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Comment by deltaonefour | Hacker News Reader

Just coming from Hong Kong or Tokyo I don't understand how someone can write an article like this without feeling completely embarrassed. Bart is a symbol of American incompetence.

It's like, ok, unique decision on the broad gauge. But the Bart is a piece of shit. So why should I care?

A real topical blog post would be one comparing Bart to say the train systems in China; but instead they ignore the obvious and focus on this irrelevant detail.

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The article is titled "Why BART uses a nonstandard broad gauge" not "Why BART is the best thing in the world and a symbol of american competence"

@deltaonefour - no you don't understand. The article isn't trying to sell you anything. I'm not trying to sell you anything. The article is literally just a nice short explanation of a relatively obscure (but apparently popular) topic - why the BART chose a specific gauge. It's not saying BART is faster, higher capacity, cheaper, cleaner, more modern or in any way better than anything else in the rest of the world. It's just about the gauge, nothing more. There's no need to get so upset about this.

Hong Kong has a population density of 6,659 people per square kilometer. Similarly, Tokyo has 6,158 persons per square kilometer

The SF Bay Area has a density of 431 people per square kilometer.

Obviously it's easier and much more efficient to build rapid transit when you are serving areas fifteen times more populated.

A better comparison would be with Greater Sydney (442 people per square kilometre).

I don't think it's that simple

https://youtu.be/MnyeRlMsTgI?t=50

And just because the bay area average is 431 there are plenty of cities in the bay area with much higher densities and there are comparable cities else where that manage to have great public transportation.

I’m seeing a density of 2,419 per sq km for SF urban core at https://www.newgeography.com/content/007367-toronto-solidifi... and that beats New York at 2,054 people per sq km. Probably has something to do with how the urban core is defined and NYC sprawl, but still interesting…

Manhattan itself is like 27,000 people per sq km, so how you define urban core matters a ton

Would've helped a lot if they'd upzoned near transit, so people would actually live next to it instead of parking lots and SFH. Eventually SB50 will come back and do it, hopefully.

There's also VTA, which guessed completely wrong about where people would move to and so goes from MTV to nowhere.

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