Sooooo much snark, and so little interest into what BART actually runs on!
Originally, BART was a master stroke of digital integration in the 70's, and it's digital voices announcing the next trains were a thing of the future: An early accessibility feature before we even knew what those were, really.
The larger engineering lesson from that is you're probably better off making standard solutions work for your situation than custom solutions. The wider gauge solved(?) the stability problem, but at the cost of always needing custom rolling stock, but more importantly, making Bart build-out significantly more expensive and unable to take advantage of existing track. That hurts the viability of the Bart ecosystem.
I lived mostly car free in Atlanta because the Marta station is one flight of stairs down from the airport terminal, and I could get to my lab in GSU in downtown Atlanta in less than 30 minutes, midtown Georgia tech campus in similar time, my first apartment in Lindberg in 40 minutes, and my second apartment in Sandy Springs on the other side of the city in less than an hour from the airport. Commute to and from my school/lab/apartment was always under 30 minutes and always faster by train compared to car.
These days I fly to the bay area to my office in East Bay. It's 2+ hours commute from either SFO or even OAK because you need to change buses 2 or 3 times. Add 1 more if you count taking the airport shuttle to the BART station. And SJC does not even have a BART connection.
There's fundamental design flaw in public transportation in the US, they almost never connect the population centers. Part of the reason why people are discouraged from using them and they don't get the funding to stay up to date.
I travel to Japan twice a year for business and for vacation, and coming back to the Bay Area and dealing with its transportation infrastructure is always jarring.
I find the Bay Area very difficult to get around. The roads are jammed with commuters who live far from their workplaces due to the housing situation. There is not enough housing near job centers, which bids up the prices of available housing to very high levels that requires FAANG-level salaries to clear unless one wants to have an army of roommates. Thus, many people have to commute, some from far-flung exurbs and even from Central Valley cities like Stockton and Modesto.
Public transportation in the Bay Area is better than most American cities, but it’s still underpowered for the size of the metro area. Not all residences are served by trains, and bus service is often infrequent and subject to delays. Missing a connection can lead to major inconveniences (such as a long 30-60 minute wait) or even being unable to reach your destination without an über-expensive Uber or Lyft ride. There’s also matters of safety and cleanliness on public transportation; every now and then I smell unpleasant odors like marijuana and urine, and occasionally I see sketchy people.
It’s a major step down from Tokyo, where public transportation is ultra-convenient, reliable in non-emergency situations, impeccably clean, and generally safe.
The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues. If it were merely technology, we’d have solutions by now.
Just came back from a vacation in Japan, and completely agree - even compared to the (much better than SF) danish public transport system the Japanese are orders of a magnitude better on so many levels!
Nu then - having 37 mio people just in one city, Tokyo, does require you to get the logistics in order (all of Denmark is just around 6 mio…)
They should fly everyone who works at BART to a conference in Tokyo for a week and make them ride the subways until the shame sets in.
When they return to their hotel rooms at the end of the week they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.
I don't think the problem is BART employees. The problem is twofold:
1. The community doesn't care. Leaving trash and making a mess is acceptable behavior. Or at least, it isn't called out (which I can understand, as there are safety issues around calling out bad behavior in public). This is the biggest factor: the vast majority of Japanese people wouldn't even consider leaving trash or making a mess on transit.
2. I'm sure BART leadership would be happy to combat this problem by cleaning more frequently and removing sketchy people from trains. But where is the funding for this going to come from?
> they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.
Even in jest, it's pretty fucked up to insinuate that someone should commit ritual suicide for any reason, let alone because they work for a transit agency that can't keep its trains clean. Please don't do that here. Or anywhere.
I don’t think BART employees really have any say in where BART stations do and don’t go, or how many trains they get. Try city councils instead, although none of them take BART anyways so they won’t know the difference.
One way to look at this is that the Bay Area focuses on transportation technology that works and scales regardless of the rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible.
And the Bay Area, largely, eats its own dogfood.
There is no faster, more powerful public transportation system than a city that allows Uber to offer mototaxi service. Uber was allowed to turned that on in Rio at some point in the last couple years and it puts busses and subways to shame. The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero.
The transit situation in the bay area is so bad that even the FAANG companies run their own private transit systems of commuter buses. I doubt there's many people paying for an Uber 2x a day from Fremont to Santa Clara with any regularity, but thousands of commuters do that trip daily by car and train.
Why are the socio-political stars aligned in tens of countries across Europe and Asia but not in the US, if such alignment is so rare?
I might argue that the bay area focuses on transportation technology that is flashy and gets around existing regulations because it is new, with hardly any regard at all for how it scales.
One thing I wonder about is the extreme localism of US transport. As far as I can see from visiting, the Muni buses and subway/trams cover only SF proper, and kinda abruptly cut off before you get to places that are theoretically other cities, but in practice close enough that they’d be treated as suburbs of SF elsewhere (South San Francisco, say). That seems to have its own independent transport (except for BART and Caltrain) which seems pretty bizarre.
Unfortunately the problem is literally the way the government is structured from an electoral + mathematical perspective. Particularly heinous failure mode is polarization, which has been the norm for 50+ years (really started after Vietnam). Biased towards inaction and status quo structurally. The last sustainably unifying event was WWII, which doesn’t bode well.
In my opinion, there are two factors at play: (1) social division and (2) it’s easy in America for self-interested people and organizations to block progress by weaponizing due process.
I’ll expound on the first point. European countries and East Asian countries generally have a stronger sense of cultural cohesion, while America has many deep divisions such as:
1. Social liberalism versus social conservatism, which also correlates to a secular versus cultural Christian worldview.
2. Racial and ethnic divides with sometimes centuries of bad blood
3. Class divides between the poor, the working class, the middle class, and the wealthy.
These divisions make it harder for people to come together to work for the common good. There are some politicians who shamelessly act in the interest of their voter bases with little regard for those outside their bases, and there are also people who are suspicious of even well-intended proposals since there may be hidden motives behind them.
In Uganda and east africa they call the motorcycle taxis "bodaboda" and they're generally regarded as the only reliable way to get through insane traffic. They're also exceedingly dangerous.
Because Grab is a copy of Uber and it would not exist without Uber. It may be that Grab is an equal (or perhaps better) implementation right now. But the entire category of app-based ride-sharing was created by Uber.
The Bay Area is crippled by people who live comfortably within biking distance of Whole Foods, Zeitgeist, and their Apple shuttle bus stop. These people can't fathom why anyone would want to drive a dirty car and blight the city with roads.
It costs almost a billion dollars to build a mile of BART, due to political corruption 65% of all MUNI service lines are to/from Chinatown, we keep the "iconic" cable car lines going even though they have the highest rate of accidents per mile and per vehicle in the country.
We just need to double or triple down on roads and let things like Waymo and Uber save us from ourselves.
Bikebrains rant about things like "induced demand" without actually understanding that building additional infrastructure simply serves pent up demand. They point to things like the Katy Freeway which was expanded to 26 lanes but "traffic got worse" - ignoring the fact that travel speeds increased by 60% for almost a decade until Houston's population ballooned to what it is today.
If I wanted to live in Houston, I'd live in Houston. I'm one of those "bike brained" morons that is happy that are getting rid of a lane on Grand Ave because pedestrians keep getting killed.
Which is exactly why San Francisco never managed to recover after COVID. The die hard radicals like yourself can't think about anyone other than themselves and without forced RTO nobody from the greater Bay Area wants to come into the city anymore.
> The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues
Well and population / population density.
China is similar - the big 15-20m+ metros have crazy good subway systems. But SF bay area is half the low end? 7.5m or so? Harbin is 10m and its subway is kinda meh. Down at 5m metro population in e.g. Changchun or Jinan and it's a pretty piddling subway/city rail system.
This isn’t a great excuse. The Berlin metro area is smaller than that, and had to contend with _being split in half_ for 40 years, and still has an infinitely better public transport system than SF, say.
I don't think this is a very big reason. I'm absolutely convinced people in the US are just used to cars, and like with any new piece of software, it has to be 10x better in some way for people to start using it en masse.
Maybe it's a matter of breaking down the costs for everyone to see, or maybe it's a matter of the city providing bus wifi so you can get some guaranteed access to the internet while riding, or maybe it's a matter of putting a police officer on every train.
But busses, aside from rush hour in probably the 10 largest cities in the nation, are always going to be way less convenient than a car. It has to stop a million times, there's no good way to guarantee you'll arrive on time (it's impossible to create a bus route where they stay evenly spaced like a train might handle better), and they never actually get you where you're going - just kinda nearby. Maybe you can transfer onto a bus now, but that's two modes of transportation. And God forbid there's a number of people combining their bus usage with a bicycle. Gotta wait for them to walk around front, unhook it, and hopefully put the bike rack back up so the driver doesn't have to get out and do it himself... etc, etc, etc.
Plus, I'm too busy to find it at the moment, but there's a study showing most people just want public transit so some other people use it and get off the highway. As in, they just want public transit so their car commute improves.
This will almost certainly never get major support; it's just too miserable of a system to overtake our already-crazy-convenient cars.
First off, you're not too busy to find it. Because you're probably not used to doing it. All you have to do is to tell your favorite map app where you want to go, then switch to the public transit tab. You should try it.
Right now if I look at routes from Newark to OAK or SFO, it shows around 40 minutes by car and 1:40 hour by public transportation. If I had a plane to catch in 2 hours, I'd never take the bus. Here's why.
About 40 minutes of that 1:40 involves walking to the nearest bus stop. You could take an Uber instead and cut it down to 10 minutes. But that's problem A, public transportation doesn't have enough coverage.
There are 2 bus changes involved. The first one, Newark to Union City or Palo Alto, depending on whether you're going to OAK or SFO, runs every 30 minutes. That's problem B, the routes are not frequent enough.
The last bus change, very close to OAK/SFO, are design flaw- problem C. You really should be able to get off BART and take a short walk or shuttle to terminal. Instead, it's another bus ride that'll take 40 minutes.
From a regular commuter's pov, problems A/B/C are the issues that'll discourage someone from taking public transportation. Like other comments mentioned, it's not really a resource, infra or tech issue. It's a social/political issue that's preventing public transportation from expanding, both in coverage, frequency and in terms of connecting big population centers where it matters. All the issues that you mentioned, like stopping million times, guarantee of arriving on time, bicycles, and even safety and cleanliness, will go away if you solve the problems I mentioned- speaking from my experience taking public transportation for 30+ years in the US and abroad.
Huh? I’m too busy to find the study supporting the point I was making. I think you may have misunderstood?
Anyways, maybe if we solve all these issues, things will improve, and I hope it does! Still, I’m with those survey respondents - I really do not care how hard cities work to overcome public transit issues. I’ll never take it. I just have no incentive to do so, and I like my car. It’s private. It’s fast as hell. It’s pretty. It’s comfy. I wouldn’t get even one of those in a bus. I’d be pretty shocked if this wasn’t a standard response.
As an aside: it’s weird and disconcerting that you’re finding a different opinion to be depressing. Is it possible you’re just really disconnected?
That's a problem in San Francisco proper too. If I think about my trips to Japan, in the population centers, at best, a car trip will take about the same time as a public transit trip, but the majority of the time transit will be faster, sometime significantly so.
But inside SF, even during rush hour, it'll still nearly always be faster for me to drive (or get an Uber). The reason is because there's precious little transit infra that doesn't share the road to some extent, and even when there are dedicated bus lanes or off-street train tracks, there's still traffic lights, and the buses and trains are slow and make enough stops that any gains are lost. Then on top of that, transfers take time, and if you're even slightly off on your timing, you might have to wait for up to 15 minutes for the next bus at your transfer point.
I agree with your assessment of inter-city trips as well; SFO airport to my house in SF is also so frustrating, because I live a few blocks from a Caltrain station, but having to go from SFO->BART->Caltrain->home... that transfer in the middle is a killer. My home is only a few blocks farther to the freeway than to the train station, so even in rush-hour traffic it's still only a 20 minute drive, while BART+Caltrain will take 30-45 minutes, and that's during a time of day the Caltrain trains run at their most frequent.
I've lived in SF for 15 years, and I think I've only taken BART/Caltrain to or from SFO a handful of times. I can't even remember the last time; it's been at least 10 years (probably before Uber/Lyft was a thing). Nowadays I always take a Lyft, and while I cringe at the price ($30-$50, depending on time of day), it's so worth it when a) I'm worried about not making my flight if transit is slower than I expect, or b) I'm getting back home and just want to be home.
And yeah, I get that I'm privileged enough to be able to afford to take a car. Many people aren't; they have to pay with their time, which just really sucks. We never get that time back.
Not to jump on your comment (since there have been quite a few other replies already) but just to add another personal anecdote: having been on the more senior end of a junior merge/deploy gone wrong and losing a Friday night or a weekend ping, I'm okay with an additional empty day throughout the week.
I've found that little things like that breed a growing resentment and stress that compounds, until someone wants to leave the company. Thursday night outage that I have to hop on? Much smaller deal than a weekend where I have established plans.
One can argue "why was the PR approved in the first place", but sometimes people make mistakes. It especially sucks when there are limited people that know how to troubleshoot and resolve the production issues with a system, even more so when the on-call individual may have not even reviewed the code initially.
All that said - I'd love to deploy as normal on Fridays! I've just found that the type of businesses I've worked at can wait until Monday, and that makes our weekends less risky.
I understand the article's emphasis on exercising good judgment around release timing, but read-only Fridays are not there for the people who generally exercise good judgment. If you are the sort of person/team that is likely to deploy late on a Friday afternoon despite the inherent risk, you are likely the kind of person/team who underestimates or ignores risks in general. This includes the risk of a given deployment, thus exacerbating the impact of your late-Friday deployments. It is therefore sensible to simply take the decision out of your hands.
I hate how people hear "read only friday" and decide to turn it into a CI/CD dick measuring contest.
For "read only friday" to have been a novel idea in the first place, you needed a starting point where conventional practice already was making changes live without stopping to consider the time/day of week.
I really suspect the detractors represent a workflow that would break (or at least introduce pain) if unable to push to production for a few days. So they have to give the hard sell on the benefits of continuous deployment.
Perhaps. But what's the risk-reward? No matter how good your CI/CD is, the risk is nonzero. Do I really need to ship this today and potentially open a can of worms this afternoon?
This post is weird to me, because it sorta feels like it's attacking a straw man.
The idea the author seems to be advocating for is is that, while maybe you sometimes/often shouldn't deploy on a Friday (or even not at the very end of any workday), there should never be a stated policy in place that freezes deployments.
And yeah, I've been at places where they have freezes on weekends, holidays, right around the company's conference, etc. But they're never 100% freezes: if something goes wrong or is necessary, you just get a manager to approve it, and off you go.
I think the author's exhortation that developers should all be able to exercise their judgment to make these calls is a nice idea in theory, but falls flat in practice. Every developer will not always have all the necessary context in order to exercise that judgment. Even those who do, and generally have good judgment, will screw up sometimes because they are tired or are working under some sort of time pressure, or something.
Having a policy -- with some flexibility and exceptions allowed -- makes it easier to avoid those sorts of lapses in judgment. And that's a good thing.
But the whole article is just all over the place to me. The author starts by implying that people should be "ashamed" about identifying with a no-Friday-deploy policy, but then softens to the point of saying it's fine to have a personal policy of no late-afternoon deploys, no shipping big changes right before the weekend, etc. But that somehow if that's instead company policy, that's a bad thing. Nope, I don't buy it.
To counter the counterpoint.
Even if you are better at pushing to production than 90% of the rest of your industry it is still elevated risk and stress so you should avoid it for the sake of your employees. Productivity vs life.
If your counterpoint is to claim that you are just as stable pushing to production as you are when you don't, then I would just suggest you're delusional or lying.
Charity's been running honeycomb.io, a SaaS startup with millions of dollars of revenue, for 9 years now, after being an early-stage engineer at Parse, a mobile backend-as-a-service startup that powered half a million mobile apps. She's talking about what she's made a reality at her company and its clients.
Deploy to what? Staging on every merged PR (commit to stg), and prod deploy on every commit to main? That sounds reasonable to me, and I've done some variation of it on most projects for the last 10 years or so without issue.
Yeah, what happens when Team A makes a change and Team B makes a different, seemingly unrelated change, and they both get merged and pushed... only to have a dozen customers discover that if someone is using Feature X that Team A just worked on and Feature Y that Team B just worked on while they have Uncommon Option Q enabled, then their backend process server will crash taking down their entire instance.
Who's fault is that?
Asking because I have been the customer with Uncommon Option Q enabled.
Everyone here blaming BART and bureaucracy for being inefficient when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting (and zoning preventing housing/badly needed ridership near transit stops). Yes it's expensive to build transit just like it's expensive to build anything in America, which we should fix but that is not unique to BART.
Just last year we failed to pass a common sense bill to make it so we only need a 51% majority for transit bills in the future, indicative of how opposed we still are to transit in the Bay Area https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-proposi....
Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.
So let's be clear, most of the issues with BART are due to anti-transit and suburban voters starving it of support.
Hilarious that from 2020 and to this day ridership has collapsed but BART operating expenses went up despite that and all the efficiencies they talk about in your link. Kind of tells you everything you need to know about where the money is actually going...
Just to compare with another expensive city - BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget.
You would not expect a ridership reduction to have any significant reduction in operating expenses. Full trains costs roughly the same as an empty trains.
If ridership is down, I'd expect them to run fewer trains.
