I’m getting ready for a short trip to NYC to visit some friends and business colleagues, and that means leaving the house before the crack of dawn on Friday morning to catch an Amtrak train from Providence.
I love the train, especially when going to NYC — it’s slow compared to bullet trains in Europe or Japan, but Amtrak’s Acela is comfortable, reasonably fast, and a much better way to travel than a bus or a plane.
My main complaint — and this has to do more with our choice of lifestyle than it does with anything Amtrak has control over — is that it’s more than an hour away from us to actually take the train. I have to drive from the Cape to Providence, which takes, all told, well more than an hour, before I can get to the train station.
So I’m putting the Jeep in the shop today, to have a long-suffering problem with the radiator fan fixed. I’d really prefer not to have the Jeep blow up from overheating on the trip.
What’s especially galling is that there is bus service from the Cape to downtown Providence, but only to Kennedy Plaza, not to the Amtrak station, which is almost a mile away.
That last-mile connection problem isn’t unique to Providence. Amtrak is under increasing pressure to improve public transit access to its stations all over the country. I expect that, like so many things, it’s just something that the bureaucrats responsible for running Amtrak never really paid much mind to until someone slapped them in the face.
Who created the name *Acela* for Amtrak? Peter, this is proof positive that Douglas Adams was right in describing marketing professionals as, “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.”
Why not take the bus to South Station then take the train?
Because it’s 70 miles out of my way. Providence has the virtue of being in the right direction.
The same sort of idiots that think up words like “Verizon” and “Cingular.” They’re company and product names that sound like they should be words and aren’t. I get particularly peeved when I see someone talking about a “segway” when they mean “segue.”