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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

The SF bay area rail and transit system seems to be a good argument for an eventual unified transit authority that will combine BART, Caltrain, etc. – undoubtedly adopting the worst features of each system in the process.

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That's what MUNI is. It started as hundreds of independent railways crisscrossing the city. They slowly unified them into the cacophony that is MUNI.

I say cacophony because there are bus', cable cars, vintage light rail, modern light rail, subway, tram, local neighborhood shuttles, and I'm sure I'm missing a few.

Well yeah, that's what a modern public transportation system looks like - I know that's unusual in the US, but if you look at other places, e.g. Europe, you will also have buses, trams/light rail (with tunnel segments and heritage services for tourists) and minibuses/neighborhood shuttles in most bigger cities. The only thing that sets SF apart is the cable cars - and having both a fully grade-separated metro (BART) and a light rail system with tunnel sections (Muni Metro) - usually in cities with a "full metro" the light rail is a tram without tunnel stations.

Or you end up with scenarios like Montreal’s, where the metro is fully enclosed with no opportunity for at-grade due to rubber wheels.

I mean, Montréal also regularly sees temperatures around -30 C in the winter, so it's not completely ridiculous to suggest this decision may be informed by fundamentally different design constraints from, say, San Francisco or many European cities [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Metro#Station_design

…except there is now also a light rail, the REM, which goes above ground including in Winter

You can do covered at grade (e.g. Sofia Metro has a few km section like this - covered to protect against the cold weather in the winter, but at grade to save costs).

Montreal did it wrong so nobody should try again? I'm struggling to see what your point is. Montreal is in north America, not Europe, in case you're not aware.

You don’t need a unified authority to run integrated transit. Most German cities are covered by an association of various cities.

One major benefit vs a shared authority is if someone wants to pay less into it and someone else wants to pay more, it is hard to get the two sides to work well.

Unfortunately the Bay Area is far too provincial to create a coherent system out of the twenty-odd systems out here, each with their own fare structure.

It’s complicated and expensive. MTA in NYC created a big mess when it swept up private bus companies. I think they have 4-5 bargaining units for busses alone.

no fancy words needed -- when the switch to electronic common fare (Clipper) was initiated, agencies including BART dragged their feet. After a few months (quarters?) of this, a BART finance officer said bluntly on the record "the cash flow we control at BART is part of our planning and stability" and flatly refused to switch completely to Clipper.

That wouldn’t magically improve if they came under one corporate umbrella, though.

Look at New York MTA where the LIRR and Metro-North have had the same owner as the subway since 1968 and yet there is no combined way to pay or integrated fare.

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