’t have wifi yet, but we tethered a laptop to an bluetooth EVDO connection and were able to email and share files comfortably.
- Time. Going to the airport for a shuttle flight would have taken roughly the same amount of time as our train ride. But instead of spending most of that time in transit–driving to the airport, waiting on security lines, sitting without electronic equipment before takeoff, taxiing to a gate, taking another car into town–our three hours were spent comfortably, in a single seat, with laptops and phones fully operational.
Which is not to say rail travel is perfect. The Acela is far from its high-speed potential, and suffers from Amtrak’s notorious reliability problems: on our Boston trip our train completely died in Rhode Island, then began running smoothly 15 minutes later. But at least there we were on the ground, looking at foliage, enjoying our comfy cabin.
Our trip was a success, and so was the commute. Here’s to hoping President Obama’s high-speed rail concept actually goes somewhere.