The problem of course then is that you create a whole in the bucket. Fewer trains -> BART becomes less convenient -> people choose other options -> lower ridership -> fewer trains -> less convenient ....
Intreased ridership almost always means better service. Run more service on the lines you have, and run / build more routes so you have a useful network.
That is mostly a zoning issue, have you seen the density around Tube stations? Compare that to the density around half of the BART stations which are big parking lots surrounded by single family houses. Of course it's cheaper to run a transit system in a city with twice the population density and population in the metro area.
If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km
> you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you
BART is not a typical metro system in that it serves a lot of suburbs that have very little population density, and was mainly built as a commuter service to get people to downtown SF. So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has without massive upzoning and more infill stations. Comparing it to the Tube which mostly serves the city of London is not an apples to apples comparison. Look at the costs of building new rail infrastructure in London and it's comparable to here.
> If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km
What you're talking about in that link is the extension to San Jose, not day to day BART operations. That one does deserve criticism as they've made poor decisions like not doing cut/cover because NIMBYs in San Jose don't want any disruption to streets. So instead we are tunneling to the Earth first. Elsewhere in the world municipalities understand that it's worth temporary disruptions to roads to bring down costs, but of course America is unique and we have to learn these lessons ourselves.
I'm not sure why we've drifted talking about new lines/stations. Both Tube and BART hardly built anything in the last 10 years. I was only remarking on operating costs for what was already built by pandemic and the fact that ridership seems completely untangled from it.
It seems to me that BART management did what most of other government bureaucracies did around here during covid - threw their feet on the desk and took an extended 2+ year sabbatical
The infill stations don't make much sense because they're also low density housing. The fundamental problem with mass transit in CA is the insane insistence to remain low density despite the overwhelming demand for housing. It's the sin that leads to all of the problems the state faces.
No, treating BART as a low-density transit system while granting them right of ways in some of the most dense areas of the country doesn't make much sense. 30th & Mission and 98th & San Leandro would've absolutely made sense while neither Millbrae nor SFO should've ever been built.
As a former tube-commuter and occasional BART-user, I'd wager that possibly a majority of the commuting trips in zone 1 are taking people from a mainline train station to somewhere, and then back in the evening. That option barely even exists in the Bay Area - indeed every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.
every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and
rent a car instead.
BART really made a mess of transit to SFO, unfortunately. BART ridership never met projections so they played around quite a lot with service between Millbrae and SFO in effort to save money. For a while there was a Millbrae-SFO shuttle. For a while one line provided service during the day and one provided evening and weekend service. Even today only one of the two transbay lines that runs down the peninsula offers service to Millbrae and SFO.
Once you actually get to Millbrae you then get to deal with BART's whole NIH problem manifesting as a refusal (up until recently) to offer timed connections with Caltrain. And, of course, up until 2021 actually getting between the BART and Caltrain platforms involved a ton of walking.
I wouldn't consider myself anti-transit - before Covid I took BART every work day and currently walk to my office. And have never regularly commuted by car in the Bay Area. But in SF, we seem to keep throwing money at transit orgs through ballot measures, and getting little tangible results in return. I voted for funding increases for Muni for years, with supposed reliability / service enhancements that never seemed to materialize. It's disappointing that rather than hearing that voters are more hesitant to fund this now vs previously, the reaction would be to try to lower thresholds to get things passed.
Even with the new Central Subway that opened in SF (which I assume cost billions given how long it took to develop), wasn't a clear net-win. Muni closed other Metro routes when those opened. Depending on where you're going, you might be worse off now.
While RTO may be increasing ridership numbers, Covid did change population and commuting dynamics. Transit orgs need to adapt, and maybe accept downsizing / focusing more on a smaller scope. In Bart's case, maybe it would be wiser to focus on the core Bart system, and not the more recent expansions (the East Bay trains that are totally separate from the rest of Bart, and the Oakland airport train). Maybe a stronger look should be taken at merging the disparate transit organizations themselves, to reduce administrative overhead?
Caltrain seems to be doing better than others - they have financing worries themselves, but are on a better track from my understanding. Pun semi-intended :)
Transit is important, and I feel like the current organizations keep letting us down.
I meant like as an individual do you have a sense? $320M in sales tax is not really very much. Because people are often upset we spend too much on transit but also upset that our transit isn't as good as, say, the Tube. Can't really have it both ways.
BART taxes are not even in the top 100 list of expenses I worry about personally.
> when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting
Everyone wants more services and lower taxes, but they vote for the lower taxes and get made when there are no services. Those things often don't go together. It's okay to either accept fewer services with less tax burden, or higher taxes with more services (the side I generally lean towards, within reason).
True, but it ignores the point of who various services are for. Wealthy professionals in the suburbs tend to vote against mass transit they don't plan on using.
I don’t have a specific link but I’d be surprised if the CityNerd channel on YouTube didn’t have a (recent) video on it. Just as a disclaimer: Even if you don’t agree with his politics, he does take care to explain his data set sources and methodology, so it’s likely a useful source for this sort of thing.
NYC is definitely the top dog. There was a recent ranking for metro areas ranked by walkability, bike-ability, public transit, and some other urban score, but divided by average rent price for a 1BR apartment. NYC still came out #1 despite the rather large denominator.
The BART is better than the DC metro in my experience. The DC Metro is great for commuters into metro center, but it shuts down too early, and is totally impractical for moving around the outside of the city/suburbs. The BART looks visibly in worse shape, but you can quite easily live car-free in SF
The failure of Proposition 5 doesn't indicate that California voters are opposed to transit. That was a very broad proposition which lowered the voting threshold for local governments to issue bonds for a wide variety of projects, not just transit. Local governments are already facing debt problems and making it easier to take on more debt would set them up for serious future fiscal problems.
It looks like BART usage is way down from pre-pandemic levels, around half of what it used to be, and to top it off the BART system has added over 300 additional employees since 2019. It may be a tough sell to convince taxpayers to fork over more money to them.
Yeah this is basically the private market filling in for our lack of transit down south. Most every other major city doesn't have this, you just take the metro to work like a normal person.
I’m at a conference at Stanford University right now. I was going to take BART and the Dumbarton Express to avoid having to drive in traffic, but when I drove to the Dublin BART station, I found out BART wasn’t running. I ended up having to drive to Stanford, since the only public transportation over the hills separating Dublin/Pleasanton from the inner East Bay is the Altamont Commuter Express, which is much less convenient due to its few runs. Thankfully traffic wasn’t that bad today, but going home is going to be a traffic nightmare since it’s a Friday.
I wish there were more bus options that connected the outer East Bay (Dublin, Pleasanton, San Ramon, Walnut Creek, etc.) to the inner East Bay.
> but going home is going to be a traffic nightmare since it’s a Friday.
I've never understood the Friday traffic issue. Are there people that normally stay in the city during the week and only go home on Fridays causing more traffic? How is there more traffic on Friday and the rest of the week? Friday being one of the forced RTO days, but the Friday traffic thing was known well before WFH/RTO fights. Then again, the root cause of most traffic always seems much more anticlimatic
Interestingly enough, even with RTO, I’ve noticed that driving on a Friday morning is much smoother than Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. Despite the BART shutdown, it was smooth sailing southbound down 680 from Pleasanton to Milpitas. I normally commute from San Ramon to Fremont, and going through Pleasanton and Sunol on a midweek morning is rough.
I think there are many people in the Bay Area who start their weekend trips Friday afternoons and evenings.
Friday afternoon traffic is people leaving the Bay Area for weekend trips. The Bay Area is effectively completely surrounded by mountains so there are a very limited number routes out of the Bay Area relative to the number of people.
You make it sound like this is a Bay Area thing. It's not. I've never lived in the Bay Area, yet everyone still dreads Friday afternoon traffic. I get holiday weekends but just a random Friday still gets that vibe
I'm curious what percent of HN is based in the bay area for this to hit the front page so quickly. I suppose it could in part be that it was posted when people are commuting in?
A tech failure taking down a big government thing is certainly HN worthy. And BART is relatively famous, as such things go. It’s a name people know, as opposed to of it was the Minnesota DMV system. That would be a fine story too but no one knows the name for that.
Ironically, the Northstar rail line (one part boondoggle, one part "would have worked if it went all the way to st cloud", depending on who you ask) is shutting down Jan 3 or 4 in 2026, so I wouldn't be surprised to see articles on it and/or the met council before then.
That's a shame. The Twin Cities set a relatively high bar for American public transit, too. The light rail is fantastic. I only wish you could take the green line all the way out to SLP or Plymouth.
Back when I lived in the cities 15 or so years ago, it was still notably slower than driving, so many if not most people still drove everywhere.
Public transit wasn't as gross as stories I've heard of elsewhere, but it also wasn't something I wanted to take on a regular basis if I could help it. I think I used it regularly for about six months or so one year in particular, and the lack of warm bus stops meant standing in freezing rain, sleet, snow and more.
Maybe things have improved since I lived there, but hearing that they are the high bar is pretty sad.
I lived there from mid-2016 through late 2020, about 4.5 years in all. I know the Green Line was a relatively new thing when I was there.
> it was still notably slower than driving, so many if not most people still drove everywhere
I'd argue that those folks are missing the point. Sure, when I was commuting by Minneapolis public transit, it was slower than driving. But you know what I wasn't doing while I was on the bus/train? Driving! I was reading, writing, daydreaming, sleeping, any number of activities more pleasant than sitting on I-94.
Standing out there in the winter could be brutal, I'll admit. Then again, the light rail stops were heated, and the park & ride I transferred at in Plymouth had a nice climate-controlled lobby. The only time I was really out there was standing in the driveway in front of my office, waiting for the shuttle to pick me up.
Twin Cities public transit is a damn sight better than what we have in Milwaukee, that's for sure. Low bar, but the Twin Cities clear it handily.
Ah yeah, that makes more sense. I lived about half a mile or a mile south of where the green line now runs and had to take a bus down university ave.
Sadly, my neighborhood had long waits between buses that connected to university ave, and neither my neighborhood or university ave had heated stops. So, odds were pretty good that I'd suffer the weather for 20-30 minutes each trip.
I also tend to get motion sickness if I read or use a laptop in cars or busses, so there really wasn't anything I could do on them that I couldn't do by driving anyway.
BART specifically is also a kind of lighting rod of the political, social, economic fissure that runs through American culture; the difference in perspective of the adversarial camps, like different tribes.
It is a microcosm, a bit of a litmus test, and an ideological battlefield of the embattled sides. But this example specifically is also a kind of infighting, of the more anarcho-libertarian tech camp that enjoys highlighting and dripping with self-righteousness about any tech related failure of government, i.e., or at least government that does not align with their ideology or control over it.
This fault line of America runs right through things like BART like an effigy or idol that America performs a kind of ritual form of battle on as proxies for all out civil war. Think of tribes you may have seen videos of where they do all kinds of elaborate dances and blustering displays and fake charges to demonstrate their power.
The glee about this outage happening to BART is very much because the libertarian tech progressive types are amused and validated by it, where something more like rashes of violent attacks on BART riders by menaces to society might be something that the "heartland" may become gleeful about, as evidence for how the ideology of SF is messed up. In the cases of violent attacks on BART riders, another camp/tribe would come out and demonstrate their fierceness; the "socially liberal" types from all over the country and even world, would rush to the defense of their ideological idols with a bewildering storm of rationalization, delusion, and excuse making for violent attackers and in defense of their ideology/cult.
It's just elaborate war dances around an idol/ideology to demonstrate how fierce and powerful each party is. BART is just one of the idols in America around which these displays of simulated conflicts happen.
Is it causation or correlation? Maybe bart being down caused all the people to browse HN while waiting for the issue to be resolved, thereby making this show up on the main page.
When GitHub was constantly failing, I finally got fed up and now I use my own private Gitea. It’s near-zero maintenance and has never had any unexpected downtime. Never looked back.
Stories like these make me feel the same way about California, which I called home for almost 20 years. So much to love, so many reasons never to live there again. Great place to visit when there’s not an active disaster unfolding.
I think the problem with BART is that it is self hosted.
By "self hosted" I'm not referring to it being run directly by the government, but that in comparison to every other government-run transit system, everything at BART is done the BART way, limiting access to an entire industry of light rail infrastructure, reducing safety and reliability, while significantly increasing costs.
I’m not frustrated that this happened, I’m frustrated that it seems likely this won’t get better (witness their protracted incredibly high constructions costs that have not improved). I hope they prove me wrong.
I'm on my phone and not able to readily dig up the link, but there was a linguistic study about the differences between the audience who use definite articles for highways/freeways/interstates and the transit system, versus those who just use the distinctive noun ("101", "80", "Bart")
I thought it was interesting and I'm sorry a hint at it is all I can offer right now
Socal says "The 101" because its a holdover from names like the Hollywood Freeway, before freeways were numbered. No idea why Norcal didn't do the same; you still hear "The Bayshore Freeway" or "The Nimitz Freeway" sometimes. My theory is the rest of the country picked up on what Socal does through media and assumed it's a California thing.
> you still hear "The Bayshore Freeway" or "The Nimitz Freeway" sometimes.
Oh huh. I certainly see these tiles on maps, but in 21 years in the bay area, I have only ever heard of one highway where people sometimes call it by the name (Skyline) rather than the number (35). And even then, I think that's pretty rare. I wonder what's different about the people you and I interact with that makes it different for you.
Buses are the resilient backup for trains, especially if road infrastructure has been designed to prioritize transit (e.g. Chicago highways with shoulders designed to let Pace buses bypass traffic jams).
Traditional train systems themselves are extremely decentralized, though scheduling is not. Traditional interlockings form a mirroring mesh network parallel to the physical network of steel rails itself.
Train tracks are a form of centralization. Without the ability to reroute around disruptions (like cars and buses) a single stopped train (e.g. due to mechanical or passenger issues) can stop everything.
BART is dual track around the entire system, except for side yard entrances. I have seen stopped trains, and it was worked around. One I was on caught fire I. The middle of a station and it did not close the line. It slowed it down a lot but did not stop. There are so many systems in place, it's a quite complex system.
The real heros? The bus drivers. The baddies? The planners, the management. The evil? Pure unadulterated evil? The AC Transit app. I would give it a -11.
If you can't send updated schedules or emergency alerts through the system, I also don't want service started. It doesn't have to be an individualized problem to render local-first useless.
Also, what do you mean by trains being local-first? Trains by definition need to share the same tracks with catastrophic consequences for getting it wrong. You can't figure out if a train is going to possibly be on the same route locally, or if your route has been obstructed. Somebody gets a schoolbus stuck on a crossing, it takes over a mile to stop a train.
Trains traditionally operate on signalling blocks: a section between two signals is a block, a block is occupied if any part of a train is inside of it, if it's occupied any signals leading into the block are red. This can be decided entirely locally (as in: local to the block). When a wheel sensor detects a wheel entering the block, the block is occupied, signals switch to red and the number of wheels is counted. As soon as another wheel sensor counts an equal number of wheels exiting the block the block is free and signals switch to green. You need a wire along the block to communicate this, but from a safety perspective there is no need for global communication.
Modernization efforts focus on trains broadcasting position and speed so trains can travel closer together and still maintain a safe stopping distance, but that's again possible locally.
Operating switches is where it gets trickier. Some rail operators maintain the possibility to operate them locally, but that requires either stopping the train at each switch you want to change, or to deploy lots of people into the field to do it on schedule
Not quite that easy. What if two trains are both traveling towards separate green signals into the same block such that the second train gets a red signal, but not in time to stop? I think it's possible to overcome this, but it become vastly more complicated than just "turn the signals red for the current block if it's occupied".
You are right, reality is more complicated. In reality some blocks need more than two states and need to know the state of adjacent blocks. For example in a one-way track with two every points you would want to deny entry from one entry point if the track leading to the other entry point is occupied, to solve your case. And you probably want to call that state "reserved" instead of "occupied" to prevent a cascade if you have multiple such blocks right after each other.
But the point that you can do this local-first is still true. You will want to engage a couple bits of information with the neighboring block, but you don't need to know any global state, and if one block breaks down that only affects its direct neighbors
>If you can't send updated schedules or emergency alerts through the system, I also don't want service started.
In the days before systems existed for publishing such schedules and emergency alerts, should public transit service not have been attempted at all?
> Trains by definition need to share the same tracks with catastrophic consequences for getting it wrong.
Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks. But if it did, I assume "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded when an emergency in the local system necessitates it.
You can go down a very deep rabbit hole learning about the history of train signaling. Trains and subways have had centralized signaling for…I’d have to look it up, but 100 years surely? It’s the only way to safely have more than one train running at a time (i.e., sharing the track) with a dense schedule. The “local first” procedure when it fails is to radically reduce service and slow down the trains.
Block based automated signaling can technically be implemented as a primarily local system. Each block needs to know if there is a train in itself block (in which case all block entrance signals must show stop, and approach signals indicate that they can be entered, but the train must be slowing, so it can come to a stop by the block entrance signal). It must also know about a few preceeding blocks for each path leading into it, so as to know which contain trains that might be trying to enter this block, so it can select at most one to be given the proceed signal, and others to be told to brake to stop in time for the entrance signal. While it is nice if it knows the intended routes of each train so it can favor giving the proceed indicator to a train that actually wants to enter it, but if it lacks that information, then giving the indication to a train that will end up using points to take a different path doesn't hurt safety, just efficiency.
Of course, centralized signaling is better, allowing for greater efficiency, helps dispatch keep track better track of the trains, makes handling malfunctioning signals a lot safer, among many other benefits. But it doesn't mean local signaling can't be done.
