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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

BART is pretty unreliable in part due to maintenance problems, but also due to system design.

For example two days ago there was a horrific final-destination-esque crash in which a motorcyclist happened to be in front of the train.

https://twitter.com/sfbart/status/1570997016347680768

This crash caused the entire system to be disrupted for hours, even very far away from the crash. According to BART, "We don’t have extra tracks to maneuver around problems. That’s why our system comes to a halt from one incident."

View on HN

"We shared the info [of an early report of someone being on the tracks] and some took to twitter declaring that the person was a junkie on our tracks and it is BART's fault.

We hope you have all since deleted your tweets."

I am looking forward to the future of aggressive-aggressive tweeting from public transit agencies.

I've also always wondered if there was any way to help BART, sort of in a USDS style, or if the problems really are paltry budgets and mismanagement, and so joining in an engineering capacity wouldn't help at all.

My POV is that it's mostly corruption. They have plenty of money but are set up in service of the employee unions and bosses, not the riders or cities they service. Bart employees make obscene salaries and the system is very protective of their monopoly.

believe it or not, BART is actually competent and does what they can with the cards they have been dealt. name another US transit agency implementing a takt

BART discovered conical instead of cylindrical wheels in 2018[1]. This is dawn-of-railroad technology. You can accuse BART of many things, but competency is not one of them.

[1] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180606

Edit: Clarified what the issue was.

> BART discovered cylindrical wheels in 2018

?? This is a 2018 piece describing how they moved from cylindrical wheels to an advanced wheel profile. I don't think they're claiming the new, non-cylindrical profile is particularly advanced, either, but just carefully optimized to maintain a single point of contact even as the wheel wears.

That doesn’t seem to be a charitable reading and in any case it has to do with wheel taper, more like cone than cylinder. More specifically the nature of the solution was getting two parts of the org, track and train, to work together. While that may seem elementary stuff, anyone at a big org can attest to how often it is tremendously difficult to do sometimes.

I write this not as an apologist for commuter rail, which I find excessively expensive and inflexible outside of very circumstances, but as an excuse to link to the lovely Feynman description of why train wheels are tapered:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE

I used to joke when the Subway wheels squealed “yeah that’s how the engineers designed that”

Turns out, it was.

>BART discovered cylindrical wheels in 2018.

... uhh, your own link says otherwise, emphasis mine...

>To answer the question, the original BART wheel profile, you can consider it like a cylindrical section of pipe. While the new profile is tapered, like a curved barrel, if you could imagine that the cylinder shape pipe rolling down a slight incline it really just wants to go straight. It doesn’t want to turn to the left, it doesn’t want to turn to the right, it just wants to go straight. That’s what our original BART wheel is like. Whenever it would come to a turn the wheel flange is what makes that wheel turn and go around the curve and that results in a lot of extra wear. The new wheel shape that we call the BT-3 Wheel Profile tends to want to self-center between the rails and it even steers in the turns so the result is much less wear and noticeably less noise.

like i said, they do what they can with the cards that they were dealt. the initial design of the system was flawed in many ways, one of them being the cylindrical wheel profile

More technical article on BART wheel geometry.[1]

The old wheels were cylindrical but the rails were tapered to provide self-centering. This works well for straight track and large radius-curves. The trouble with conical wheels is that too much self-centering can induce sideways oscillation at high speeds. BART was designed for 80MPH, a high speed for the time and still fast for a transit system. BART was also the first rail system to have active suspension. Rail geometry, wheel geometry, and suspension all interact.

High speed rail wheel and track profiles are a complicated problem. The Shinkansen system in Japan did a lot of work on this, as did the TGV developers in France. It took a while to get wheels, rails, and suspension to all work together well enough for high speeds. Now this is reasonably well understood, but it wasn't when BART was designed.

[1] https://www.wheel-rail-seminars.com/archives/2016/rt-papers/...

  Now this is reasonably well understood, but it wasn't when BART was designed

Claiming that BART was ground breaking and could've never predicted the consequences of their design choices is quite revisionist. They got called out for their dangerous train control almost immediately. 80 MPH is not and was not high speed. Amtrak trainsets were cable of over 100 MPH back in the mid-70s. BART just reinvented everything poorly (that's their MO).

Anyways here's a technical piece about BART wheels:

https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/noisereport.pd...

