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Comment by jelling | Hacker News Reader

Now explain why they put carpet in a train.

Not just carpet, but padded wool seats -- those were replaced with padded water-repellant vinyl a decade ago, which sounds like a long time until you realize that it had cloth seats for 40 years before that.

Absorbent wool was, as you might imagine, unbelievably nasty. Among other things I saw on BART, I once saw a guy with severe flesh necrosis on his foot sit with said foot, bandages taken off, pressed against the seat. Of course, minor issues like diarrhea and vomit stains were more typical.

As why carpets and wool, the answer is actually just about as interesting as the linked article. Back in the 60s / 70s when BART started operating, it was one of the first metro subways. Its creators envisioned it as a futuristic luxury ride, whisking businesspeople and tourists in and out of far-flung suburbs to the glimmering high-rises of San Francisco. Everyone would be wearing a suit or a nice dress, and they would sigh in relief each time they daintily sat down in these airline-style seats.

The actual future turned out to be a bit more disappointing...

No one imagines homeless and drug addicts riding their transportation.

>No one imagines homeless and drug addicts riding their transportation.

That's a pretty strong absolute; I'm certain that, at the very least, folk involved with public transportation do regularly consider homeless and/or addicts when covering various aspects of their service. Maybe not so much in the past, but these days it's basically a given.

I'm not so sure. Bay area is the only transit systems I've been on that seems to commonly have homeless and drug addicts. I've used transit systems all over the world. The rest don't seem to have that issue. Maybe it's because of better social services or maybe it's because so many normies use those other systems that it doesn't become a place for homeless and drug addict to hang out.

You haven't traveled much, then.

The London Underground circle line is famous for being a resting place for homeless people

Was famous. Not so much anymore.

It’s not being an actual circle line means it’s not as attractive to homeless people. You can’t just fall asleep and just ride in circles, you get up periodically and change trains now.

New York? London?

It's not common in London, at least since the 2000s.

Homeless people are more likely to be on buses (it's cheaper) but even that isn't common.

Wasn't this whole seat discussion about the past?

I mean, you don’t need the homeless and drug addicts to make wool and carpet nasty, you just need people to be outside before they come and use public transit.

Sweat, rain, dirt etc. are all going to come into the train.

It's not that someone has a drug problem or is homeless, but that they act with disregard for others.

> Back in the 60s / 70s when BART started operating, it was one of the first metro subways.

What does that mean? It wasn't the first in anything by any stretch of the imagination.

I know, the way I said it was poorly worded. It was a first in the minds of the planners and builders for, among other reasons, the approval process, the engineering conditions they built it under (a compressed air tunnel was required to keep out the mud and water from the Bay, I'm not sure if that was a first for just the US or the entire world), the amount of funding required (largest US public project to date), the specifications of the system, and the supposed comforts of the trains themselves.

In short, it was supposed to be a revolutionary metro, not just "yet another metro system". As it turned out, they would have been much better served by copying what was tried and true.

Have you ever seen the drawings from the late 1800s of what the subway was supposed to be in NYC? The future has been disappointing people for a very long time.

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56200fcee4b020...

> first metro subways

Uhh. No. London had the Underground literally 100 years before this and Boston had a subway around 1900. Paris, Moscow.. many subways predate BART.

Because in the 60s it was unthinkable that someone would urinate on a public transit?

I remember the 1960's, at least the last half and yeah. If you took a piss on public transit the bus driver would beat the living fuck out of you.

That's not necessarily an issue — Deutsche Bahn uses carpet and fabric seats for second class and carpet and leather seats for first class as well.

Even local transit, e.g., BVG frequently uses fabric as seat material.

You just have to design it to be able to be cleaned easily and quickly.

Because BART is an urban subway marketed to the white flight suburbanites. It was supposed to be luxurious not usable. That's why you got two doors at the cost of boarding speed and tons of seats at the cost of standing room.

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