Amtrak Decision Theory
The Wisdom Of Crowds
Navigating the New York Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station is overwhelming. You arrive via packed NYC subway, laden with bags filled with trinkets, books, custom-made stamps, and a chopped cheese for the road.
You think getting to the station early will finally give you a chance to breathe and claim your place in line to get your pick of seats. WRONG. This is what separates novice travelers from the truly experienced. For you see, the track your train is arriving at has not yet been decided or announced. The naive will find a café to order coffee and relax, waiting for the track announcement to be made. You will see them later desperately walking the aisles of the train searching for a spare seat and a place to store their luggage.
The experienced are watching, waiting, trying to guess the correct track. Every bit of information helps. If a train is regularly scheduled, it might leave from the same track, so keep an eye out for clumps of those who look like well-traveled regulars. Sometimes those with the Amtrak app get a slightly longer heads-up than those waiting in person. Occasionally the lounge will announce a track early, and loungers will become runners racing to claim the coveted early spots in line. Others still take more initiative and ask the workers (emphasis on the plural) which track a train will arrive at.
Each traveler in the station carries a bit of information with them. A whisper on the wind, a passing glance, a slight chill. The agglomeration of that information is surprisingly accurate at predicting the correct track, which becomes apparent when you guess wrong and quickly find that at least 30 people have magically lined up at the right one.
The first time this happened to me, I stood there staring at the line snaking around the station and thought: how did all of these people know? None of them had coordinated. There was no visible signal. And yet, collectively, they had arrived at the right answer. It turns out there’s a name for this.
This phenomenon, I learned, is called the Wisdom of Crowds. An argument made by James Surowiecki that decisions made by groups are almost always better than those that could have been made by any one individual. The idea actually traces back further: to a 1907 paper by Francis Galton, who discovered that when a crowd at a county fair was asked to guess the weight of an ox, the median of their guesses was more accurate than the estimates of any individual expert. Surowiecki built his entire book on that single observation. He posits there are four main elements to a “wise crowd”:
| Criteria | At the Train Hall |
|---|---|
| Diversity of opinion | Every traveler has different intel: a regular's habit, an Amtrak app notification, a tip from a worker, or a gut feeling from years of travel. |
| Independence | Each person is making their own guess about the track before the announcement. No one is openly coordinating. (Admittedly they might look to others for clues so it is not entirely independent) |
| Decentralization | Lounge members, frequent riders, app users, and workers each have access to different pockets of information that no single person holds in full. |
| Aggregation | The crowd's movement is the mechanism. When enough people drift toward a track, that physical signal aggregates everyone's private guesses into a visible, actionable answer. |
The funny thing about the Wisdom of Crowds is that as an individual inside the system, being wrong is part of what makes it work. Natural variation (being really right, kind of right, kind of wrong, really wrong) is exactly what pulls the median toward the correct answer. The last time I was at Moynihan Hall, I was the shmuck across the station when they announced my track, and by the time I got there, the line was already wrapped around the escalator.
As a member of the crowd, all you can do is show up, bring whatever scrap of information you’ve got, and hope the crowd, the chaotic, surprisingly accurate crowd, is standing somewhere near you when the answer reveals itself.
Sources
- “When Taking Amtrak at Moynihan, How Do People Know Which Track?” Reddit, r/AskNYC, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNYC/comments/1jxenxs/when_taking_amtrak_at_moynihan_how_do_people_know/.
- “The Wisdom of Crowds.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds.
- Galton, Francis. “Vox Populi.” Nature, vol. 75, no. 1949, 7 Mar. 1907, pp. 450–451. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/sim_nature-uk_1907-03-07_75_1949/page/450/mode/2up.