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Amtrak’s social media targets college students, ‘Millennials’
It’s a cliche to refer to young people as “our future,” but these millennials have a definite appetite for travel modes other than private auto, and not just for economic reasons. They are very much Amtrak’s future and possibly its saving grace. Bring them aboard!
There goes the neighborhood!
Let’s just hope that they can get the cars, locomotives and perhaps more frequent trains to handle the increase in pasdengers!
Amtrak needs to make the unaccompanied minor policy more appropriate–allow children younger than 16 to travel alone (i.e., allow persons too young to have a drivers license to take the train alone). This will set up the foundation even further for people to understand train travel. Amtrak’s current policy on this is borderline absurd (and they are completely unresponsive to my letters on this topic). When you realize that young children can travel alone on transit all over the country, one can see that Amtrak’s policy is quite restrictive now for the mobility of young people.
Eric,
Having dealt with the unaccompanied minor issue, I can assure you that it is something that is never totally resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. There was a time when people felt no pangs about putting their minor children aboard public transportation. That time has long since passed, especially when the mode of transportation–unlike non-stop endpoint to endpoint air travel–involves frequent stops of multiple car trains under the supervision of a crew of two or three employees. There are so many opportunities for something to happen en route, or for a child to simply get up and detrain unnoticed, that the attached jeopardy simply becomes too great to ignore.