This seems like a good place to bring together discussion of some aspects of the two seating-related incidents of the last week or so, and of similar incidents and patterns: Ms. Ifils and the group of passengers in wheelchairs. In each case, part of the situation involved Amtrak's patchy and erratic system for seating passengers who hold reserved tickets.
Imagine if Amtrak's ticketing system (a) collected information about a passenger's special needs, (b) described the various accessibility options right on the ticketing screen, and (c) assigned each passenger a seat in some way. (Leave the question of whether each passenger chose a seat so they could get their preferred side/car/etc. or whether a computer would assign seats a day or so before the trip depending on how many people were travelling between the possible station pairs on that particular run. Just assume that pax arrive at the station knowing their car and seat number.) The Assistant Conductor on the Crescent would have had no reason to try to clear space in a car for passengers boarding at the next stop (and therefore no excuse to bother Ms. Ifils for racist reasons, if that is what happened); in turn, Ms. Ifils would have had a clear right to a particular seat. The people in wheelchairs would have been able to submit their information online and the computer system could have automatically sent a message to the person in charge of the hypothetical backup car with extra wheelchair spaces to assign it to the train where it was needed. A lot of hassle, hurt feelings, ambiguous situations that might have been racist or ablist, etc., would have been eliminated.
And, of course, all the other little hassles of full trains without reserved seats would have been eliminated: people boarding early in the morning struggling to find a seat among the sleeping passengers in coach, families and groups trying to sit together, conductors and attendants working out their own paper systems to try to help but making some people angry (see the long thread about Chicago boarding policies, for example), etc.
Two more incidents that I saw in person this summer, while boarding the the CONO in Chicago on June 22, 2019: (1) a middle-aged woman and her elderly mother, who could not walk so well, were waiting by the gate with a couple other adult family members who came to see them off. They told the gate agents that their mother needed help getting to the train and her seat. The agents apparently couldn't get hold of a redcap with a cart; in any case they told the family that they could all go out onto the platform. It happened that I walked out just behind them and was headed to the same car. Beside the door to the car, a conductor (or Assistant, I didn't see) told the other family members they couldn't be on the platform, that they had better hurry off the platform because the police had been called and they'd be arrested. They told him the gate agents had said they could help their mother; he didn't care. I told him the gate agents had said they could help their mother; he appeared not to believe me and basically told me to mind my own business. I was too cautious to keep arguing with him -- he has pretty close to shouting, and to be fair the platform was, as it always is there, crowded and confusing -- so I just helped the people with their bags. They were in upper-level seats even though the mother was a bit frail. (2) Once I was seated on the upper level two older people with canes came struggling up the stairs, just barely making it with a rest on the landing. No one had told them they should have lower-level seats. In both cases, if the ticketing website (1) said "people who can't climb stairs easily should reserve lower-level seats and (2) had a place to indicate trouble walking, the gate agents and conductors and redcaps could have been tipped off beforehand to help those passengers to their cars and seats. Instead, we had the spectacle of three pax climbing stairs they should not have climbed, a conductor desperate to clear the platform getting angry at passengers who were not being unreasonable, and the prospect of the police arresting some middle-aged women for trying to help mom and sister get on the train. (White conductor, black passengers; probably not a directly racist incident but it kind of felt that way to me once he mentioned the police.) I can't fault the conductor for trying to get people boarded quickly. I know the CUS platforms are too small even for the pax, let alone visitors; I appreciate that that crew was handing pax seat checks with assigned seats to save time and prevent arguments on board. They were trying. But the system there was against everyone.
Reserved seats, a clear explanation that lower-level seats don't require stairs and upper-level seats do, and a chance to tell Amtrak "I will need some help or extra time to board" would have made the passengers, the gate agents, the conductors, and the attendant a lot less stressed -- and maybe gotten us all out of CUS a few minutes sooner.