  With trued wheels and smooth ground rail on ballast and ties, BART is one of
  the quietest vehicles. in operation at U.S. transit systems.

Problem is BART is exceptionally hard on their track. Even with conical wheels you can feel the new trains bounce up and down on wildly out of round wheels. You can feel the rumbling on the decrepit track between Lake Merritt and 19th St. Normal railways often lubricate their tracks, but BART can't. Normal railways increase the track gauge slightly in curves (because most train cars don't use differentials), BART pretty much doesn't.

This was my favorite bit:

  Of these two types of curving noise, wheel squeal is the more prevalent,
  while wheel howl may be limited to lightly damped aluminum centered wheels
  such as used at BART. In fact, wheel howl may be unique to BART, because
  BART is the only transit system employing rigid aluminum centered wheels.

Whoops.

> Normal railways increase the track gauge slightly in curves (because most train cars don't use differentials)

Actually gauge widening in curves is to some extent probably more a remnant of steam locomotives with their comparatively ginormous wheelbases.

Based on current knowledge, a slight gauge widening on straight track and a slight gauge tightening on tight curves might actually be more beneficial – while trains don't have differentials, they normally (BART and some streetcar systems excepted) use conical wheels, which can self-steer themselves around curves down to a certain radius. That radius is somewhere in the range of a few hundred metres, but its exact value depends on the equivalent conicity of the combination of wheel and rail profiles.

A higher equivalent conicity reduces the minimum radius down to which self-steering remains effective, while a lower conicity reduces hunting and increases stability at high speeds on straight track. Simultaneously, given a nominal track gauge, a slight increase in the track gauge reduces the equivalent conicity, while a decrease of the track gauge noticeably increases equivalent conicity.

  Based on current knowledge, a slight gauge widening on straight track and
  a slight gauge tightening on tight curves might actually be more beneficial – 
  while trains don't have differentials, they normally (BART and some streetcar
  systems excepted) use conical wheels

Right, BART got the track gauge wrong when they were using flat wheels. Instead of self-centering the wheels got dragged down the track. This went on for forty-odd years which is how BART earned its reputation for being so damn noisy.

> Now this is reasonably well understood, but it wasn't when BART was designed.

absolute nonsense.

nevermind that the shinkansen opened a decade before BART, the pioneer zephyr hit 112 mph in _1934_. while the dynamics of the wheel-rail system are complex and still the subject of active research, the need for conical wheel profiles was well-known when BART was designed. the choice of cylindrical wheel profiles was purely a symptom of not-invented-here syndrome, and BART being designed by aerospace engineers. the best excuse they could come up with for that decision is, uh, muni did it first.

None of these salaries[0] seem obscene, especially given the CoL in the area.

[0]: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Salary%20Sched...

Bart station attendants make over 3x the median rider. They do nothing but sit in the booth. They don't sell tickets or monitor fare evasion, and they are infamously unhelpful at answering questions.

> Bart station attendants make over 3x the median rider.

which job title specifically are you referring to? from the pay schedule linked above, the closest thing I see is Station Agent, with a pay range of $73-86k.

and where are you getting the data on the median salary of a BART rider?

That's their base pay, but they make huge amounts of overtime depending on seniority.

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=san-fra...

Many of them make over 150k, some over 220k

BART claims says their median rider makes 50k, based on a survey they conducted in 2020. You can find various sources by searching "rider profile" or something like that.

Sure, they can make 220k if they only take 4 days off in an entire year:

https://abc7news.com/bart-news-building-a-better-bay-area-ov...

To make 150k, they only need to work ~250 days.

What I mean by "corruption" is that the compensation in the story you shared is from 2018, and it's still going on in 2021 (the compensation data I shared)

They were paid slightly more than enough to afford average rent for an average unit in San Francisco. They earned it by working overtime. By working more than full time and being compensated according to their employment agreement. The idea that that’s corruption is mind boggling to me. I don’t know whether you just want janitors to be underclass by definition or whether you object to people being compensated for their work, or what could possibly be the problem here.

Personally, I think everyone should be able to afford to live comfortably wherever they are. And I think janitors and other people who do often thankless and grueling work should be compensated substantially more than they are, not less. If it were up to me, no one would have to work overtime to afford average rent where they work so hard already.

