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Joe Manchin, the senior Senator from West Virginia, has inserted language in the FY19 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies appropriations bill that will force Amtrak to employ at least one ticketing agent in every state that it serves.
His reasoning? "Amtrak has told me that most of their sales are now online, but West Virginians buy far more tickets at the Charleston station than most places around the country. That's not surprising, as nearly 30% of West Virginia is without internet access, and mobile broadband access is also difficult in my state's rugged, mountainous terrain, making online ticket sales difficult."
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Senator Makes Amtrak Hire Ticket Agents Because 30% of West Virginia Lacks Internet
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(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 10 2018, @09:48AM (8 children)
Agreed. But, there is a mitigating circumstance in W. Va. It actually costs to build there. There's an old joke, "If West Virginia were steamrolled flat, it would be as big as Texas!" So, the joke is something of an exaggeration, but still, it's tough to get into some of those little valleys, and the backsides of mountains where people live.
Mountain states provide some excuse for the telcos. Of course, they need no excuse to bypass one county in a plains state, while building up in all surrounding counties.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by coolgopher on Sunday June 10 2018, @10:17AM (2 children)
Telstra still manages to service* all of Australia. Yeah, it costs them, but they do it (because they're forced to).
*) Commence commentary about use of "Telstra" and "service" in the same sentence.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday June 10 2018, @08:58PM
New Zealand is a country with parts that are more mountanous than almost anywhere, and is also very sparsely settled, but we have also forced our national telecoms intrastructure provider to roll out links to all the places people live.
They also make a lot of money from it, so there's not really that excuse either.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Monday June 11 2018, @04:48AM
Perfectly acceptable as long as you include the phrase "in an agricultural sense"...
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @03:01PM (3 children)
That's still no excuse for it. This is the 21st century, and cable companies started out by dealing with situations like that where people were living without the ability to get TV broadcasts.
Yes, it is expensive, but it's hardly insurmountable, just place a tower on most of those ridges and run lines from there. It's not like in other parts of the country where you need to have actual environmental studies conducted prior to construction.
What's more, this is exactly the kind of thing that the UTF is supposed to be used on. Perhaps if those folks in those areas had access to the internet, they'd realize why it is that they're being forgotten and be able to more readily speak up for themselves.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday June 10 2018, @04:44PM
Spoken like a true consumertard, hypnotized by all of the marketing, so blinded you never see the disadvantage of cost, and so pinheaded that you believe everyone should do everything the exact same way as you.
Every piece of technology has a cost. Both up front and long term. Design, manufacutring, testing, planning, installation, maintenance, support, repair, upgrades, replacement, and so on.
There is always a certain cost-benefit ratio.
Some are quite obvious. Given availability and price of computer chips, it would be nuts to pay a staff of 50 people to process 100,000 financial transactions a month with pen an paper.
But would you spend millions of dollars on software development costs, server costs, and so on to automate some process that involves 3 paper forms a year, processed by one person in just a few minutes? I hope not, but some gung-ho clueless PHBs would love to do that, just because some advertising says they should. (Lets go absolutely paperless because paper doesn't grow on trees...)
So you want these people in west Virgina to pay a huge pile of cash a month either directly or in taxes to pay for all of this? If they are living out in the middle of nowhere, they probably aren't rich to start with. Now if you have the exact numbers and can show the costs are really low enough, then get back with us.
Personally, I hate it when the *only* way to do something truly important is either "on the web" or requires a retarded toy cell phone. Any exception at all, and there is absolutely no one to talk to! (If you can't get to our web then go to our web site and print out the PDF form... duuuh)
Oh, and BTW, increasingly people are living quite nicely without TV these days.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 10 2018, @04:47PM (1 child)
Agreed. The phone companies service just about all parts of W.Va. There may be a couple little crossroads, where a small collection of hillbillies just never saw the point in having a telephone. Doubtful, today, but possible. But, the telcos have lines basically everywhere. Anyplace serviced with electricity and telephone, it's possible to run fiber. Expensive, sure, but no more expensive now, than running those telephone lines were back in the first half of the 20th century.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday June 10 2018, @06:36PM
This covered the whole region if not rural USA entirely, I don't really know WVA specifically but something sounds fishy here.
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 11 2018, @12:14AM
Isn't that why we have all been paying into a federal fund on our phone bill for decades?
Then they pirated that off for Schools.
Then for budget balances etc.
This is broken windows theory all over again.
Saddling Amtrak with a boat load of employees forever (while wailing about how inefficient Amtrak is) won't fix anything. It certainly won't fix the internet.
If you can get a road there, you can get a fiber optic cable there. Its literally that easy. Make the State highway department trench in the cables and let the municipality contract for town cell towers. And pay for it from that universal access fund.
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