Matthew Yglesias has been having a field day criticizing Amtrak’s airline-style boarding procedures:
At Union Station there’s a bizarre process where they list a gate instead of a track. The gate is a door and the door is closed. Outside the closed door there is a long snaking line. You wait in line, and then eventually the door opens. Then everyone shows their ticket to an agent, walks through an ante-chamber of some kind, and only then do you reach the platforms.
The ticket-checking is completely superfluous because you could walk to any platform once you’re out there. But it’s also unnecessary because conductors check the tickets on the trains anyway. But then you walk to the appropriate platform and board the train that’s waiting for you.
This method is both slower than the standard method and also involves overcrowding the interior of the station. Amazingly, Amtrak says it wants $7 billion to ameliorate track capacity constraints and station interior overcrowding when for the low price of $0 they could adopt standard train-boarding procedures.
Indeed, this is totally idiotic and without justification. But it gets worse — because the policy is being replicated all over the country.
Station plans for the California High-Speed Rail show lots of security theater; including mezzanine-level “waiting” rooms (holding pens), pre-boarding ticket check, and perhaps even x-ray machines. There is no thought to passenger circulation, and the underground platforms will be every bit as cramped as the “obsolete” ones at Union Station. All this security theater doesn’t come cheap. The new Transbay Terminal in San Francisco just got hit with $56 million in cost overruns to meet “unanticipated” Federal security requirements.
And then there is the All-Aboard Florida rail project. Here is how they plan to manage train boarding with station ushers:
Because the AAF service will be an ‘all reserved service,’ ticketed customers will pass through a control gate to gain access to the vertical circulation leading to the secure ‘ticketed passengers only’ spaces. In all cases, passengers will not be allowed access to the station platforms until approximately 4 or 5 minutes before departure of an arriving train. Train departure and arrival information will be electronically updated both in the public ticketing/information area, as well as in the secure waiting room and Business Class lounge. Access to the platform will be provided by means of two escalator/stair pairs and ADA compliant elevators, controlled by an AAF usher in the secure waiting room.
Systemic Failure 
The Chicago-Milwaukee line I usually take has this too. I don’t understand why people line up. There’s no reserved seats. You can (and I do) sit and wait for the gate to open and just cut in line. Everyone else does too! People will line up 30 minutes before for no reason.
If CA HSR has security lines it’ll defeat the purpose and an argument for intercity rail travel, which is not having to do the security circus like with an airplane. In Europe I can show up 10 minutes before a train leaves. Even with Eurostar (which does have this pre-boarding security) the line was quick and the waiting area large enough, unlike Amtrak. Hopefully it would be more like Eurostar.
I “sit-and-cut” in Milwaukee, but sometimes end up standing in Chicago due to to a lack of seating at Union Station.
In either case I’ve never showed my ticket to an agent though for a pre-boarding check, though.
In addition to airport culture, I’m sure part of this is also due both to railway culture (in the US platforms have historically been unfurnished, unpleasant waiting areas), the lack of competent passenger rail (so private-sector players like All Aboard Florida end up copying airlines), and an obsessive concern about “undesirables” getting on the train without paying a fare (a commuter example, but I know on Metra a while ago there was a brief furor that “some people” were not paying fares and that the already-overstaffed agency should add more conductors).
Yes, this is bloody annoying, but the EuroStar and Spanish AVE trains do something similar. For example, before you go to Barcelona from Madrid, you will pass your belongings through an x-ray machine (although there’s none of this shoes off, laptop out bullshit) as step 1. And then step 2 is showing your ticket to a person at a ‘gate’ before proceeding down the ramp to the high-speed train. EuroStar is similar, although it also includes immigration/passports because of the UK’s insane fear of Europeans and other migrants. What worries me, though, is that the TSA people will undoubtedly make Spain’s no-problems-boarding, become a big pain in the ass.
EuroStar has a passable excuse because the UK isn’t part of Schengen (which I may have misspelled), so I can at least buy the passport controls to some very limited extent. AVE makes far, far less sense.
That said, I concur that the Totally Stupid Agency will make it a pain.
I think Amtrak tries to do this with the Surfliners at LA Union Station too. I usually just ignore the “gates” and go right to the platform once it’s displayed.
It’s particularly weird at LAUS since large numbers of passengers come from the “other side” of the station via Patsaouras transit center – since that’s where the majority of the local bus connections as well as the parking garage are, and there is no gate control there. I took Surfliners for years before I even realized that the line in the main station existed.
Its part of an effort to decrease transit ridership, akin to refusing to install signal priority on light rail lines and roaming TSA teams. There can really be no other explanation.
I personally enjoy how stations like Boston (south Station), NYC and DC have these idiotic lining up systems and yet the very next station – Back Bay, Newark etc have no such idiocy in place and people wait on the platform when they want, where they want.
And Back Bay and Newark arent exactly sleepy little stops.
It is indeed a scheme to reduce train ridership. It has no other purpose.
Oh, sorry, I forgot: it also creates great targets for terrorists to bomb. So it’s also designed to assist terrorists by providing them with easy targets where they can kill lots of people. All part of our government sponsorship of terrorism — after all, terrorists need subsidies too, right? 😛
FEC officials need to go to Tokyo Station and observe boarding for the Shinkansen. Really ridiculous to incorporate the “Kindergarten Walk”. If anything, this results in smaller, higher density pockets of people which is much easier to terrorize than a spread out arrangement.
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