BART slows rollout of new trains as it contends with more repairs than expected
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
The new BART trains that are only now rolling out remind me a lot of the Swedish trains I saw more than 20 years ago, except that the BART trains have flat panel screens in them that I doubt those Swedish trains had back then, but the Swedish trains had doors that would silently and easily slide open when you held your hands up to them -- that was something that had greatly impressed me back then, because all the trains I'd been to before had really heavy doors that you'd have to struggle with to open by hand, while on the Swedish trains you just held your hand up and the doors would glide open like on the spacecraft on Star Trek.
The whole experience had left me embarrassed for the US, which I'd seen as a technological leader up to that point. I came away from that trip with an impression that the US was very backwards in many ways. The train system and train differences were just one glaring example, but also politically and in many other ways the US was very backwards.
Now finally these new BART trains rolling out, some NYC trains were also modernizing some about a decade ago, but I haven't been to Sweden or much of the rest of Europe in a long time, and I wonder how much further they've progressed.
https://storage.googleapis.com/titlemax-media/2018/03/averag...
There’s the Northeast corridor (and its cousin the Southeast corridor going down to Atlanta).
The PNW cities also are clustered like this but have difficult geography.
California and the Central Valley with the Bay and LA also meet this criteria, but CAHSR is run by a mix of incompetents and constrained by the wording of the ballot initiative that got it approved.
Not really. It's pretty flat here in the Willamette valley, where the majority of Oregon's population lives, and relatively flat going north into Washington to Seattle... But the best we've got for long distance trains is Amtrak which shares the tracks with commercial traffic, where Amtrak gets basically the lowest priority on the tracks.
Comparing long distance train service to Bart would be weird.
BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone
Unfortunately very little in Sweden. Really the only thing of note close to Sweden would probably be the subway in Copenhagen. Maybe Spain would be impressive, but most of it is happening in Asia these days.
Maybe this guy shouldn’t be president of the BART board? I mean, lots of other people quoted in the article seem to know what they do.
The role of President is to gladhand and otherwise maintain relationships necessary for the partners to feel safe continuing their contracts.
That kind of “aw, shucks” mentality is very useful for this.
Several years ago the main type of train I use, Class 444 Desiro got a firmware upgrade to teach it Selective Door Operation. Meaning now it knows this platform is 8 carriages long, this is a ten carriage train, so disable the doors in the rear two carriages and make an announcement automatically. Nice. But the firmware upgrade messed up the clock. So for example maybe it's about lunch time, the train displays 12:05 but is it actually 12:05? Nah, might be 13:20 or 11:50. After several months they fixed the clock, but now it is only shown intermittently. So when it says 12:05 that's definitely 12:05 but it might not remember to show the time for five minutes which is little help.
They took months to ship firmware with a fixed clock.
The SDO change also resulted in the computer becoming convinced in certain places that, as it annunciates, ""There is a fault with the door system, this is being attended to. Please do not operate any emergency equipment". There isn't a fault. But since "Ignore spurious door message" is a workaround there is no hurry to qualify a new firmware release that fixes it.
[1] See the top photo here https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/design-and-architecture/e...
I'd be very curious to see what causes things like this, and especially the code... but then again, maybe seeing the code will just put me off ever riding in one.
Is it just me or does 5% not seem like nearly a large enough percent? If I only had to hit 20% of my expected performance in exchange for 95% of my pay... I would have a lot more hobbies.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBB_RABe_502
Two examples doesn't make a trend, but seeing how similar the issues are, maybe there is some systemic issue plaguing them.
It featured a couple of tourists in Europe asking a lady to take a photo for them. She purposefully waited until a train blocked the shot, so they got a photo of the train instead of the view they wanted. She then shows them the sabotaged photo and says something like, "I made that train! It's Bombardier."
I think the point of the ad was that they're an important exporter that creates good jobs and that earns international recognition. It was clearly designed for strengthening political support from the provincial and federal governments, not for selling trains. To me, though, it just made them seem like selfish assholes.
I wish I could find the ad, but Google just returns a mountain of news reports and marketing videos.
Very little these two things have in common other than the name.