The New York Times had a very visually compelling article a few months ago about how a good part of the city's subway system is still manually-operated.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for us to have higher standards for quality and safety than we did 100 years ago.
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks
Building a replica set of tracks that runs parallel to the current tracks just to avoid sharing doesn't strike me as a good use of anyone's time/money.
> "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded
And how are you going to notify them that they are excluded when the network is down?
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks.
We're talking about BART, which uses a track gauge of 5'6" instead of the standard US rail gauge of 4'8.5". They can't run on the same tracks.
(Actually, this is generally true even for those systems that do use 4'8.5" gauge track--I suspect that the standard US freight car envelope doesn't actually fit on most subway systems.)
They would not, the term you're looking for is "Loading Gauge"[1]. The US freight loading gauge is one of the larger ones.
That said there are other reasons a subway could end up being subject to Federal Railroad Administration[2] rules. I will note that I'm not an expert on those rules. But, generally passenger rail systems in the US are subject to Positive Train Control[3] or equivalent. It appears BART is actually one of the earliest adopters of Automatic Train Control[4], which appears to be a PTC equivalent. If not more automated.
(Actually, this is generally true even for those systems that do use 4'8.5" gauge track--I suspect that the standard US freight car envelope doesn't actually fit on most subway systems.)
As a related aside, the Chicago Transit Authority still ran freight on its tracks until not that long ago. Maybe the early 2000's?
Standard US freight envelope doesn't even fit on the standard US freight line, famously there are tunnels and bridges in the East that prevent Superliner and other double-stack cars from getting into New York and other places.
It is certainly possible to send a freight train that will fit in most subway tunnels of the right gauge, but you may need a short locomotive and short cars.
(After all, what are the maintenance trains but a form of freight?)
> Standard US freight envelope doesn't even fit on the standard US freight line, famously there are tunnels and bridges in the East that prevent Superliner and other double-stack cars from getting into New York and other places.
The standard US freight envelope probably counts as Plate C, which is 10'8" wide by 15'6" above the rail. Plate H is the standard for double-stacked containers, which pushes the height to 20'2".
(The part of the loading gauge that I'd be most concerned about is actually the width of the cars at the bottom of the carbody--passenger cars tend to be somewhat narrower than standard boxcar, and given a desire to minimize the platform gap, I'd think there's a decent chance that most freight would strike the platform.)
Bart is india broad guage - a common enough standed that anyone making train parts will supply what you need. You can's share tracks with other trains but realisticaly you wouldn't do that anyway. If bart isn't running a train on some track it should be closed for maintenance not given to someone else.
The very first transcontinental railroad included telegraph communications infrastructure. [0] The dependence is necessary because it's so critical for safety and scheduling.
The US congressional committee that recommended construction of the railroad was called the "Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad and Telegraph".
So it seems very early it was decided that no, rail transit systems should not be built without communications/publishing infrastructure.
Our modern transit system has no correlation to the complexity of transit service previously. Enjoy fewer schedules, more delays, and higher costs; pick three.
Edit, for the pedantic: There's a huge difference between horizontal complexity (i.e. variety of transit options) and vertical complexity (complexity of a particular option). We have less horizontal complexity than we used to; but vertical complexity of a modern railroad is obscene compared to historical standards.
> But if it did, I assume "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded when an emergency in the local system necessitates it.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Is it that we have more or less complexity? The public transit system was far more complex in the past. Between trolleys, inter urbans, and passenger trains, we’ve lost a LOT of routes.
Theres things police could/can attach to the rail to signal trains to stop.
I think our over reliance on the telecom network has lead to safety issues- mostly in terms of "what to do when the telecom goes down." Because on the whole, its astoundingly reliable.
I don't think it needs to be taken that literal. The train orchestrator can set signals on connected tracks and read out the block statuses without needing to also be able to reach HN and the wider internet. Local can be the track you're on, not merely driving on sight (but, yes, worst case you'd hope there's still procedures for that, too)
No. It is pretty typical for anything gov to be pretty bad. Most dont work there due to how bureaucratic it is rather than the comp. This is what my friends who work in gov say at least.
There is a strong correlation between hiring low end people and being or becoming ever more bureaucratic. Bureaucracy like everything else is there for a reason.
BART is a government organization and all California government employee pay is public. You can see that BART has about 40 software engineers and they earn about 70% of the market rate:
It seems to me that they are over-worked & under-paid and are doing a good job given the circumstances.
NIMBYs have blocked BART in Silicon Valley. BART doesn't reach Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Stanford, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Santa Clara, or Cupertino. A few years ago, it finally reached San Jose.
A separate train (CalTrain) goes from SF through Silicon Valley. Last year they switched to electric trains which are faster and run more frequently. The SF CalTrain station is inconvenient (20-mins walk from downtown, under a highway), but they are working to extend CalTrain to the central SF station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce_Transit_Center#Futu... .
So Silicon Valley transit is getting better, slowly.
BART barely goes into Silicon Valley. Fremont was the closest stop up until 2017. Now it gets to North San Jose. Even if was funded, any further extension wouldn't be complete for over a decade.
I'll bite: Silicon Valley isn't known for good infrastructure, we are just able to roll back changes very easily. The cost of getting software wrong for BART is far higher than if my div is padded incorrectly.
edit: lmao, so many upvotes yet my comment has been moved so low. No more snark than a loving brother would provide. TY for your attention to this matter
I generally downvote jokes, even the clever ones, because I don't come here for that (reddit is generally more fun for that; even though many are low effort, there are many that are just so clever), and I'm mainly interested in thoughtful prose and discussion. (Which sometimes is hard to come by here, too, but jokes are obviously not it.)
Probably what's happened is you ended up with a lot of upvotes, but also a lot of downvotes. I would expect HN's software to downrank "controversial" posts, since those are likely to lead to flamewars. So even if you see +30 on your comment, the overall tallies might be something along the lines of +100 -70.
I mean despite it's history the snark is well deserved. With so many companies and people in the bay paying taxes, where the hell does all the money go?
Interesting, tidbit you added here. But snark is needed for this situation.
Yeah I was pretty blown away when I visited San Francisco just how archaic it was. In the same place you have driverless cars you have a metro payment system from like 70s USSR or something.
I don't know what your frame of reference is, but BART is above average for US public transit payment systems.
I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area CA, Portland OR, and Philadelphia PA over the last 10 years. All of those metros have comparable public transit payment systems with auto-loading special use cards and are at various stages of adopting support for tap to pay. Honestly, within the US I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted.
Internationally I think there is a larger range of experiences. I don't travel enough to properly gauge it, but I was in Paris in the last year and I don't think public transit payment was better. Still had to acquire specialized fare cards and navigate different payment systems between RATP and RER. Honestly, SF Bay comes out slightly ahead of Paris if only because Clipper is unified between various transit options (BART, Bus, Ferry, CalTrain) IMO.
> I don't know what your frame of reference is, but BART is above average for US public transit payment systems.
That doesn't change anything in the comment you're replying to. Just because it's above average for the USA, does not mean it isn't also ancient by global standards.
Some time ~11 years ago, I needed to take a bus trip in SF. There was nowhere nearby to reload a Clipper card, so I was happy when I found out I could do it online. I was less happy when the web site said it would take 24-48 hours for the newly-loaded funds to be available on my Clipper card.
I find that a little hard to believe given that you can/could service Clipper cards at any Walgreens and a bunch of other retailers (e.g. pharmacies and hardware stores).
It's also had phone based clipper card support for years now. Credit card open loop systems are pretty slow compared to a well implemented closed loop transit system like they have with suica in japan, but BART's clipper is probably about as slow in comparison
Clipper (nee TransLink) is a regional system, not a BART specific one. In fact BART was one of the last Clipper hold outs because they were hell bent on having their own BART purse. Time to authorize is really down to which readers you interact with. The current BART turnstiles+readers are pretty slow.
We watched this happen again in New York where OMNY was supposed to be the region-wide fare system, but the Port Authority decided not to use it, all the bus systems decided not to use it, and the MTA's railroads decided not to use it. It is a mild disaster. (Hilariously, the Port Authority runs two rail system, PATH and the JFK Airtrain. The Airtrain does take OMNY.)
Does Caltrain still count entering the BART station at Milbrae as not tapping off? That was always my favorite quirk of the Clipper system.
(For those not familiar... Caltrain is a tap on / tap off "proof of payment" system. You're charged the full fare when you tap on, and refunded what you didn't use when you tap off. BART and Caltrain share a platform at Milbrae. You can get off Caltrain and be right at the gate to get into BART by tapping your Clipper card. Well. This taps you into BART, but doesn't tap you off of Caltrain. To get your refund, you had to know this was a thing and go find a fare validator before tapping on to BART. You also end up being inside Caltrain's proof of payment required area without proof of payment while you walk along the platform from Caltrain's fare validator to BART's entry turnstile. I am probably the only person to ever care about this, but...)
I can tap my credit card on any public transit system in Southern Ontario (where Toronto/Waterloo are located).
I can still use an auto-loading special use card if I want. I do that so I can have a free transfer between different transit systems during my commute.
> Honestly, within the US I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted.
Chicago is pretty good too. IIRC they also have tap-to-pay. In fact, I think they had it before NYC
FWIW Septa has had tap-to-pay working for about 2 years now (so, 2 years longer than what BART just rolled out like last week). But barely a decade ago they (septa) were still using physical tokens!
When I moved to the bay area, I thought it was so rad I could use the clipper card for vta + bart + caltrain + muni + ferry all in one.
Frame of reference is the world which is reasonable given the US status in the world.
Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Dubai, Japan, UK. The USA is supposed to be among the top in terms of technology but infra is just garbage. The BART is pathetic. I don't know why you defend it with pride. Attack it, because if you hate it and you are vocal about it, things are more likely to change.
I'm sick of people defending something that's shit because of pride. It's garbage.
I have a Clipper Card on my Android phone and pay for BART and SF Muni that way.
BART does now accept credit cards at the turnstiles now (I think this started 2 years ago). Agreed that it took a long while to get there, much much longer than in other places.
Personally I prefer the Clipper method, as it's generally faster to scan than a contactless credit card payment (that's going to always be the case for closed-loop payment system). I also like that BART (and Muni, Caltrain, etc.) will pay less to Visa/Mastercard/whomever in transaction fees if I use my Clipper card and periodically top it up (which, as I have my Clipper card on my phone, happens automatically if the balance ever falls below $10). Credit card tap-to-pay is a nice convenience for out-of-town visitors and for locals who rarely use transit and don't have Clipper (or who use a physical Clipper card but forgot it at home), but I don't think it's a great way to pay for transit day-to-day.
I mean it auto fills/pays from my card. It's just one extra step at setup. I agree it would be nice to just take my card at the rail, but "Shockingly outdated" seems a bit dramatic lol. It's certainly not comparable to "70s USSR" idk where that came from
I remember when I was in college in the early 2010s finding it amusing that SEPTA still used tokens in Philadelphia. On a whim I looked it up, and apparently they did finally stop using them, but only in 2024.
I mean the answer is in the question--why are the self-driving cars (largely funded by billion-dollar private companies and VC) available in the same city as this anarchic public transit system (funded by largely by regional taxes and ridership fees)
I'm sorry to report that you're looking at that tech through rose-tinted glasses. I remember electronic systems that would routinely fail to properly scan the mag stripes. I remember all the people working retail who had special tricks to try to get a card to scan, which would help maybe 25% of the time. I remember cards becoming demagnetized for random reasons and becoming useless. I remember when merchants would have to take a physical carbon imprint of the card, and would have no idea if the card was even real until the paper was processed, days or weeks later.
Right, but venting is for a long time understood to be bad. In the same way punching your pillow or the wall is bad when you're angry.
Venting is different from expressing your negative emotions healthily. E.g. telling your significant other you are frustrated because of a problem at work is healthy. Venting about the problem, complaining, being sarcastic etc is known to reinforce anger and generally lead to unhealthy outcomes.
It causes shame, and shame paves the way for change. I'm a bay area native, and I'm fucking ashamed of the pathetic excuse of public transportation called the bart. Absolute travesty.
Think in terms of evolution. If snark didn't convey any survival benefit, why tf does it exist?
Shame does not pave the way for change. Can you think of a shame-based culture that is prone to change?
Shame is like other kinds of abusive and toxic behavior. Does child abuse convey a survival benefit? Or spousal abuse? Evolution can be a useful guide, but it takes work and research to establish an evolutionary cause of a behavior.
Seems like voting for someone else is the correct answer. If the uniparty that exists there today was in an away threatened, they might be motivated to competence. Complaining on HN won't motivate them. The snark is meant to be heard not just said to a void.
Voting hasn't done much good for this country. In fact voting is probably one of the most ineffective things for change in existence.
I'm not complaining to a void. All the readers of HN have heard me and other people complaining hear will be heard too. In aggregate many people complaining on many different venues creates an aggregate sentiment that hopefully will motivate the right people.
Cancel culture on social media has made big changes to this country and not everything necessarily good. But one thing is clear, it makes change effectively. Why not use it for the right thing?
Either way, I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece. Bart IS categorically fucking garbage, that's less of a complaint and more of a statement. I'm just stating facts.
> an aggregate sentiment that hopefully will motivate the right people.
I can't comprehend the thought that polluting this not-bay-area specific forum with complaints will somehow eventually, hopefully, make its way to a politician.
> because I need some platform to say my piece.
This is soap boxing. To affect change, it would be better to do something directly in the real world, rather than hoping for the snark to overflow and leak out of here into the real world.
>I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece.
Dude, fuck off. The full quote which you've taken out of context is this: "I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece."
I hate it when people twist statements. I literally said I am not doing that. I am just stating the god awful truth which is: Bart is total shit. But here's another truth: When you manipulate my statement and take it out of context it makes you a shit head too.
Cancel culture has made exactly zero effective changes in our society. I've noticed that you've brought up how you don't think voting is effective.
One thing that's made a huge impact on our society is that many people participating in cancel culture and promoting shame and anger as solutions also tell people not to vote.
I watched it happen three times before the last three presidential elections and it was a big part of the voter suppression messaging tracked by democracy watchdogs. I'd argue that the biggest impact cancel culture has had is electing Donald Trump twice, weakening faith in democracy, and increasing the appeal of authoritarianism.
Shame, anger, and other tactics of using abuse to promote change is simply not effective. That's beyond the fact that it's unethical.
Cancel culture is appealing because hate and anger are addictive and they make you feel powerful. But they also make it hard to feel empathy. This is basically the main point of Star Wars, beyond just wanting to make a swashbuckler film set in space.
It certainly doesn't go to Bay Area software companies. When BART originally began letting out the contract to redesign the then-already-obsolete control system in 1992, they awarded it the Hughes Aircraft. That project failed. The current attempt to deploy CBTC was awarded to Hitachi. The supplier of their fare gate system integration was originally IBM and is now CUBIC, a San Diego defense contractor.
If anything the Bay Area has utterly failed to provide systems software of lasting value to address public needs like these.
Under funded relative to what? What would the optimal amount of funding be? Are there ways that BART could cut costs to free up budget for IT upgrades?
I'm not trying to be snarky, it's just that for regular citizens who don't have time to attend BART BoD and committee meetings it's almost impossible to tell whether existing money is being wisely spent. So people get the impression that taxes are going up while service quality declines and assume the money must be going into someone's pocket.
In nearly all of the US there is an unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) debate about to what extent public transit should get a subsidy vs pay for itself.
The dominant position (even in CA) has been no or little subsidy.
The bigger issue is not just the upgrade but how brittle the system is. Modern practices like rolling releases or safe fallback modes are standard elsewhere. Critical infrastructure should not be this fragile.
In no way does BART pay for itself. 22% of their operating costs are covered by fares. Public transit is an amenity paid for by taxes. Private transport also has its own subsidy, but it's not even close.
The subsidy in BART is higher than anyone would like it now, but I do think that's still a transient response to the pandemic; either more people will have to eventually go back to riding public transit, or we'll need to drop the emergency funding it's been receiving.
Well I wasn't trying to be misleading. I do agree with what you've said wrt historical ridership, but it's been 6 years. BART docs imply that RTO is driving ridership back. We may be in a new normal wrt remote working patterns. Dropping emergency funding would, imo, lead to a death spiral of reduced maintenance and service which further reduces ridership. We can have nice things, paid for by taxes.
But if single-occupancy vehicles don't cover the costs of the infrastructure they use, the ridership moving from public to private may incur even higher costs.
Which is a bit shocking in its own way, even if the numbers were break-even instead of 20-50%.
Public transit is widely touted as being more efficient than the alternatives, but for most trips it's cheaper (factoring in maintenance, depreciation, gas, etc, and pretending that BART is as convenient and reliable) to drive than to take BART, and not by a little bit.
Income just from gas taxes, tolls, and registration cover ~half the infrastructure maintenance, so there exists effectively another $200-$300 per capita per annum subsidy, but that's nowhere near enough to make BART cost less than just driving, even if I had to account those extra fees against my driving.
Why is that? How is BART worse than driving and still losing money when it's supposedly a more efficient solution? Is it just low volume? Is the organization making bad bets? Is the premise that trains are more efficient flawed?
There are also a variety of ways that "efficiency" can be defined; your comment considers monetary efficiency, but both modes of transport have costs on society that are not considered in the numerical operating costs (pollution, opportunity cost of land use, healthcare costs due to accidents...)