It's over double area median income. It's simply not the case that it's just enough to survive or anything like that. Those people could afford to live almost anywhere in the bay area easily.

The part that makes it corruption is that BART is overpaying to pad the pockets of specific more senior members of the union at the expense of less senior members and the public.

To make it concrete, I have a very nice and spacious apartment in a good location in SF. Around 85% of BART employees could easily afford my apartment, based on public data (less than 30% one month pay).

You have a spacious apartment for $2.5K / month in a good location in SF?

$2.5K is on-the-cheaper-side 1 bedroom, no?

Are you complaining that people are compensated when they work overtime? Wow.

I downloaded the results from that page, loaded them into a spreadsheet, and less than 25% are earning more than 150k/year and only 17% are higher than the 160k median income.

All these involve overtime which means: - lower quality of life - either not having kids or having to hire someone to take care of them

There is definitely something wrong if the system allow people to only take a handful of days off a year, is there a hiring freeze or something? Any sane manager would prefer having more workers that rest fully and stay motivated than people extending their times and becoming fatigued, demotivated and grumpy in the process.

Where did you get the median income from? Also, median household income is different from median income. According to the last census, median household income in San Francisco is under $120k[1]. That is household. The average income for a person is less than $82k[2]. Oakland and San Jose are lower than that.

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia

[2] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/san-francisco-ca#economy

Every major public transit system in the world has employee unions and most of those systems are a lot nicer than BART.

The problem is that the United States is not good at building this sort of transit, and it's going to suck no matter how much money we spend and how much we pay the employees because the systems are not well designed or maintained.

In my limited experience with transit districts, they don't recruit high performers. It's a hang-out type of career, and they hire people like them.

As far as mechanics keeping older machines running, what is described in the article is typical. It is old and is being replaced. Giving mechanics MS Win 11 to download log files via a recent OS doesn't improve the outcome.

In most countries the union is reasonable to work with. For that matter in most counties management is reasonable to work with. In the us neither cares for anything but making themselves better at their expense of anything else.

Feels pretty circular. It’s not the unions and it’s not the money. It’s the design and maintenance! Okay, but why would that be uniquely bad in America?

The MTA in NYC spends about $19 billion per year. It’s hard to fathom that amount of spend, and equally hard to imagine how residents get so little for so much.

https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MTA-...

A lot of people earning significantly over $200k. I’m sure all those OT hours are legit and necessary and not at all an obvious sign of corruption.

I wouldn't call it "corruption" primarily, but BART is very much run to profit the union and its members.

The union in turn gets it power by being able to paralyze the entire Bay Area with a strike. Last actual strike was in 2013: https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/18/bart-strike-throws-sf-commut...

Without this blackmail power over the region, BART'a costs would be considerably lower. Assuming 1/3 lower, we'd get 50% more BART for our money, and I think that would be much better than keeping a few thousand union members in nice lifestyles.

Oh yeah, the problem with BART is employee wages, look at all those millionaire stall clerks and attendants, they're what's holding back mass transit in the bay area - unlike in Europe, where public transit works so much better because there are no unions and no strikes anywhere... </sarcasm>

American unions are quite different from European unions.

More militant than Germany, way less militant than France. "Europe" isn't close to a monoculture for trades unions.

Even the UK does public transport better than the US, and our union/management relations are very similar to yours.

In the US, unions have been outcompeted from almost all the private sector.

They mostly remain in public sector monopolies, where they in some ways are stronger than politicians and management.

I don't know of anywhere in Europe that's similar. It has little to do with "militancy" levels.

Yeah, the same in the UK (though I'd quibble about 'outcompete', and 'stronger than' is quite contingent in both countries in my view).

Our public transport system still works way better than in the US. And I say that as someone who actually likes Amtrak.

That's a hilariously bold claim with zero evidence.

I think it's not as crazy as it sounds. You should visit SF and ride BART. You'll likely find the experience horrifying as a direct result of the behavior of these highly paid employees. The badness of the BART experience is a major cause of underinvestment. The public simply does not want more of that.

So you're saying BART employees are providing a vital job serving critical infrastructure? Sounds like the kind of worker you'd want to make sure gets decent pay and working conditions then.