See this link [1] for a summary of the current situation (start about halfway down). It doesn't look great. Nippon/Sharyo is going to be at a disadvantage in bidding because their Amtrak contracts with California and Illinois were cancelled due to the prototype cars failing safety tests. It looks like Siemens will play a part in the replacement for those, which perhaps may convince them to try out transit cars in the USA. Competition would be good.
What we have now is CRRC Sifang America (a Chinese state-owned company) has built a factory in Illinois and has orders from Chicago and Boston. The first prototypes are expected this year. We will see if they can deliver.
Siemens, Alstom, and Mitsubishi off the top of my head. There probably is some Chinese companies but I’m not familiar with them.
Edit: turns out this business was sold to Hitachi. I didn't know that.
[1] https://www.alstom.com/our-solutions/rolling-stock/citadis-s...
It looks like there are 7-9 small CCTV cameras in each car. This means that there is nowhere inside the vehicle where you have private space to enter a password, or check your work email, or pull out a laptop to do some programming.
For people who spend 60 minutes (or more) commuting, this is obnoxious.
Also, this is another step toward pervasive surveillance in the public sphere. Default-on all-angles video recording normalizes what infrastructure operators (and their third-party contractors) are allowed to learn about you, your work, and your life.
2) It turned out a lot of BART cameras were fake. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Repl...
3) If they got rid of cameras you'd still not be able to use your computer during your commute because you'd almost certainly be robbed within the year if you were to use it every day on the BART for a year. In fact, even with cameras this will be true.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Your comment would be fine without the first sentence.)
I will say that Warm Springs is one of the least-used stations so I somewhat doubt this story of full trains departing. It only has 4400 pax/day.
I also don't believe Bart's stats, the incompetence of the people running it is so massive that everything they do is suspect in my eyes. An example: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/BART-escalator-repairs-...
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/02/16/property-...
The password issue you raise has some merit though.
> For people who spend 60 minutes (or more) commuting, this is obnoxious.
I’m sure it’s merely obnoxious for you - but it’s there for people more vulnerable than you who get assaulted.
I believe the AC motor wave forms maybe smoothed out, I was very impressed by it. To the UK train companies just not value it? To me it was an impressive quality improvement. It is a detriment to all the other trains I travel on.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit_rolli...
A bart train car (an electric train) should have like 50 - in Silicon fucking Valley) - and/or a giant induction charger in the middle.
Dont give me crap about the homeless - give that to the city.
We are silicon freaking valley and if you hVe never been to any other country with public transport we look like freaking idiots.
Sweden, japan, Singapore, china, all have severely more advanced transport systems than we.
Bart is a pos embarrassment.
There are big-ass tech companies, of course, but the country itself is not exactly a paragon of progress.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547137 and marked it off-topic.
One of the most sold cars in Europe is the Volkswagen Golf; I don't see how that is tiny.
Interestingly, I see that mid and large size classes (mid-size being a "large family car") originated in USA, which makes me wonder if that's a typical American perception.
I'd even argue that 1400+ kg for moving around an average of 1.5 person/120 kg (I think an average of 2 people is too generous), during a time of ecological crisis, is tragic, and in my opinion, describes perfectly how there's no hope.
Are compact cars tiny? That is debatable. Compared to a 1961 Lincon Continental with suicide doors it is very tiny.
Your point would make sense if USA had high-speed trains linking big cities but it doesn't, and the train routes that do exist experience all sorts of delays which makes people choose planes even for shorter distances under 500 km which would take ~2 hr on high speed train.
In the US city status makes an important practical difference to how an area is run and what the people running it can do independently of the State they're in. So it makes sense every settlement with a general store and a paved road would want that status.
The status of various municipal designations varies greatly based on state laws. Generally, government levels go state->county->municipality. The type and form of a municipality generally only affects how it is organized, not its level of independence from higher levels of government. Some states restrict types and forms based on size, though.
The person you are responding to never even used the word cities.
I feel like it's worth making a distinction between having the relevant capabilities/resources for a technology vs. actually deploying it in its infrastructure?
For historical reasons, the U.S. legal system offers citizens an unparalleled number of veto points at which they can attempt to block government projects. Any infrastructure project bigger than painting a schoolhouse thus has to either fight out the reviews and court cases for years, or buy off the opponents, or more likely, both.
The lack of infrastructure definitely affects perception and quality of life. Make no mistake though, currently the united states is one of the technology leaders of the world. Key word: currently.