The problem is that you have to go all-in on transit to make people want to ride it. You need to have frequent, reliable service, clean trains/buses, and feelings of safety. You also need the infrastructure to be designed well: build subways rather than surface-level trains. If you can't build subways, elevate the trains, or at least do your best to grade-separate, and give priority to those trains at traffic signals. Buses should have dedicated lanes.
Transit in the bay area fails at pretty much all of those things. Service is just infrequent enough to make things difficult, and unreliable enough that you worry that a late or missing bus or train will make you late. Cleanliness is inconsistent, and there are often people on drugs riding around all day, spouting nonsense. We do have some subways, but not enough of them, and there is no light rail line in SF that runs only underground, so they can only be a maximum of two cars long (otherwise they'd be too long for a single city block in some areas). All of the above-ground light rail is at mercy of car traffic (with tracks in some areas actually running in the same lanes as cars), stop signs, and traffic lights (which do not prioritize the trains). We do have some dedicated bus lanes, but they're dedicated bus+taxi lanes, and Ubers/Lyfts and regular passenger cars abuse them with little risk of being ticketed.
The end result of this is that people see that it takes 10 minutes to drive and 40 minutes to take public transit, but that they really need to add on an extra 15 minutes to the transit trip to account for delays and unreliability. So even though they don't want to to deal with parking, or pay 5-10x as much for an Uber/Lyft fare, they value their transit time more, and drive or get a car ride from an app.
Earlier this year, SF Muni was experiencing a large budget shortfall. They managed to save many jobs from being cut, which is commendable, but instead they reduced service. This just causes more people to look at the situation and choose to find an alternative that will get them where they're going faster, and more reliably.
Agreed. The other problem is connectivity - if you aren't close to a hub you can actually get to, and that BART didn't connect south along the east bay until very recently.
I once looked at how long to get to work by public transit (~20 miles each way) - it was estimated at 1.5 hours each way (multiple buses + some walking), and costing ~$12-15 each way (15+ years ago). It took 25 minutes each way to drive on a good day, 45 each way on a bad day. Worst case was ~60 minutes to get home.
On average, it would take 2+ hours less PER DAY to drive, and cost $5-10 less, calculating driving cost at $0.50/mile. Plus I could go on my own schedule, no walking in the rain, etc. There was very little "win" for public transit in any way.
If I'm reading this report correctly[1], California's car registration fees and gas taxes cover more than the cost of roads. Caltrans estimates $20.2 billion in revenue from fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, while their budget is $18.7 billion.
It also looks like public transportation is mostly paid for with sales taxes, federal loans/grants, and $1 billion of taxes on diesel fuel.
Note that Caltrans only maintains state roads; looks like from that document that they distribute some money to localities but as far as I can tell we can't see what fraction of local road maintenance that covers. Of course localities also have parking fees, traffic tickets, etc that can help cover road maintenance.
That's difficult to untangle due to multiple agencies. Local, State, and Federal. However, the answer is the overwhelming majority of road construction and maintenance is paid for by gas taxes, car registration, and tolls.
And this is the problem. If you "don't have time" to be civically engaged, then you're woefully uninformed, and you shouldn't complain about how your tax dollars are allocated, because you simply have no idea what you're complaining or arguing about.
No it’s not. Bart is just really bad, and don’t blame lack of civil engagement. We don’t have time for this shit. Plenty of countries have good public infrastructure without the need for everyone to be engaged.
It’s like saying crime is a problem in this world because of your lack of engagement in stopping crime.
Bitching on HN is one small form of engagement I can afford and I’m hoping at least one bart official sees it and realize what a shit job he’s doing or one government official sees it and realizes what a shit government official he is and changes something. Minuscule hope but why not.
Instead we get random people who will only benefit from fixing the bart actually trying to defend it as if it’s their favorite sports team.
Why do you think HN is a place to engage in a productive (necessarily means resulting in something) discussion that would improve BART? Do you think this audience is in any way qualified to discuss the monetary or tech troubles of a uniparty government run service?
Instead, we could have an interesting discussion, maybe even one involving technology, that nerds would enjoy!
You don't have to be an activist wherever you go. In fact, it's almost alway inappropriate soap boxing/virtue signaling.
The "train operators" cited were averaging around $80k for a 40 hour week. That comes to an hourly pay of around $38, when not working overtime. I don't see that as crazy high pay for a place like SF.
The bart is basically the crowning achievement of US public transit. As for the solutions coming from everyone's favourite bay Aryan Elon Musk, they are...somewhat lacking.
You're probably not going to believe this but the Hyperloop in Las Vegas:
- is now just "the loop."
- only has 8 stops
- doesnt go to the airport
- most stations are unprotected park benches in the desert sun
- vehicles arent driverless
- speeds are 26 miles per hour instead of 155
- it can take up to 20 minutes for a ride to show up
- it does not go to or from the airport.
- it only runs for 11 hours a day at some stations.
Is it even better than the LA subway anymore? (I haven’t been down since the improvements everyone says are so good)
Is it better than systems in New York, Boston, Chicago, or uh, even Philadelphia before recent septa cuts? Honest question, I haven’t been all those places, but BART seems… fine to me.
If you compare it to the commuter rail systems in those places, BART feels impressive (though less so with the service cuts). I was a regular rider on the Metro North New Haven line and had experience with SEPTA and NJT commuter rail and I was really impressed with BART when I moved out here. Peak frequency was pretty good (at least on the Red line I primarily used) and when things were on time they were very on-time ("on-time" Metro North trains were always at least a few minutes late in my experience).
If you compare it to the NYC subway, it's obviously not impressive at all (though the tech is less dated). As a rapid-transit system, BART isn't exactly a commuter rail or subway system exactly, but I think it's closer to the former than the latter.
Train rolling jokes aside, that makes sense... until it doesn't work.
A traffic control system, the thing that makes sure all trains are in known locations, safely spaced, etc.... might be necessarily centralized. There isn't really a "rolling release" you can do for a single system.
Should they have a separate test system for release before "production", sure. Do they? No idea. Is it identical to production? Clearly not. How does the saying go....
> Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough enough to have a totally separate environment to run production.
This is not how software works. Although I guess this isn't quite as catchy:
Assume all software is broken at all times. Constantly try to ensure it works and is secure. Sometimes updates break things. Test before production. Ensure test environments are similar to production. You're going to break things.
Public infrastructure is requested and funded by the government, not voluntarily done by companies that happen to base themselves nearby. Sounds more of an issue of government.
BART is unique and doesn't share much in the way of infrastructure with any other public transit system. You can't build a scalable startup targeting BART because you'd have a maximum of one customer.
The Boring Company has attempted to develop tunnel boring technology which theoretically could someday allow for cheaper expansion of all subway and light rail systems. Although in practice they haven't accomplished much and their existing projects aren't even used for rail transit.
There are also several eVTOL startups aiming to improve quality of life through rapid point-to-point transportation. But I doubt they'll succeed on any widespread basis due to battery and noise limitations.
There isn't much different about bart. Slightly wider wheel spacing and such are things anyone making trains can handle.
the real problem is thinking they are different or that they need to innovate. Trains are common and they need not innovation but minor improvements over time.
I've heard that makes procurement way more difficult, you can't just order a train car in the standard gauge from many manufacturers. It's like big and tall sizing, yes, any place can make it, but there just isn't that large volume to create a liquid market.
But is this a problem that can account of the day-to-day difficulties of managing and using BART? Yes, procuring new train cars is more difficult (and likely more expensive), but BART has lots of other problems to tackle.
The problem isn't just the rolling stock. Everything in BART is at least somewhat custom including control systems and software. Very little can be shared with public transit systems in other metro areas so there are no economies of scale. Thus BART has to do a lot in house or depend on a limited set of specialized vendors at great expense.
If you had to buy a special car to be allowed to drive on Bay Area roads because they weren't the same as the roads in Chicago or Boston then a Honda Civic would cost $1M.
Basically everything on BART is unique to BART. Odd loading gauge. Odd track gauge. Lightweight aluminum chassis so none of the aerial infrastructure is designed to carry a heavier, more traditional car. Multi-part wheels with aluminum hubs to make extra noise. Non-standard traction voltage so BART struggled mightily to find replacement thyristors for the old cars. BART still struggles to keep their electric substations running. The original signaling system makes some sense, but trying to replace it with another NIH product in the 90s made zero sense. The original trains had glass with compound curves and BART could not find a vendor who could reliably recreate them. The current trains indicate ADA seating with the color green, reserving blue for the regular seats.
If it can be made differently or done differently BART will absolutely try to do so.
the real problem is thinking they are different or that they need to innovate.
> BART is unique and doesn't share much in the way of infrastructure with any other public transit system. You can't build a scalable startup targeting BART because you'd have a maximum of one customer.
The notion of a startup running BART is fucking horrifying.
I didn't read the comment criticizing VC's for not investing in BART or a company to make BART better, I read it as a criticism of the American system for letting things like VC's and other rich entities/people lock up unconscionable amounts of wealth for either hoarding or funding stupid shit as opposed to make sure our country still functions and people can eat.
And please just spare me the capitalist apologia. I get it, people wanna be rich. On balance I don't give a shit, get as rich as you can, just as long as it doesn't require millions of people to suffer so you can. If you having objectively, factually, more than anyone needs to be happy requires a ton of people to go without necessities, IMO, that is not a right you should have, and I don't care how communist that makes me.
You could take 90% of Bezos', Musk's, or Gates' wealth and they would still never have to work again and live in exceptional luxury. There is no goddamn reason in the world to let them keep it while we have people starving.
The problem with the US is it's been taken over by finance capitalists, and lets be honest, VC's are finance capitalists. And finance capitalists are essentially slumlords.
Their first reflex when it comes to paying for infrastructure and maintenance is to think what that'll do to their short term CAP rates. And then they get angry.
They did. They started before yesterday's shutdown, and worked all night, they tried to bring up the system for startup, and it came up, then crashed.
It was state of the art on 1962 when it was designed, and remained state of the art until the 1980s, when the signal system started breaking down, and the the late 80s upgrade which had a train presence glitch, which caused almost all the system to get resignaled.
So by the 2000s again it's showing its age, and they got a 32 processor zSeries mainframe.
Brake problem last week, and the this on Friday? Now it's getting like New York, even more. Whatsmatteryou?
Nothing, but rewriting a train system from scratch and testing it is incredibly expensive and disruptive. Eventually you do have to do it, and we might not agree with their trade offs here, but it's not unreasonable.
It doesn't require a mainframe but that was the cheapest path to keep things running without rewriting the software. The IBM Z platform is very good at maintaining backward compatibility. If you don't constantly keep your applications software up to date with support for new platforms then eventually you find yourself with very limited platform options.
Sooooo much snark, and so little interest into what BART actually runs on!
Originally, BART was a master stroke of digital integration in the 70's, and it's digital voices announcing the next trains were a thing of the future: An early accessibility feature before we even knew what those were, really.
Reading:
https://www.bart.gov/about/history
https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/traincontrol#:~:text=To%...
I know what it runs on! It's a 5' 6" in gauge, usually used in India, and used no where else in the US.
https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220708-2
The larger engineering lesson from that is you're probably better off making standard solutions work for your situation than custom solutions. The wider gauge solved(?) the stability problem, but at the cost of always needing custom rolling stock, but more importantly, making Bart build-out significantly more expensive and unable to take advantage of existing track. That hurts the viability of the Bart ecosystem.
> wider gauge solved(?) the stability problem, but at the cost of always needing custom rolling stock
Why not use Indian rolling stock? Modern Indian metro trains are quieter and more comfortable than BART.
Indian _metros_ generally use standard gauge. The BART _may_ be the only metro using this gauge in the world.
Serious train nerd, here!
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I believe in one of the Planet of the Apes sequels, they used a BART construction site, because of how futuristic it looked.
Pre-opening BART tubes were definitely used for George Lucas's first feature film, THX-1138: https://www.sfgate.com/streaming/article/bart-transbay-tube-...
A Streets of San Francisco episode, starting a very young Michael Douglas, was set in the BART tunnels, still under construction, as well.
I lived mostly car free in Atlanta because the Marta station is one flight of stairs down from the airport terminal, and I could get to my lab in GSU in downtown Atlanta in less than 30 minutes, midtown Georgia tech campus in similar time, my first apartment in Lindberg in 40 minutes, and my second apartment in Sandy Springs on the other side of the city in less than an hour from the airport. Commute to and from my school/lab/apartment was always under 30 minutes and always faster by train compared to car.
These days I fly to the bay area to my office in East Bay. It's 2+ hours commute from either SFO or even OAK because you need to change buses 2 or 3 times. Add 1 more if you count taking the airport shuttle to the BART station. And SJC does not even have a BART connection.
There's fundamental design flaw in public transportation in the US, they almost never connect the population centers. Part of the reason why people are discouraged from using them and they don't get the funding to stay up to date.
I travel to Japan twice a year for business and for vacation, and coming back to the Bay Area and dealing with its transportation infrastructure is always jarring.
I find the Bay Area very difficult to get around. The roads are jammed with commuters who live far from their workplaces due to the housing situation. There is not enough housing near job centers, which bids up the prices of available housing to very high levels that requires FAANG-level salaries to clear unless one wants to have an army of roommates. Thus, many people have to commute, some from far-flung exurbs and even from Central Valley cities like Stockton and Modesto.
Public transportation in the Bay Area is better than most American cities, but it’s still underpowered for the size of the metro area. Not all residences are served by trains, and bus service is often infrequent and subject to delays. Missing a connection can lead to major inconveniences (such as a long 30-60 minute wait) or even being unable to reach your destination without an über-expensive Uber or Lyft ride. There’s also matters of safety and cleanliness on public transportation; every now and then I smell unpleasant odors like marijuana and urine, and occasionally I see sketchy people.
It’s a major step down from Tokyo, where public transportation is ultra-convenient, reliable in non-emergency situations, impeccably clean, and generally safe.
The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues. If it were merely technology, we’d have solutions by now.
Just came back from a vacation in Japan, and completely agree - even compared to the (much better than SF) danish public transport system the Japanese are orders of a magnitude better on so many levels!
Nu then - having 37 mio people just in one city, Tokyo, does require you to get the logistics in order (all of Denmark is just around 6 mio…)
They should fly everyone who works at BART to a conference in Tokyo for a week and make them ride the subways until the shame sets in.
When they return to their hotel rooms at the end of the week they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.
I don't think the problem is BART employees. The problem is twofold:
1. The community doesn't care. Leaving trash and making a mess is acceptable behavior. Or at least, it isn't called out (which I can understand, as there are safety issues around calling out bad behavior in public). This is the biggest factor: the vast majority of Japanese people wouldn't even consider leaving trash or making a mess on transit.
2. I'm sure BART leadership would be happy to combat this problem by cleaning more frequently and removing sketchy people from trains. But where is the funding for this going to come from?
> they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.
Even in jest, it's pretty fucked up to insinuate that someone should commit ritual suicide for any reason, let alone because they work for a transit agency that can't keep its trains clean. Please don't do that here. Or anywhere.
I don’t think BART employees really have any say in where BART stations do and don’t go, or how many trains they get. Try city councils instead, although none of them take BART anyways so they won’t know the difference.
One way to look at this is that the Bay Area focuses on transportation technology that works and scales regardless of the rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible.
And the Bay Area, largely, eats its own dogfood.
There is no faster, more powerful public transportation system than a city that allows Uber to offer mototaxi service. Uber was allowed to turned that on in Rio at some point in the last couple years and it puts busses and subways to shame. The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero.
The deaths per mile on the subway must be 3 orders of magnitude lower than the skilled motorcyclists.
Especially if they're lane splitting in a crowded city street to speed through traffic jams. That's incredibly dangerous.
https://i.redd.it/rviipp7czy131.jpg
And the rail fatalities are only that high because of people using it for suicide.
The transit situation in the bay area is so bad that even the FAANG companies run their own private transit systems of commuter buses. I doubt there's many people paying for an Uber 2x a day from Fremont to Santa Clara with any regularity, but thousands of commuters do that trip daily by car and train.
Why are the socio-political stars aligned in tens of countries across Europe and Asia but not in the US, if such alignment is so rare?
I might argue that the bay area focuses on transportation technology that is flashy and gets around existing regulations because it is new, with hardly any regard at all for how it scales.
One thing I wonder about is the extreme localism of US transport. As far as I can see from visiting, the Muni buses and subway/trams cover only SF proper, and kinda abruptly cut off before you get to places that are theoretically other cities, but in practice close enough that they’d be treated as suburbs of SF elsewhere (South San Francisco, say). That seems to have its own independent transport (except for BART and Caltrain) which seems pretty bizarre.
Unfortunately the problem is literally the way the government is structured from an electoral + mathematical perspective. Particularly heinous failure mode is polarization, which has been the norm for 50+ years (really started after Vietnam). Biased towards inaction and status quo structurally. The last sustainably unifying event was WWII, which doesn’t bode well.
In my opinion, there are two factors at play: (1) social division and (2) it’s easy in America for self-interested people and organizations to block progress by weaponizing due process.
I’ll expound on the first point. European countries and East Asian countries generally have a stronger sense of cultural cohesion, while America has many deep divisions such as:
1. Social liberalism versus social conservatism, which also correlates to a secular versus cultural Christian worldview.
2. Racial and ethnic divides with sometimes centuries of bad blood
3. Class divides between the poor, the working class, the middle class, and the wealthy.
These divisions make it harder for people to come together to work for the common good. There are some politicians who shamelessly act in the interest of their voter bases with little regard for those outside their bases, and there are also people who are suspicious of even well-intended proposals since there may be hidden motives behind them.