"Without leverage workers wouldn't be able to negotiate better salaries" is hardly a novel idea. The top 10% of people in software development (hint: if you're on HN, you're probably in that 10%) can usually rely on market demand as leverage for the time being. For everyone else the best chance at gaining leverage is collective bargaining. Seems like it's working quite well for BART employees.

> our money

What percentage of your income goes to BART? What percentage of your income goes to militarizing the police and to the prison industrial complex? What percentage of your income goes to the military industrial complex? What percentage of your income goes towards rent? What percentage of your total compensation goes towards health insurance? What percentage of your delivered value goes towards your employer?

If you're upset about not getting your worth it feels like there are a lot bigger drains siphoning off that surplus value than BART. Seems odd to get so upset about BART salaries when their work seems to be vital enough that refusing to work can "paralyze the entire Bay Area".

  I am looking forward to the future of aggressive-aggressive tweeting
  from public transit agencies.

I'm not. Linton Johnson was plenty aggressive and aggressively stupid. He got shitcanned because it's a bad look.

Caltrain also has limited ability to route around accidents, and in some cases has to run trains the "wrong way" on the other side of the tracks to get past certain areas.

They also have no communication at all. Back when I had a Caltrain commute I would use Twitter to find out if there were accidents or delays, because the station signs were alway wrong and almost all of the stations are unstaffed. I would see posts on Twitter from people who were on a train that crashed into a car and the station signs would still say everything was on schedule.

> They also have no communication at all.

Their radios are (or were) unencrypted, and you can listen with the radio scanner apps.

Check out the twitter account / website I run.

@bettercaltrain https://caltrain.live

Caltrain is basically an afterthought. Secondhand rolling stock, tracks shared with freight, and perpetually starved for funding. BART was a green field transit system. BART had every opportunity to design redundancy into the system and didn't. And yet Caltrain actually has dedicated passing tracks while BART doesn't.

> For example two days ago there was a horrific final-destination-esque crash in which a motorcyclist happened to be in front of the train.

Isn't Bart entirely grade-separated?

But yes, no ability to single-track is an issue.

The non-standard rail gauge is also an ongoing issue. Everything has to be custom. Compare this to Caltrain. Several years ago, they wanted to add capacity. They bought off-the-shelf Bombardier cars from an agency in Socal. I'm not sure if they ever even painted them, but they could use them almost immediately.

Isn't Bart entirely grade-separated?

Yes, but portions run near/under/over/alongside/in the median of roadway traffic. If you read the tweet thread you can see that a driver on the road was ejected into the BART ROW and was hit by a train.

Bart is running India broad guage. While it's isn't a common standard, most off the shelf trains can be ordered with that wheel width.

Though they might be stuck with made in America rules that limit their ability to order trains to fit.

> But yes, no ability to single-track is an issue.

Though it's not an absolute panacea, either. The Washington subway has crossovers every two to three stations and is set up for bi-directional operation on one track, and the two things I immediately noticed when I visited Washington eight or so years ago were:

- service levels on weekends were already only meh even without construction works

- there were construction works on a very small segment of the Red Line between two of those aforementioned crossovers – those works only required closing one track, so they decided to continue running a service on the remaining track. Unfortunately single-tracking severely limits the number of trains you can run, so that tiny closure meant that on that weekend the whole length of the Red Line (all 32 miles of it!) was only operating every 20 minutes or so (originally I had considered an accommodation along the Red Line, luckily I had reconsidered and chosen a different place to stay even before learning about those construction works).

After some googling, it seemed that this (i.e. construction works on a tiny stretch of track significantly affecting the service of the whole line even during the daytime, at least at weekends) was not an uncommon occurrence in Washington.

While single-tracking might be no problem late at night (when a reduced frequency doesn't matter that much, and might not be even all that much reduced as compared to normal service levels at that time of the day), or during unplanned short-term disruptions, for that kind of scheduled-in-advance all-day construction works I'd say it's at least debatable whether a complete closure of the affected stretch of track (with a bus replacement service) and a full service on the whole rest of the line might not be a better compromise…

IIRC that's also why the hours of BART are so limited. They have to do all their maintenance when the train isn't running since they can't route around it

BART has grade crossings? Isn’t entirely underground or elevated? Caltrain has grade crossings along its entire length.

No. BART tracks pass under the street at this point. This motorcyclist managed to fling himself over a prison-style fence while operating on a street with a posted 20 MPH limit.

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