In Uganda and east africa they call the motorcycle taxis "bodaboda" and they're generally regarded as the only reliable way to get through insane traffic. They're also exceedingly dangerous.
Why is Uber so much better than Grab?
Because Grab is a copy of Uber and it would not exist without Uber. It may be that Grab is an equal (or perhaps better) implementation right now. But the entire category of app-based ride-sharing was created by Uber.
The Bay Area is crippled by people who live comfortably within biking distance of Whole Foods, Zeitgeist, and their Apple shuttle bus stop. These people can't fathom why anyone would want to drive a dirty car and blight the city with roads.
It costs almost a billion dollars to build a mile of BART, due to political corruption 65% of all MUNI service lines are to/from Chinatown, we keep the "iconic" cable car lines going even though they have the highest rate of accidents per mile and per vehicle in the country.
We just need to double or triple down on roads and let things like Waymo and Uber save us from ourselves.
Bikebrains rant about things like "induced demand" without actually understanding that building additional infrastructure simply serves pent up demand. They point to things like the Katy Freeway which was expanded to 26 lanes but "traffic got worse" - ignoring the fact that travel speeds increased by 60% for almost a decade until Houston's population ballooned to what it is today.
If I wanted to live in Houston, I'd live in Houston. I'm one of those "bike brained" morons that is happy that are getting rid of a lane on Grand Ave because pedestrians keep getting killed.
Which is exactly why San Francisco never managed to recover after COVID. The die hard radicals like yourself can't think about anyone other than themselves and without forced RTO nobody from the greater Bay Area wants to come into the city anymore.
Enjoy the return of 80s era San Francisco.
> The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues
Well and population / population density.
China is similar - the big 15-20m+ metros have crazy good subway systems. But SF bay area is half the low end? 7.5m or so? Harbin is 10m and its subway is kinda meh. Down at 5m metro population in e.g. Changchun or Jinan and it's a pretty piddling subway/city rail system.
This isn’t a great excuse. The Berlin metro area is smaller than that, and had to contend with _being split in half_ for 40 years, and still has an infinitely better public transport system than SF, say.
I don't think this is a very big reason. I'm absolutely convinced people in the US are just used to cars, and like with any new piece of software, it has to be 10x better in some way for people to start using it en masse.
Maybe it's a matter of breaking down the costs for everyone to see, or maybe it's a matter of the city providing bus wifi so you can get some guaranteed access to the internet while riding, or maybe it's a matter of putting a police officer on every train.
But busses, aside from rush hour in probably the 10 largest cities in the nation, are always going to be way less convenient than a car. It has to stop a million times, there's no good way to guarantee you'll arrive on time (it's impossible to create a bus route where they stay evenly spaced like a train might handle better), and they never actually get you where you're going - just kinda nearby. Maybe you can transfer onto a bus now, but that's two modes of transportation. And God forbid there's a number of people combining their bus usage with a bicycle. Gotta wait for them to walk around front, unhook it, and hopefully put the bike rack back up so the driver doesn't have to get out and do it himself... etc, etc, etc.
Plus, I'm too busy to find it at the moment, but there's a study showing most people just want public transit so some other people use it and get off the highway. As in, they just want public transit so their car commute improves.
This will almost certainly never get major support; it's just too miserable of a system to overtake our already-crazy-convenient cars.
That's a depressing take.
First off, you're not too busy to find it. Because you're probably not used to doing it. All you have to do is to tell your favorite map app where you want to go, then switch to the public transit tab. You should try it.
Right now if I look at routes from Newark to OAK or SFO, it shows around 40 minutes by car and 1:40 hour by public transportation. If I had a plane to catch in 2 hours, I'd never take the bus. Here's why.
About 40 minutes of that 1:40 involves walking to the nearest bus stop. You could take an Uber instead and cut it down to 10 minutes. But that's problem A, public transportation doesn't have enough coverage.
There are 2 bus changes involved. The first one, Newark to Union City or Palo Alto, depending on whether you're going to OAK or SFO, runs every 30 minutes. That's problem B, the routes are not frequent enough.
The last bus change, very close to OAK/SFO, are design flaw- problem C. You really should be able to get off BART and take a short walk or shuttle to terminal. Instead, it's another bus ride that'll take 40 minutes.
From a regular commuter's pov, problems A/B/C are the issues that'll discourage someone from taking public transportation. Like other comments mentioned, it's not really a resource, infra or tech issue. It's a social/political issue that's preventing public transportation from expanding, both in coverage, frequency and in terms of connecting big population centers where it matters. All the issues that you mentioned, like stopping million times, guarantee of arriving on time, bicycles, and even safety and cleanliness, will go away if you solve the problems I mentioned- speaking from my experience taking public transportation for 30+ years in the US and abroad.
Huh? I’m too busy to find the study supporting the point I was making. I think you may have misunderstood?
Anyways, maybe if we solve all these issues, things will improve, and I hope it does! Still, I’m with those survey respondents - I really do not care how hard cities work to overcome public transit issues. I’ll never take it. I just have no incentive to do so, and I like my car. It’s private. It’s fast as hell. It’s pretty. It’s comfy. I wouldn’t get even one of those in a bus. I’d be pretty shocked if this wasn’t a standard response.
As an aside: it’s weird and disconcerting that you’re finding a different opinion to be depressing. Is it possible you’re just really disconnected?
That's a problem in San Francisco proper too. If I think about my trips to Japan, in the population centers, at best, a car trip will take about the same time as a public transit trip, but the majority of the time transit will be faster, sometime significantly so.
But inside SF, even during rush hour, it'll still nearly always be faster for me to drive (or get an Uber). The reason is because there's precious little transit infra that doesn't share the road to some extent, and even when there are dedicated bus lanes or off-street train tracks, there's still traffic lights, and the buses and trains are slow and make enough stops that any gains are lost. Then on top of that, transfers take time, and if you're even slightly off on your timing, you might have to wait for up to 15 minutes for the next bus at your transfer point.
I agree with your assessment of inter-city trips as well; SFO airport to my house in SF is also so frustrating, because I live a few blocks from a Caltrain station, but having to go from SFO->BART->Caltrain->home... that transfer in the middle is a killer. My home is only a few blocks farther to the freeway than to the train station, so even in rush-hour traffic it's still only a 20 minute drive, while BART+Caltrain will take 30-45 minutes, and that's during a time of day the Caltrain trains run at their most frequent.
I've lived in SF for 15 years, and I think I've only taken BART/Caltrain to or from SFO a handful of times. I can't even remember the last time; it's been at least 10 years (probably before Uber/Lyft was a thing). Nowadays I always take a Lyft, and while I cringe at the price ($30-$50, depending on time of day), it's so worth it when a) I'm worried about not making my flight if transit is slower than I expect, or b) I'm getting back home and just want to be home.
And yeah, I get that I'm privileged enough to be able to afford to take a car. Many people aren't; they have to pay with their time, which just really sucks. We never get that time back.
Part of the reason why people are discouraged s/from/by/ using them and they don't get the funding to stay up to date.
People are constantly being encouraged to take public transpo, but once they finally do, they realize why they hadn't before.
Chicago (Blue Line from O'Hare) and NYC (M60 from Laguardia or Skytrain to MTA/LIRR from JFK) are also good in that regard.
I've been to Chicago once but yet to visit New York, and yes public transportation was very much accessible in Chicago as well.
September 5, 2025, from late Thursday night into Friday morning caused by a server upgrade
On May 8, 2025, from late Thursday night into Friday morning caused by a server upgrade
On November 25, 2013, from late Thursday night into Friday morning caused by a server upgrade
https://web.archive.org/web/20131124212037/http://www.bart.g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/us/bart-train-shutdown.ht...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/bart-transit-outage-ba...
Broke the read-only Friday rule…
I know this is a tongue in cheek casual comment, but this article is a really good and important counterpoint: https://charity.wtf/2019/05/01/friday-deploy-freezes-are-exa...
Not to jump on your comment (since there have been quite a few other replies already) but just to add another personal anecdote: having been on the more senior end of a junior merge/deploy gone wrong and losing a Friday night or a weekend ping, I'm okay with an additional empty day throughout the week.
I've found that little things like that breed a growing resentment and stress that compounds, until someone wants to leave the company. Thursday night outage that I have to hop on? Much smaller deal than a weekend where I have established plans.
One can argue "why was the PR approved in the first place", but sometimes people make mistakes. It especially sucks when there are limited people that know how to troubleshoot and resolve the production issues with a system, even more so when the on-call individual may have not even reviewed the code initially.
All that said - I'd love to deploy as normal on Fridays! I've just found that the type of businesses I've worked at can wait until Monday, and that makes our weekends less risky.
It is not about fear, it is about risk management.
As an engineer I have absolutely no issue deploying on a friday. But friday bar starts at 4pm, and after that I am not sober before monday.
So leadership don't want me to do it - which is probably wise.
I enforce a work/life balance and this is how the team loses a weekend when something goes wrong.
I understand the article's emphasis on exercising good judgment around release timing, but read-only Fridays are not there for the people who generally exercise good judgment. If you are the sort of person/team that is likely to deploy late on a Friday afternoon despite the inherent risk, you are likely the kind of person/team who underestimates or ignores risks in general. This includes the risk of a given deployment, thus exacerbating the impact of your late-Friday deployments. It is therefore sensible to simply take the decision out of your hands.
I hate how people hear "read only friday" and decide to turn it into a CI/CD dick measuring contest.
For "read only friday" to have been a novel idea in the first place, you needed a starting point where conventional practice already was making changes live without stopping to consider the time/day of week.
I really suspect the detractors represent a workflow that would break (or at least introduce pain) if unable to push to production for a few days. So they have to give the hard sell on the benefits of continuous deployment.
Perhaps. But what's the risk-reward? No matter how good your CI/CD is, the risk is nonzero. Do I really need to ship this today and potentially open a can of worms this afternoon?
This post is weird to me, because it sorta feels like it's attacking a straw man.
The idea the author seems to be advocating for is is that, while maybe you sometimes/often shouldn't deploy on a Friday (or even not at the very end of any workday), there should never be a stated policy in place that freezes deployments.
And yeah, I've been at places where they have freezes on weekends, holidays, right around the company's conference, etc. But they're never 100% freezes: if something goes wrong or is necessary, you just get a manager to approve it, and off you go.
I think the author's exhortation that developers should all be able to exercise their judgment to make these calls is a nice idea in theory, but falls flat in practice. Every developer will not always have all the necessary context in order to exercise that judgment. Even those who do, and generally have good judgment, will screw up sometimes because they are tired or are working under some sort of time pressure, or something.
Having a policy -- with some flexibility and exceptions allowed -- makes it easier to avoid those sorts of lapses in judgment. And that's a good thing.
But the whole article is just all over the place to me. The author starts by implying that people should be "ashamed" about identifying with a no-Friday-deploy policy, but then softens to the point of saying it's fine to have a personal policy of no late-afternoon deploys, no shipping big changes right before the weekend, etc. But that somehow if that's instead company policy, that's a bad thing. Nope, I don't buy it.
To counter the counterpoint. Even if you are better at pushing to production than 90% of the rest of your industry it is still elevated risk and stress so you should avoid it for the sake of your employees. Productivity vs life. If your counterpoint is to claim that you are just as stable pushing to production as you are when you don't, then I would just suggest you're delusional or lying.
this is just mindless blogospam/clickbait/"buy my thing" - the author even admits shipping big changes on friday is a bad idea
This reads like someone who works on a small and simple system.
"Deploy on every commit" lmao
"Shipping software and running tests should be fast. Super fast. Minutes, tops." hahah
Charity's been running honeycomb.io, a SaaS startup with millions of dollars of revenue, for 9 years now, after being an early-stage engineer at Parse, a mobile backend-as-a-service startup that powered half a million mobile apps. She's talking about what she's made a reality at her company and its clients.
Deploy to what? Staging on every merged PR (commit to stg), and prod deploy on every commit to main? That sounds reasonable to me, and I've done some variation of it on most projects for the last 10 years or so without issue.
Well people aren't talking about not deploying to staging on Fridays.
And there are hints to what the author actually means, like "Each deploy should be owned by the developer who made the code changes."
That just isn't feasible in a system that's of any reasonable size.
Yeah, what happens when Team A makes a change and Team B makes a different, seemingly unrelated change, and they both get merged and pushed... only to have a dozen customers discover that if someone is using Feature X that Team A just worked on and Feature Y that Team B just worked on while they have Uncommon Option Q enabled, then their backend process server will crash taking down their entire instance.
Who's fault is that?
Asking because I have been the customer with Uncommon Option Q enabled.
> "Shipping software and running tests should be fast. Super fast. Minutes, tops." hahah
You mean to tell me not everyone works on some SaaS product outside of critical path?
Wait... (Obligatory) Did they forget to mount a scratch monkey?
Everyone here blaming BART and bureaucracy for being inefficient when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting (and zoning preventing housing/badly needed ridership near transit stops). Yes it's expensive to build transit just like it's expensive to build anything in America, which we should fix but that is not unique to BART.
It's quite possible the system will collapse next year if we don't pass increased taxes to fund it in 2026 https://www.bart.gov/about/financials/crisis.
Just last year we failed to pass a common sense bill to make it so we only need a 51% majority for transit bills in the future, indicative of how opposed we still are to transit in the Bay Area https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-proposi....
Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.
So let's be clear, most of the issues with BART are due to anti-transit and suburban voters starving it of support.
Hilarious that from 2020 and to this day ridership has collapsed but BART operating expenses went up despite that and all the efficiencies they talk about in your link. Kind of tells you everything you need to know about where the money is actually going...
Just to compare with another expensive city - BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget.
You would not expect a ridership reduction to have any significant reduction in operating expenses. Full trains costs roughly the same as an empty trains.
If ridership is down, I'd expect them to run fewer trains.
The problem of course then is that you create a whole in the bucket. Fewer trains -> BART becomes less convenient -> people choose other options -> lower ridership -> fewer trains -> less convenient ....
> BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget
I would think increased ridership means increased efficiency.
Intreased ridership almost always means better service. Run more service on the lines you have, and run / build more routes so you have a useful network.
That is mostly a zoning issue, have you seen the density around Tube stations? Compare that to the density around half of the BART stations which are big parking lots surrounded by single family houses. Of course it's cheaper to run a transit system in a city with twice the population density and population in the metro area.
Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data/
BART is one of the most cost efficient systems in the US: https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1d27dvo/us_cost_pe.... It's so efficient that pre-pandemic it got the majority of its funding through fares, not taxes.
By the way it costs exorbitant amounts to build highways too and you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you.
So quite frankly you don't know what you're talking about.
BART service area population is comparable to Greater London
> Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data
If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km
> you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you
uhm what?
BART is not a typical metro system in that it serves a lot of suburbs that have very little population density, and was mainly built as a commuter service to get people to downtown SF. So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has without massive upzoning and more infill stations. Comparing it to the Tube which mostly serves the city of London is not an apples to apples comparison. Look at the costs of building new rail infrastructure in London and it's comparable to here.
> If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km
What you're talking about in that link is the extension to San Jose, not day to day BART operations. That one does deserve criticism as they've made poor decisions like not doing cut/cover because NIMBYs in San Jose don't want any disruption to streets. So instead we are tunneling to the Earth first. Elsewhere in the world municipalities understand that it's worth temporary disruptions to roads to bring down costs, but of course America is unique and we have to learn these lessons ourselves.
I'm not sure why we've drifted talking about new lines/stations. Both Tube and BART hardly built anything in the last 10 years. I was only remarking on operating costs for what was already built by pandemic and the fact that ridership seems completely untangled from it.
It seems to me that BART management did what most of other government bureaucracies did around here during covid - threw their feet on the desk and took an extended 2+ year sabbatical
The infill stations don't make much sense because they're also low density housing. The fundamental problem with mass transit in CA is the insane insistence to remain low density despite the overwhelming demand for housing. It's the sin that leads to all of the problems the state faces.
No, treating BART as a low-density transit system while granting them right of ways in some of the most dense areas of the country doesn't make much sense. 30th & Mission and 98th & San Leandro would've absolutely made sense while neither Millbrae nor SFO should've ever been built.
> have you seen the density around Tube stations?
As a former tube-commuter and occasional BART-user, I'd wager that possibly a majority of the commuting trips in zone 1 are taking people from a mainline train station to somewhere, and then back in the evening. That option barely even exists in the Bay Area - indeed every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.
> ...every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.
Why? Last I checked, it's
Is there some complication I'm missing (other than the fact that neither BART nor Caltrain are 24/7 services)?Depending on the year and day of the week it also involved a transfer at San Bruno.
Fortunately they've since reverted back to always running to Millbrae from the airport.
Once you actually get to Millbrae you then get to deal with BART's whole NIH problem manifesting as a refusal (up until recently) to offer timed connections with Caltrain. And, of course, up until 2021 actually getting between the BART and Caltrain platforms involved a ton of walking.
I wouldn't consider myself anti-transit - before Covid I took BART every work day and currently walk to my office. And have never regularly commuted by car in the Bay Area. But in SF, we seem to keep throwing money at transit orgs through ballot measures, and getting little tangible results in return. I voted for funding increases for Muni for years, with supposed reliability / service enhancements that never seemed to materialize. It's disappointing that rather than hearing that voters are more hesitant to fund this now vs previously, the reaction would be to try to lower thresholds to get things passed.
Even with the new Central Subway that opened in SF (which I assume cost billions given how long it took to develop), wasn't a clear net-win. Muni closed other Metro routes when those opened. Depending on where you're going, you might be worse off now.
While RTO may be increasing ridership numbers, Covid did change population and commuting dynamics. Transit orgs need to adapt, and maybe accept downsizing / focusing more on a smaller scope. In Bart's case, maybe it would be wiser to focus on the core Bart system, and not the more recent expansions (the East Bay trains that are totally separate from the rest of Bart, and the Oakland airport train). Maybe a stronger look should be taken at merging the disparate transit organizations themselves, to reduce administrative overhead?
Caltrain seems to be doing better than others - they have financing worries themselves, but are on a better track from my understanding. Pun semi-intended :)
Transit is important, and I feel like the current organizations keep letting us down.
Do you have a sense of how much you're paying in taxes that is being mismanaged by BART? I think it's far less than you realize.
The numbers are here [1]. BART generates about $300M in revenue and gets $500M in "financial assistance," of which $320M is sales tax revenue.
[1] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/FY26%20Adop...
I meant like as an individual do you have a sense? $320M in sales tax is not really very much. Because people are often upset we spend too much on transit but also upset that our transit isn't as good as, say, the Tube. Can't really have it both ways.
BART taxes are not even in the top 100 list of expenses I worry about personally.
There is a half cent sales tax in BART counties, 75% of which goes to BART.
> when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting
Everyone wants more services and lower taxes, but they vote for the lower taxes and get made when there are no services. Those things often don't go together. It's okay to either accept fewer services with less tax burden, or higher taxes with more services (the side I generally lean towards, within reason).
True, but it ignores the point of who various services are for. Wealthy professionals in the suburbs tend to vote against mass transit they don't plan on using.
It's pretty hard to keep from drowning in despair when one realizes that almost everywhere else in the USA except maybe NYC, the situation is worse.
Hey, the Boston T runs some of the time!
Jokes aside, I'd like to see a stack ranking of US public transit. I'd assume NYC and DC are top dogs, but I'm curious about other cities.
I don’t have a specific link but I’d be surprised if the CityNerd channel on YouTube didn’t have a (recent) video on it. Just as a disclaimer: Even if you don’t agree with his politics, he does take care to explain his data set sources and methodology, so it’s likely a useful source for this sort of thing.
NYC is definitely the top dog. There was a recent ranking for metro areas ranked by walkability, bike-ability, public transit, and some other urban score, but divided by average rent price for a 1BR apartment. NYC still came out #1 despite the rather large denominator.
The BART is better than the DC metro in my experience. The DC Metro is great for commuters into metro center, but it shuts down too early, and is totally impractical for moving around the outside of the city/suburbs. The BART looks visibly in worse shape, but you can quite easily live car-free in SF
IMO, if LA can maintain its rate of progress from the last 10 years going forward, they will have a better system than SF before long.
It even has direct service from two metro lines to the airport.
The failure of Proposition 5 doesn't indicate that California voters are opposed to transit. That was a very broad proposition which lowered the voting threshold for local governments to issue bonds for a wide variety of projects, not just transit. Local governments are already facing debt problems and making it easier to take on more debt would set them up for serious future fiscal problems.
It looks like BART usage is way down from pre-pandemic levels, around half of what it used to be, and to top it off the BART system has added over 300 additional employees since 2019. It may be a tough sell to convince taxpayers to fork over more money to them.
> Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.
Didn't bigTech start buses going directly to their campus as a perk?
Yeah this is basically the private market filling in for our lack of transit down south. Most every other major city doesn't have this, you just take the metro to work like a normal person.
What metro :/
Good ol' Prop 12, guaranteeing that everything will be underfunded one way or another.
didn't realize cage free pigs lead to such dramatic second order effects =)
must have meant Prop 13
Whoops, yes, that was the one. Caught it too late for an edit.
Except, as always bureaucratic pay raises.
Are there any technical details yet? What was upgraded?
I’m at a conference at Stanford University right now. I was going to take BART and the Dumbarton Express to avoid having to drive in traffic, but when I drove to the Dublin BART station, I found out BART wasn’t running. I ended up having to drive to Stanford, since the only public transportation over the hills separating Dublin/Pleasanton from the inner East Bay is the Altamont Commuter Express, which is much less convenient due to its few runs. Thankfully traffic wasn’t that bad today, but going home is going to be a traffic nightmare since it’s a Friday.
I wish there were more bus options that connected the outer East Bay (Dublin, Pleasanton, San Ramon, Walnut Creek, etc.) to the inner East Bay.
> but going home is going to be a traffic nightmare since it’s a Friday.
I've never understood the Friday traffic issue. Are there people that normally stay in the city during the week and only go home on Fridays causing more traffic? How is there more traffic on Friday and the rest of the week? Friday being one of the forced RTO days, but the Friday traffic thing was known well before WFH/RTO fights. Then again, the root cause of most traffic always seems much more anticlimatic
Interestingly enough, even with RTO, I’ve noticed that driving on a Friday morning is much smoother than Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. Despite the BART shutdown, it was smooth sailing southbound down 680 from Pleasanton to Milpitas. I normally commute from San Ramon to Fremont, and going through Pleasanton and Sunol on a midweek morning is rough.
I think there are many people in the Bay Area who start their weekend trips Friday afternoons and evenings.
It's people leaving home, for the weekend. Friday traffic extends along I-80 (and eventually Hwy 50) all the way to Nevada, and beyond.
Friday afternoon traffic is people leaving the Bay Area for weekend trips. The Bay Area is effectively completely surrounded by mountains so there are a very limited number routes out of the Bay Area relative to the number of people.
You make it sound like this is a Bay Area thing. It's not. I've never lived in the Bay Area, yet everyone still dreads Friday afternoon traffic. I get holiday weekends but just a random Friday still gets that vibe
> Are there people that normally stay in the city during the week and only go home on Fridays causing more traffic?
In NYC people going out of the city for the weekend (Airbnb or their own house somewhere).
I'm curious what percent of HN is based in the bay area for this to hit the front page so quickly. I suppose it could in part be that it was posted when people are commuting in?
A tech failure taking down a big government thing is certainly HN worthy. And BART is relatively famous, as such things go. It’s a name people know, as opposed to of it was the Minnesota DMV system. That would be a fine story too but no one knows the name for that.
Ironically, the Northstar rail line (one part boondoggle, one part "would have worked if it went all the way to st cloud", depending on who you ask) is shutting down Jan 3 or 4 in 2026, so I wouldn't be surprised to see articles on it and/or the met council before then.
That's a shame. The Twin Cities set a relatively high bar for American public transit, too. The light rail is fantastic. I only wish you could take the green line all the way out to SLP or Plymouth.
Back when I lived in the cities 15 or so years ago, it was still notably slower than driving, so many if not most people still drove everywhere.
Public transit wasn't as gross as stories I've heard of elsewhere, but it also wasn't something I wanted to take on a regular basis if I could help it. I think I used it regularly for about six months or so one year in particular, and the lack of warm bus stops meant standing in freezing rain, sleet, snow and more.
Maybe things have improved since I lived there, but hearing that they are the high bar is pretty sad.
I lived there from mid-2016 through late 2020, about 4.5 years in all. I know the Green Line was a relatively new thing when I was there.
> it was still notably slower than driving, so many if not most people still drove everywhere
I'd argue that those folks are missing the point. Sure, when I was commuting by Minneapolis public transit, it was slower than driving. But you know what I wasn't doing while I was on the bus/train? Driving! I was reading, writing, daydreaming, sleeping, any number of activities more pleasant than sitting on I-94.
Standing out there in the winter could be brutal, I'll admit. Then again, the light rail stops were heated, and the park & ride I transferred at in Plymouth had a nice climate-controlled lobby. The only time I was really out there was standing in the driveway in front of my office, waiting for the shuttle to pick me up.
Twin Cities public transit is a damn sight better than what we have in Milwaukee, that's for sure. Low bar, but the Twin Cities clear it handily.
Ah yeah, that makes more sense. I lived about half a mile or a mile south of where the green line now runs and had to take a bus down university ave.
Sadly, my neighborhood had long waits between buses that connected to university ave, and neither my neighborhood or university ave had heated stops. So, odds were pretty good that I'd suffer the weather for 20-30 minutes each trip.
I also tend to get motion sickness if I read or use a laptop in cars or busses, so there really wasn't anything I could do on them that I couldn't do by driving anyway.
BART specifically is also a kind of lighting rod of the political, social, economic fissure that runs through American culture; the difference in perspective of the adversarial camps, like different tribes.
It is a microcosm, a bit of a litmus test, and an ideological battlefield of the embattled sides. But this example specifically is also a kind of infighting, of the more anarcho-libertarian tech camp that enjoys highlighting and dripping with self-righteousness about any tech related failure of government, i.e., or at least government that does not align with their ideology or control over it.
This fault line of America runs right through things like BART like an effigy or idol that America performs a kind of ritual form of battle on as proxies for all out civil war. Think of tribes you may have seen videos of where they do all kinds of elaborate dances and blustering displays and fake charges to demonstrate their power.
The glee about this outage happening to BART is very much because the libertarian tech progressive types are amused and validated by it, where something more like rashes of violent attacks on BART riders by menaces to society might be something that the "heartland" may become gleeful about, as evidence for how the ideology of SF is messed up. In the cases of violent attacks on BART riders, another camp/tribe would come out and demonstrate their fierceness; the "socially liberal" types from all over the country and even world, would rush to the defense of their ideological idols with a bewildering storm of rationalization, delusion, and excuse making for violent attackers and in defense of their ideology/cult.
It's just elaborate war dances around an idol/ideology to demonstrate how fierce and powerful each party is. BART is just one of the idols in America around which these displays of simulated conflicts happen.
I'm not even on the same continent but I'm still reading this, including the comments...
HN has always had a huge bay area focus.
Is it causation or correlation? Maybe bart being down caused all the people to browse HN while waiting for the issue to be resolved, thereby making this show up on the main page.
Was this related to the CBTC rollout by any chance?
EDIT: It was not.
sorry using throwaway for this.
When GitHub was constantly failing, I finally got fed up and now I use my own private Gitea. It’s near-zero maintenance and has never had any unexpected downtime. Never looked back.
Stories like these make me feel the same way about California, which I called home for almost 20 years. So much to love, so many reasons never to live there again. Great place to visit when there’s not an active disaster unfolding.
mate we can't self host BART
I think the problem with BART is that it is self hosted.
By "self hosted" I'm not referring to it being run directly by the government, but that in comparison to every other government-run transit system, everything at BART is done the BART way, limiting access to an entire industry of light rail infrastructure, reducing safety and reliability, while significantly increasing costs.
Isn't that kinda what people are doing when they commute in private cars?
fair enough!
Incompetence. Someone should be fired for this.
I’m not frustrated that this happened, I’m frustrated that it seems likely this won’t get better (witness their protracted incredibly high constructions costs that have not improved). I hope they prove me wrong.
Yeah the BART needs some love.
I'm on my phone and not able to readily dig up the link, but there was a linguistic study about the differences between the audience who use definite articles for highways/freeways/interstates and the transit system, versus those who just use the distinctive noun ("101", "80", "Bart")
I thought it was interesting and I'm sorry a hint at it is all I can offer right now
Socal says "The 101" because its a holdover from names like the Hollywood Freeway, before freeways were numbered. No idea why Norcal didn't do the same; you still hear "The Bayshore Freeway" or "The Nimitz Freeway" sometimes. My theory is the rest of the country picked up on what Socal does through media and assumed it's a California thing.
> you still hear "The Bayshore Freeway" or "The Nimitz Freeway" sometimes.
Oh huh. I certainly see these tiles on maps, but in 21 years in the bay area, I have only ever heard of one highway where people sometimes call it by the name (Skyline) rather than the number (35). And even then, I think that's pretty rare. I wonder what's different about the people you and I interact with that makes it different for you.
Public transportation is inherently centralized.
Cars are anti-fragile and decentralized.
Cars fail open in the short term.
Buses are the resilient backup for trains, especially if road infrastructure has been designed to prioritize transit (e.g. Chicago highways with shoulders designed to let Pace buses bypass traffic jams).
Tell that to someone in a two-hour traffic jam on the highway.
No. Cars rely on centralized road systems.
Traditional train systems themselves are extremely decentralized, though scheduling is not. Traditional interlockings form a mirroring mesh network parallel to the physical network of steel rails itself.
Train tracks are a form of centralization. Without the ability to reroute around disruptions (like cars and buses) a single stopped train (e.g. due to mechanical or passenger issues) can stop everything.
BART is dual track around the entire system, except for side yard entrances. I have seen stopped trains, and it was worked around. One I was on caught fire I. The middle of a station and it did not close the line. It slowed it down a lot but did not stop. There are so many systems in place, it's a quite complex system.
The real heros? The bus drivers. The baddies? The planners, the management. The evil? Pure unadulterated evil? The AC Transit app. I would give it a -11.
Windows, upgrading again?
Nah, we upgraded the network configuration. Should have no impact. No there is no source control.
It'd be pretty cool if busses and trains were local-first.
If you can't send updated schedules or emergency alerts through the system, I also don't want service started. It doesn't have to be an individualized problem to render local-first useless.
Also, what do you mean by trains being local-first? Trains by definition need to share the same tracks with catastrophic consequences for getting it wrong. You can't figure out if a train is going to possibly be on the same route locally, or if your route has been obstructed. Somebody gets a schoolbus stuck on a crossing, it takes over a mile to stop a train.
Trains traditionally operate on signalling blocks: a section between two signals is a block, a block is occupied if any part of a train is inside of it, if it's occupied any signals leading into the block are red. This can be decided entirely locally (as in: local to the block). When a wheel sensor detects a wheel entering the block, the block is occupied, signals switch to red and the number of wheels is counted. As soon as another wheel sensor counts an equal number of wheels exiting the block the block is free and signals switch to green. You need a wire along the block to communicate this, but from a safety perspective there is no need for global communication.
Modernization efforts focus on trains broadcasting position and speed so trains can travel closer together and still maintain a safe stopping distance, but that's again possible locally.
Operating switches is where it gets trickier. Some rail operators maintain the possibility to operate them locally, but that requires either stopping the train at each switch you want to change, or to deploy lots of people into the field to do it on schedule
Not quite that easy. What if two trains are both traveling towards separate green signals into the same block such that the second train gets a red signal, but not in time to stop? I think it's possible to overcome this, but it become vastly more complicated than just "turn the signals red for the current block if it's occupied".
You are right, reality is more complicated. In reality some blocks need more than two states and need to know the state of adjacent blocks. For example in a one-way track with two every points you would want to deny entry from one entry point if the track leading to the other entry point is occupied, to solve your case. And you probably want to call that state "reserved" instead of "occupied" to prevent a cascade if you have multiple such blocks right after each other.
But the point that you can do this local-first is still true. You will want to engage a couple bits of information with the neighboring block, but you don't need to know any global state, and if one block breaks down that only affects its direct neighbors
>If you can't send updated schedules or emergency alerts through the system, I also don't want service started.
In the days before systems existed for publishing such schedules and emergency alerts, should public transit service not have been attempted at all?
> Trains by definition need to share the same tracks with catastrophic consequences for getting it wrong.
Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks. But if it did, I assume "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded when an emergency in the local system necessitates it.
You can go down a very deep rabbit hole learning about the history of train signaling. Trains and subways have had centralized signaling for…I’d have to look it up, but 100 years surely? It’s the only way to safely have more than one train running at a time (i.e., sharing the track) with a dense schedule. The “local first” procedure when it fails is to radically reduce service and slow down the trains.
Wikipedia has a good survey [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_signalling
Block based automated signaling can technically be implemented as a primarily local system. Each block needs to know if there is a train in itself block (in which case all block entrance signals must show stop, and approach signals indicate that they can be entered, but the train must be slowing, so it can come to a stop by the block entrance signal). It must also know about a few preceeding blocks for each path leading into it, so as to know which contain trains that might be trying to enter this block, so it can select at most one to be given the proceed signal, and others to be told to brake to stop in time for the entrance signal. While it is nice if it knows the intended routes of each train so it can favor giving the proceed indicator to a train that actually wants to enter it, but if it lacks that information, then giving the indication to a train that will end up using points to take a different path doesn't hurt safety, just efficiency.
Of course, centralized signaling is better, allowing for greater efficiency, helps dispatch keep track better track of the trains, makes handling malfunctioning signals a lot safer, among many other benefits. But it doesn't mean local signaling can't be done.
Yes, block based signaling is what I interpreted “local first” to mean in this context. It works, but it slows everything way down.
I don’t know, but I would imagine, there’s still a block based setup as a failsafe backup in most or all modern rail systems.
Yeah, we literally invented positive train control because trains crashed too often.
The New York Times had a very visually compelling article a few months ago about how a good part of the city's subway system is still manually-operated.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/20/nyregion/nyc-...
For me, this was the best picture:
https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2025-03-10-subway-...
Someone has to stand at that machine 24 hours a day and push and pull levers to keep the trains from whacking one another.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for us to have higher standards for quality and safety than we did 100 years ago.
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks
Building a replica set of tracks that runs parallel to the current tracks just to avoid sharing doesn't strike me as a good use of anyone's time/money.
> "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded
And how are you going to notify them that they are excluded when the network is down?
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks.
We're talking about BART, which uses a track gauge of 5'6" instead of the standard US rail gauge of 4'8.5". They can't run on the same tracks.
(Actually, this is generally true even for those systems that do use 4'8.5" gauge track--I suspect that the standard US freight car envelope doesn't actually fit on most subway systems.)
They would not, the term you're looking for is "Loading Gauge"[1]. The US freight loading gauge is one of the larger ones.
That said there are other reasons a subway could end up being subject to Federal Railroad Administration[2] rules. I will note that I'm not an expert on those rules. But, generally passenger rail systems in the US are subject to Positive Train Control[3] or equivalent. It appears BART is actually one of the earliest adopters of Automatic Train Control[4], which appears to be a PTC equivalent. If not more automated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loading_gauge
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Railroad_Administratio...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit#Automat...
> We're talking about BART, which uses a [non-standard] track gauge
Eh? I thought we (TTC, in Toronto) were the only ones making that mistake.
(Actually, this is generally true even for those systems that do use 4'8.5" gauge track--I suspect that the standard US freight car envelope doesn't actually fit on most subway systems.)
As a related aside, the Chicago Transit Authority still ran freight on its tracks until not that long ago. Maybe the early 2000's?
Standard US freight envelope doesn't even fit on the standard US freight line, famously there are tunnels and bridges in the East that prevent Superliner and other double-stack cars from getting into New York and other places.
It is certainly possible to send a freight train that will fit in most subway tunnels of the right gauge, but you may need a short locomotive and short cars.
(After all, what are the maintenance trains but a form of freight?)
> Standard US freight envelope doesn't even fit on the standard US freight line, famously there are tunnels and bridges in the East that prevent Superliner and other double-stack cars from getting into New York and other places.
The standard US freight envelope probably counts as Plate C, which is 10'8" wide by 15'6" above the rail. Plate H is the standard for double-stacked containers, which pushes the height to 20'2".
(The part of the loading gauge that I'd be most concerned about is actually the width of the cars at the bottom of the carbody--passenger cars tend to be somewhat narrower than standard boxcar, and given a desire to minimize the platform gap, I'd think there's a decent chance that most freight would strike the platform.)
That’s probably the #1 issue - freight works fine on low platform lines, but high platform ones probably won’t work without modified cars.
Last freight service was 1973.
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight
BART has a non-standard rail gauge size that precludes it from interoperability with other rail networks.
https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220708-2
I was going to say, it just happens to be one of the handful of systems in the entire continent that does not use standard gauge.
Other ones I'm aware of are Washington DC's metro, and Toronto's subway and streetcars.
Bart is india broad guage - a common enough standed that anyone making train parts will supply what you need. You can's share tracks with other trains but realisticaly you wouldn't do that anyway. If bart isn't running a train on some track it should be closed for maintenance not given to someone else.
The very first transcontinental railroad included telegraph communications infrastructure. [0] The dependence is necessary because it's so critical for safety and scheduling.
The US congressional committee that recommended construction of the railroad was called the "Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad and Telegraph".
So it seems very early it was decided that no, rail transit systems should not be built without communications/publishing infrastructure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_railroa...
Our modern transit system has no correlation to the complexity of transit service previously. Enjoy fewer schedules, more delays, and higher costs; pick three.
Edit, for the pedantic: There's a huge difference between horizontal complexity (i.e. variety of transit options) and vertical complexity (complexity of a particular option). We have less horizontal complexity than we used to; but vertical complexity of a modern railroad is obscene compared to historical standards.
> But if it did, I assume "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded when an emergency in the local system necessitates it.
No dice; as consider just 14 hours ago:
https://x.com/SFBARTalert/status/1963772853947355630?ref_src...
How does a local-first train safely operate if it could go through a police zone? You need communication, by definition, not local-first.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Is it that we have more or less complexity? The public transit system was far more complex in the past. Between trolleys, inter urbans, and passenger trains, we’ve lost a LOT of routes.
Theres things police could/can attach to the rail to signal trains to stop.
I think our over reliance on the telecom network has lead to safety issues- mostly in terms of "what to do when the telecom goes down." Because on the whole, its astoundingly reliable.
There's a fourth factor here: labor costs.
It would be cool IF. I said if. I also included busses which do operate autonomously from a safety perspective.
If air traffic control can fall back to pen and paper in a pinch, I think it would be cool IF trains had a decent fallback. ;-)
I don't think it needs to be taken that literal. The train orchestrator can set signals on connected tracks and read out the block statuses without needing to also be able to reach HN and the wider internet. Local can be the track you're on, not merely driving on sight (but, yes, worst case you'd hope there's still procedures for that, too)
Sure pal, that's why the internet enabled the existence of buses and trains.
Did the upgrade also break scrolling on their site?
Your ad blocker is probably blocking a modal popup, badly.
Why is a site that needs to be ADA2-compliant showing anything modal?
Does the ADA outlaw modals?
Blind people can't close them and it screws up their screen reader. Blind people often rely on public transportation.
Only if they’re badly implemented. Lots of fully accessible software has modal dialogs.
You'd think trains would use a rolling release
They clearly need to rebuild this as a Rails app
Apparently there was too much Rust on the Rails?
If it was rust, they'd still be compiling.
Also surprised they don't have the ability to rollback
Not having redundant rails in case of breakdowns is something BART is well known for
Maintaining roll backs is incredibly expensive for what you get.
If you've ever been in, on, or near bart you wouldn't be.
Broken release train breaks train brakes
nice.
Works on my local environment <points to train set> choo choo
so you're saying BART should run in a container?
[dead]
The cheap easy take: it's tragically ironic that the software running the infrastructure in Silicon Valley is such a problem
It's a shame that SF politics are so dysfunctional it can't have a metro at the same level of quality as, say, North Korea.
SF doesn't run BART, though.
Not saying SF politics is great, but at least point to the correct boogeyman.
North Korea? If you think it is a good example of a low bar of transit quality/safety to meet, then you’re comically far off.
You think that's setting the bar too high or too low?
Too high. I think NK transit system is incomparably safer and cleaner than BART.
Riding without a ticket? Jail.
Littering on the platform? Straight to jail, right away!
Doing any violent crime in NK transit? Believe it or not - death by firing squad.
Here is a quick overview of how the system works: https://youtu.be/eiyfwZVAzGw?si=CnOMa8F6NkiyhifE
Maybe expected though that high salaries there depress incentive to work in these jobs even more than other cities?
No. It is pretty typical for anything gov to be pretty bad. Most dont work there due to how bureaucratic it is rather than the comp. This is what my friends who work in gov say at least.
There is a strong correlation between hiring low end people and being or becoming ever more bureaucratic. Bureaucracy like everything else is there for a reason.
And yet NYC .gov sites, apps, and functionality makes SF still look like a shantytown after all this time.
Beating a bar that is on the floor is none too impressive.
BART is a government organization and all California government employee pay is public. You can see that BART has about 40 software engineers and they earn about 70% of the market rate:
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=compute...
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=compute...
It seems to me that they are over-worked & under-paid and are doing a good job given the circumstances.
NIMBYs have blocked BART in Silicon Valley. BART doesn't reach Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Stanford, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Santa Clara, or Cupertino. A few years ago, it finally reached San Jose.
A separate train (CalTrain) goes from SF through Silicon Valley. Last year they switched to electric trains which are faster and run more frequently. The SF CalTrain station is inconvenient (20-mins walk from downtown, under a highway), but they are working to extend CalTrain to the central SF station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce_Transit_Center#Futu... .
So Silicon Valley transit is getting better, slowly.
BART barely goes into Silicon Valley. Fremont was the closest stop up until 2017. Now it gets to North San Jose. Even if was funded, any further extension wouldn't be complete for over a decade.
I'll bite: Silicon Valley isn't known for good infrastructure, we are just able to roll back changes very easily. The cost of getting software wrong for BART is far higher than if my div is padded incorrectly.
break things and don't move at all
edit: lmao, so many upvotes yet my comment has been moved so low. No more snark than a loving brother would provide. TY for your attention to this matter
I generally downvote jokes, even the clever ones, because I don't come here for that (reddit is generally more fun for that; even though many are low effort, there are many that are just so clever), and I'm mainly interested in thoughtful prose and discussion. (Which sometimes is hard to come by here, too, but jokes are obviously not it.)
Probably what's happened is you ended up with a lot of upvotes, but also a lot of downvotes. I would expect HN's software to downrank "controversial" posts, since those are likely to lead to flamewars. So even if you see +30 on your comment, the overall tallies might be something along the lines of +100 -70.
Makes sense :) Nothing is for everyone, all the time.
Addition of the last phrase had truly the worst impact; Drumpf meme was not well-timed/placed
fed combinator startup decelerator
I mean despite it's history the snark is well deserved. With so many companies and people in the bay paying taxes, where the hell does all the money go?
Interesting, tidbit you added here. But snark is needed for this situation.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140823 and marked it off topic.
Yeah I was pretty blown away when I visited San Francisco just how archaic it was. In the same place you have driverless cars you have a metro payment system from like 70s USSR or something.
I don't know what your frame of reference is, but BART is above average for US public transit payment systems.
I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area CA, Portland OR, and Philadelphia PA over the last 10 years. All of those metros have comparable public transit payment systems with auto-loading special use cards and are at various stages of adopting support for tap to pay. Honestly, within the US I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted.
Internationally I think there is a larger range of experiences. I don't travel enough to properly gauge it, but I was in Paris in the last year and I don't think public transit payment was better. Still had to acquire specialized fare cards and navigate different payment systems between RATP and RER. Honestly, SF Bay comes out slightly ahead of Paris if only because Clipper is unified between various transit options (BART, Bus, Ferry, CalTrain) IMO.
> I don't know what your frame of reference is, but BART is above average for US public transit payment systems.
That doesn't change anything in the comment you're replying to. Just because it's above average for the USA, does not mean it isn't also ancient by global standards.
Some time ~11 years ago, I needed to take a bus trip in SF. There was nowhere nearby to reload a Clipper card, so I was happy when I found out I could do it online. I was less happy when the web site said it would take 24-48 hours for the newly-loaded funds to be available on my Clipper card.
Still the way it is. Clipper is a multi-agency cooperative. It sucks but the fact that it works at all is a real triumph....
I find that a little hard to believe given that you can/could service Clipper cards at any Walgreens and a bunch of other retailers (e.g. pharmacies and hardware stores).
BART now does actually have tap-to-pay, but it's very recent: https://www.kqed.org/news/12052690/bart-fares-2025-credit-ca...
It's also had phone based clipper card support for years now. Credit card open loop systems are pretty slow compared to a well implemented closed loop transit system like they have with suica in japan, but BART's clipper is probably about as slow in comparison
Clipper (nee TransLink) is a regional system, not a BART specific one. In fact BART was one of the last Clipper hold outs because they were hell bent on having their own BART purse. Time to authorize is really down to which readers you interact with. The current BART turnstiles+readers are pretty slow.
We watched this happen again in New York where OMNY was supposed to be the region-wide fare system, but the Port Authority decided not to use it, all the bus systems decided not to use it, and the MTA's railroads decided not to use it. It is a mild disaster. (Hilariously, the Port Authority runs two rail system, PATH and the JFK Airtrain. The Airtrain does take OMNY.)
Does Caltrain still count entering the BART station at Milbrae as not tapping off? That was always my favorite quirk of the Clipper system.
(For those not familiar... Caltrain is a tap on / tap off "proof of payment" system. You're charged the full fare when you tap on, and refunded what you didn't use when you tap off. BART and Caltrain share a platform at Milbrae. You can get off Caltrain and be right at the gate to get into BART by tapping your Clipper card. Well. This taps you into BART, but doesn't tap you off of Caltrain. To get your refund, you had to know this was a thing and go find a fare validator before tapping on to BART. You also end up being inside Caltrain's proof of payment required area without proof of payment while you walk along the platform from Caltrain's fare validator to BART's entry turnstile. I am probably the only person to ever care about this, but...)
In my day, that transfer was a privately owned blue bus called the Jitney.
I can tap my credit card on any public transit system in Southern Ontario (where Toronto/Waterloo are located).
I can still use an auto-loading special use card if I want. I do that so I can have a free transfer between different transit systems during my commute.
> Honestly, within the US I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted.
Chicago is pretty good too. IIRC they also have tap-to-pay. In fact, I think they had it before NYC
Chicago has had tap to pay for as long as one lived here (11 years now). I think it predates me having any tap to pay credit card or phone lol.
FWIW Septa has had tap-to-pay working for about 2 years now (so, 2 years longer than what BART just rolled out like last week). But barely a decade ago they (septa) were still using physical tokens!
When I moved to the bay area, I thought it was so rad I could use the clipper card for vta + bart + caltrain + muni + ferry all in one.
Frame of reference is the world which is reasonable given the US status in the world.
Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Dubai, Japan, UK. The USA is supposed to be among the top in terms of technology but infra is just garbage. The BART is pathetic. I don't know why you defend it with pride. Attack it, because if you hate it and you are vocal about it, things are more likely to change.
I'm sick of people defending something that's shit because of pride. It's garbage.
How did you pay? I made a Clipper account that I fill up with my credit card and tap my phone to pay...
Which is still shockingly outdated compared to e.g. London, where I just use my tap to pay method of choice on entry and exit, done.
I have a Clipper Card on my Android phone and pay for BART and SF Muni that way.
BART does now accept credit cards at the turnstiles now (I think this started 2 years ago). Agreed that it took a long while to get there, much much longer than in other places.
Personally I prefer the Clipper method, as it's generally faster to scan than a contactless credit card payment (that's going to always be the case for closed-loop payment system). I also like that BART (and Muni, Caltrain, etc.) will pay less to Visa/Mastercard/whomever in transaction fees if I use my Clipper card and periodically top it up (which, as I have my Clipper card on my phone, happens automatically if the balance ever falls below $10). Credit card tap-to-pay is a nice convenience for out-of-town visitors and for locals who rarely use transit and don't have Clipper (or who use a physical Clipper card but forgot it at home), but I don't think it's a great way to pay for transit day-to-day.
Oooh, even behind e.g London, the first city in the world to offer tap and pay with bank cards!
Now available on BART and coming to other Bay Area transit agencies.
https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/contactless-payments....
It's also the slowest possible system, there are benefits for a closed loop system: https://atadistance.net/2020/06/13/transit-gate-evolution-wh...
They introduced tap-to-pay with your credit card a few weeks ago.
I was going to say the same thing. I saw this and I don't even ride it regularly anymore.
I mean it auto fills/pays from my card. It's just one extra step at setup. I agree it would be nice to just take my card at the rail, but "Shockingly outdated" seems a bit dramatic lol. It's certainly not comparable to "70s USSR" idk where that came from
(which we've had to some extent for thirteen years now)
You can do that on BART as well.
So tokens and kopeks? Because there were no mag stripe systems in 1970s.
> https://www.ebay.ca/itm/174311087766
I remember when I was in college in the early 2010s finding it amusing that SEPTA still used tokens in Philadelphia. On a whim I looked it up, and apparently they did finally stop using them, but only in 2024.
Being built in 1960s-1970s it has proper ventilation. Unlike older systems, like in Boston, where you are forced to breathe in brake dust.
I just use my phone to pay for BART?
I mean the answer is in the question--why are the self-driving cars (largely funded by billion-dollar private companies and VC) available in the same city as this anarchic public transit system (funded by largely by regional taxes and ridership fees)
The Moscow metro system is actually supposed to be pretty good.
The mag stripe 1960s technology worked much better than the new one, I'm sorry to report.
I'm sorry to report that you're looking at that tech through rose-tinted glasses. I remember electronic systems that would routinely fail to properly scan the mag stripes. I remember all the people working retail who had special tricks to try to get a card to scan, which would help maybe 25% of the time. I remember cards becoming demagnetized for random reasons and becoming useless. I remember when merchants would have to take a physical carbon imprint of the card, and would have no idea if the card was even real until the paper was processed, days or weeks later.
We are talking specifically about the BART fare gates, which worked perfectly for 50 years.
It's hard to think of a single situation that's ever been improved by snark. Or passive aggressiveness in general.
Usually the snarky guys have precious little useful to say in the service of having any understanding of civics or its processes.
it is a vent. potentially you could say that snark is the lesser path, it's virtue is it's banality
Right, but venting is for a long time understood to be bad. In the same way punching your pillow or the wall is bad when you're angry.
Venting is different from expressing your negative emotions healthily. E.g. telling your significant other you are frustrated because of a problem at work is healthy. Venting about the problem, complaining, being sarcastic etc is known to reinforce anger and generally lead to unhealthy outcomes.
It causes shame, and shame paves the way for change. I'm a bay area native, and I'm fucking ashamed of the pathetic excuse of public transportation called the bart. Absolute travesty.
Think in terms of evolution. If snark didn't convey any survival benefit, why tf does it exist?
Shame does not pave the way for change. Can you think of a shame-based culture that is prone to change?
Shame is like other kinds of abusive and toxic behavior. Does child abuse convey a survival benefit? Or spousal abuse? Evolution can be a useful guide, but it takes work and research to establish an evolutionary cause of a behavior.
Seems like voting for someone else is the correct answer. If the uniparty that exists there today was in an away threatened, they might be motivated to competence. Complaining on HN won't motivate them. The snark is meant to be heard not just said to a void.
Voting hasn't done much good for this country. In fact voting is probably one of the most ineffective things for change in existence.
I'm not complaining to a void. All the readers of HN have heard me and other people complaining hear will be heard too. In aggregate many people complaining on many different venues creates an aggregate sentiment that hopefully will motivate the right people.
Cancel culture on social media has made big changes to this country and not everything necessarily good. But one thing is clear, it makes change effectively. Why not use it for the right thing?
Either way, I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece. Bart IS categorically fucking garbage, that's less of a complaint and more of a statement. I'm just stating facts.
> an aggregate sentiment that hopefully will motivate the right people.
I can't comprehend the thought that polluting this not-bay-area specific forum with complaints will somehow eventually, hopefully, make its way to a politician.
> because I need some platform to say my piece.
This is soap boxing. To affect change, it would be better to do something directly in the real world, rather than hoping for the snark to overflow and leak out of here into the real world.
>I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece.
Dude, fuck off. The full quote which you've taken out of context is this: "I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece."
I hate it when people twist statements. I literally said I am not doing that. I am just stating the god awful truth which is: Bart is total shit. But here's another truth: When you manipulate my statement and take it out of context it makes you a shit head too.
Cancel culture has made exactly zero effective changes in our society. I've noticed that you've brought up how you don't think voting is effective.
One thing that's made a huge impact on our society is that many people participating in cancel culture and promoting shame and anger as solutions also tell people not to vote.
I watched it happen three times before the last three presidential elections and it was a big part of the voter suppression messaging tracked by democracy watchdogs. I'd argue that the biggest impact cancel culture has had is electing Donald Trump twice, weakening faith in democracy, and increasing the appeal of authoritarianism.
Shame, anger, and other tactics of using abuse to promote change is simply not effective. That's beyond the fact that it's unethical.
Cancel culture is appealing because hate and anger are addictive and they make you feel powerful. But they also make it hard to feel empathy. This is basically the main point of Star Wars, beyond just wanting to make a swashbuckler film set in space.
It certainly doesn't go to Bay Area software companies. When BART originally began letting out the contract to redesign the then-already-obsolete control system in 1992, they awarded it the Hughes Aircraft. That project failed. The current attempt to deploy CBTC was awarded to Hitachi. The supplier of their fare gate system integration was originally IBM and is now CUBIC, a San Diego defense contractor.
If anything the Bay Area has utterly failed to provide systems software of lasting value to address public needs like these.
Those types of contracts have much worse margins then Bay Area tech companies expect (or aspire to)
Those types of contracts always seem to go massively over-budget anyway.
Arguably the Hughes contract had a gross margin of infinity.
Likewise neither Rohr nor Westinghouse are Bay Area based.
your tax money broadly speaking doesn't go to BART; it's massively underfunded. not sure why they are the target of the snark.
Under funded relative to what? What would the optimal amount of funding be? Are there ways that BART could cut costs to free up budget for IT upgrades?
I'm not trying to be snarky, it's just that for regular citizens who don't have time to attend BART BoD and committee meetings it's almost impossible to tell whether existing money is being wisely spent. So people get the impression that taxes are going up while service quality declines and assume the money must be going into someone's pocket.
In nearly all of the US there is an unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) debate about to what extent public transit should get a subsidy vs pay for itself.
The dominant position (even in CA) has been no or little subsidy.
The bigger issue is not just the upgrade but how brittle the system is. Modern practices like rolling releases or safe fallback modes are standard elsewhere. Critical infrastructure should not be this fragile.
I would assume the IT side is just as underfunded as the rest of the system, probably more (they will prioritize safety and rolling stock)
In no way does BART pay for itself. 22% of their operating costs are covered by fares. Public transit is an amenity paid for by taxes. Private transport also has its own subsidy, but it's not even close.
https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/BART_FY24%2...
I think that's a misleading statement:
- Prior to the pandemic, BART got >60% of its operating costs from riders (p9 in your linked doc)
- Ridership is still way down relative to 2019 even though costs are up in absolute terms
- Even from 2020 data, BART was hitting 50% https://lovetransit.substack.com/p/most-profitable-public-tr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_...
The subsidy in BART is higher than anyone would like it now, but I do think that's still a transient response to the pandemic; either more people will have to eventually go back to riding public transit, or we'll need to drop the emergency funding it's been receiving.
Well I wasn't trying to be misleading. I do agree with what you've said wrt historical ridership, but it's been 6 years. BART docs imply that RTO is driving ridership back. We may be in a new normal wrt remote working patterns. Dropping emergency funding would, imo, lead to a death spiral of reduced maintenance and service which further reduces ridership. We can have nice things, paid for by taxes.
But if single-occupancy vehicles don't cover the costs of the infrastructure they use, the ridership moving from public to private may incur even higher costs.
Which is a bit shocking in its own way, even if the numbers were break-even instead of 20-50%.
Public transit is widely touted as being more efficient than the alternatives, but for most trips it's cheaper (factoring in maintenance, depreciation, gas, etc, and pretending that BART is as convenient and reliable) to drive than to take BART, and not by a little bit.
Income just from gas taxes, tolls, and registration cover ~half the infrastructure maintenance, so there exists effectively another $200-$300 per capita per annum subsidy, but that's nowhere near enough to make BART cost less than just driving, even if I had to account those extra fees against my driving.
Why is that? How is BART worse than driving and still losing money when it's supposedly a more efficient solution? Is it just low volume? Is the organization making bad bets? Is the premise that trains are more efficient flawed?
There are also a variety of ways that "efficiency" can be defined; your comment considers monetary efficiency, but both modes of transport have costs on society that are not considered in the numerical operating costs (pollution, opportunity cost of land use, healthcare costs due to accidents...)
The problem is that you have to go all-in on transit to make people want to ride it. You need to have frequent, reliable service, clean trains/buses, and feelings of safety. You also need the infrastructure to be designed well: build subways rather than surface-level trains. If you can't build subways, elevate the trains, or at least do your best to grade-separate, and give priority to those trains at traffic signals. Buses should have dedicated lanes.
Transit in the bay area fails at pretty much all of those things. Service is just infrequent enough to make things difficult, and unreliable enough that you worry that a late or missing bus or train will make you late. Cleanliness is inconsistent, and there are often people on drugs riding around all day, spouting nonsense. We do have some subways, but not enough of them, and there is no light rail line in SF that runs only underground, so they can only be a maximum of two cars long (otherwise they'd be too long for a single city block in some areas). All of the above-ground light rail is at mercy of car traffic (with tracks in some areas actually running in the same lanes as cars), stop signs, and traffic lights (which do not prioritize the trains). We do have some dedicated bus lanes, but they're dedicated bus+taxi lanes, and Ubers/Lyfts and regular passenger cars abuse them with little risk of being ticketed.
The end result of this is that people see that it takes 10 minutes to drive and 40 minutes to take public transit, but that they really need to add on an extra 15 minutes to the transit trip to account for delays and unreliability. So even though they don't want to to deal with parking, or pay 5-10x as much for an Uber/Lyft fare, they value their transit time more, and drive or get a car ride from an app.
Earlier this year, SF Muni was experiencing a large budget shortfall. They managed to save many jobs from being cut, which is commendable, but instead they reduced service. This just causes more people to look at the situation and choose to find an alternative that will get them where they're going faster, and more reliably.
Agreed. The other problem is connectivity - if you aren't close to a hub you can actually get to, and that BART didn't connect south along the east bay until very recently.
I once looked at how long to get to work by public transit (~20 miles each way) - it was estimated at 1.5 hours each way (multiple buses + some walking), and costing ~$12-15 each way (15+ years ago). It took 25 minutes each way to drive on a good day, 45 each way on a bad day. Worst case was ~60 minutes to get home.
On average, it would take 2+ hours less PER DAY to drive, and cost $5-10 less, calculating driving cost at $0.50/mile. Plus I could go on my own schedule, no walking in the rain, etc. There was very little "win" for public transit in any way.
> Private transport also has its own subsidy, but it's not even close.
So - what % of Cali's road construction & maintenance is paid for by gas taxes?
If I'm reading this report correctly[1], California's car registration fees and gas taxes cover more than the cost of roads. Caltrans estimates $20.2 billion in revenue from fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, while their budget is $18.7 billion.
It also looks like public transportation is mostly paid for with sales taxes, federal loans/grants, and $1 billion of taxes on diesel fuel.
1. See chart A on page 24, and chart F on page 28: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/budgets/docume...
Note that Caltrans only maintains state roads; looks like from that document that they distribute some money to localities but as far as I can tell we can't see what fraction of local road maintenance that covers. Of course localities also have parking fees, traffic tickets, etc that can help cover road maintenance.
That's difficult to untangle due to multiple agencies. Local, State, and Federal. However, the answer is the overwhelming majority of road construction and maintenance is paid for by gas taxes, car registration, and tolls.
The highway fund gets a massive amount of money from the general budget every year federally.
And this is the problem. If you "don't have time" to be civically engaged, then you're woefully uninformed, and you shouldn't complain about how your tax dollars are allocated, because you simply have no idea what you're complaining or arguing about.
No it’s not. Bart is just really bad, and don’t blame lack of civil engagement. We don’t have time for this shit. Plenty of countries have good public infrastructure without the need for everyone to be engaged.
It’s like saying crime is a problem in this world because of your lack of engagement in stopping crime.
Bitching on HN is one small form of engagement I can afford and I’m hoping at least one bart official sees it and realize what a shit job he’s doing or one government official sees it and realizes what a shit government official he is and changes something. Minuscule hope but why not.
Instead we get random people who will only benefit from fixing the bart actually trying to defend it as if it’s their favorite sports team.
Oh yeah? Why do the train operators get paid a quarter of a million dollars? How about massive misuse of funds ALONG with underfunding.
snark is not productive.
What form of comment on an online forum _would be_ productive?
Why do you think HN is a place to engage in a productive (necessarily means resulting in something) discussion that would improve BART? Do you think this audience is in any way qualified to discuss the monetary or tech troubles of a uniparty government run service?
Instead, we could have an interesting discussion, maybe even one involving technology, that nerds would enjoy!
You don't have to be an activist wherever you go. In fact, it's almost alway inappropriate soap boxing/virtue signaling.
Cat memes. But HN doesn't support image comments.
A significant amount of BARTs budget goes to inflated salaries for operators and ticketing staff.
They have very little money left for paying engineering and construction staff.
Inflated compared to what? Software engineer salaries in the BART region?
Do you think train operators should make a quarter million a year to drive the same train on the same route every day?
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=train+o...
The "train operators" cited were averaging around $80k for a 40 hour week. That comes to an hourly pay of around $38, when not working overtime. I don't see that as crazy high pay for a place like SF.
The total pay is quarter of a million. 80k + "other pay" whatever the fuck "other pay" is.
What's "other pay?"
Yes.
Yeah. It's an actually useful job compared to writing surveillance advertising software.
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The bart is basically the crowning achievement of US public transit. As for the solutions coming from everyone's favourite bay Aryan Elon Musk, they are...somewhat lacking.
You're probably not going to believe this but the Hyperloop in Las Vegas:
- is now just "the loop."
- only has 8 stops
- doesnt go to the airport
- most stations are unprotected park benches in the desert sun
- vehicles arent driverless
- speeds are 26 miles per hour instead of 155
- it can take up to 20 minutes for a ride to show up
- it does not go to or from the airport.
- it only runs for 11 hours a day at some stations.
- cost taxpayers fifty-three million dollars.
I prefer the public transit systems of NY, Chicago, and San Diego.
Maybe LA is even better now but I haven’t ridden it recently.
Is it even better than the LA subway anymore? (I haven’t been down since the improvements everyone says are so good)
Is it better than systems in New York, Boston, Chicago, or uh, even Philadelphia before recent septa cuts? Honest question, I haven’t been all those places, but BART seems… fine to me.
If you compare it to the commuter rail systems in those places, BART feels impressive (though less so with the service cuts). I was a regular rider on the Metro North New Haven line and had experience with SEPTA and NJT commuter rail and I was really impressed with BART when I moved out here. Peak frequency was pretty good (at least on the Red line I primarily used) and when things were on time they were very on-time ("on-time" Metro North trains were always at least a few minutes late in my experience).
If you compare it to the NYC subway, it's obviously not impressive at all (though the tech is less dated). As a rapid-transit system, BART isn't exactly a commuter rail or subway system exactly, but I think it's closer to the former than the latter.
Just because the Hyperloop is a boondoggle doesn't mean public transit is bad.
BART isn't even the best light rail system in the SF Bay area, let alone the US in general.
>The bart is basically the crowning achievement of US public transit.
Hardly. People in this country outside of the Northeast Corridor have absolutely no idea what public transit can actually be.
Moved to the west coast from NYC area many years ago, public transit here is atrocious in comparison to the northeast.
but does it go to the airport at least?
The hyperloop idea (which was just a presentation with no plans to build it) is an entirely different thing from the boring company tunnels
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Should have taken the car!
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Alternatively, get good at doing rolling releases so you don't take down the entire system and have some sort of canarying process.
Train rolling jokes aside, that makes sense... until it doesn't work.
A traffic control system, the thing that makes sure all trains are in known locations, safely spaced, etc.... might be necessarily centralized. There isn't really a "rolling release" you can do for a single system.
Should they have a separate test system for release before "production", sure. Do they? No idea. Is it identical to production? Clearly not. How does the saying go....
> Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough enough to have a totally separate environment to run production.
I feel like some BARTs moving and some stuck might be a bit of a worse problem.
I think the rolling stock may be stationary right now. Updates relying on stationery.
This is not how software works. Although I guess this isn't quite as catchy:
Assume all software is broken at all times. Constantly try to ensure it works and is secure. Sometimes updates break things. Test before production. Ensure test environments are similar to production. You're going to break things.
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142101 and marked it off topic.
Public infrastructure is requested and funded by the government, not voluntarily done by companies that happen to base themselves nearby. Sounds more of an issue of government.
BART is unique and doesn't share much in the way of infrastructure with any other public transit system. You can't build a scalable startup targeting BART because you'd have a maximum of one customer.
The Boring Company has attempted to develop tunnel boring technology which theoretically could someday allow for cheaper expansion of all subway and light rail systems. Although in practice they haven't accomplished much and their existing projects aren't even used for rail transit.
https://www.boringcompany.com/
There are also several eVTOL startups aiming to improve quality of life through rapid point-to-point transportation. But I doubt they'll succeed on any widespread basis due to battery and noise limitations.
There isn't much different about bart. Slightly wider wheel spacing and such are things anyone making trains can handle.
the real problem is thinking they are different or that they need to innovate. Trains are common and they need not innovation but minor improvements over time.
I've heard that makes procurement way more difficult, you can't just order a train car in the standard gauge from many manufacturers. It's like big and tall sizing, yes, any place can make it, but there just isn't that large volume to create a liquid market.
But is this a problem that can account of the day-to-day difficulties of managing and using BART? Yes, procuring new train cars is more difficult (and likely more expensive), but BART has lots of other problems to tackle.
The problem isn't just the rolling stock. Everything in BART is at least somewhat custom including control systems and software. Very little can be shared with public transit systems in other metro areas so there are no economies of scale. Thus BART has to do a lot in house or depend on a limited set of specialized vendors at great expense.
If you had to buy a special car to be allowed to drive on Bay Area roads because they weren't the same as the roads in Chicago or Boston then a Honda Civic would cost $1M.
If it can be made differently or done differently BART will absolutely try to do so.
Yep NIH is a huge problem for BART.Or intentionally designed by the original contractors for lock-in, like an Apple product or a John Deere tractor.
> BART is unique and doesn't share much in the way of infrastructure with any other public transit system. You can't build a scalable startup targeting BART because you'd have a maximum of one customer.
The notion of a startup running BART is fucking horrifying.
I didn't read the comment criticizing VC's for not investing in BART or a company to make BART better, I read it as a criticism of the American system for letting things like VC's and other rich entities/people lock up unconscionable amounts of wealth for either hoarding or funding stupid shit as opposed to make sure our country still functions and people can eat.
And please just spare me the capitalist apologia. I get it, people wanna be rich. On balance I don't give a shit, get as rich as you can, just as long as it doesn't require millions of people to suffer so you can. If you having objectively, factually, more than anyone needs to be happy requires a ton of people to go without necessities, IMO, that is not a right you should have, and I don't care how communist that makes me.
You could take 90% of Bezos', Musk's, or Gates' wealth and they would still never have to work again and live in exceptional luxury. There is no goddamn reason in the world to let them keep it while we have people starving.
This is government procurement being broken not the companies themselves.
The problem with the US is it's been taken over by finance capitalists, and lets be honest, VC's are finance capitalists. And finance capitalists are essentially slumlords.
Their first reflex when it comes to paying for infrastructure and maintenance is to think what that'll do to their short term CAP rates. And then they get angry.
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Seems like BART should do these upgrades only at low traffic times, like overnight Saturday night.
They did. They started before yesterday's shutdown, and worked all night, they tried to bring up the system for startup, and it came up, then crashed.
It was state of the art on 1962 when it was designed, and remained state of the art until the 1980s, when the signal system started breaking down, and the the late 80s upgrade which had a train presence glitch, which caused almost all the system to get resignaled.
So by the 2000s again it's showing its age, and they got a 32 processor zSeries mainframe.
Brake problem last week, and the this on Friday? Now it's getting like New York, even more. Whatsmatteryou?
What on earth does it do that requires a mainframe?
Nothing, but rewriting a train system from scratch and testing it is incredibly expensive and disruptive. Eventually you do have to do it, and we might not agree with their trade offs here, but it's not unreasonable.
It doesn't require a mainframe but that was the cheapest path to keep things running without rewriting the software. The IBM Z platform is very good at maintaining backward compatibility. If you don't constantly keep your applications software up to date with support for new platforms then eventually you find yourself with very limited platform options.
They're highly resilient - as in the hardware/OS itself is, so the applications dont have to be.
That and IOPS are the primary advantage of mainframe systems.