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Comment by infotainment | Hacker News Reader

Agreed largely, though IMO BART is holding the bay area back. Unlike Caltrain and Muni, BART management is completely incompetent and more focused on spending their money on random things than actually running their transit system.

Fun fact: BART police has a large fleet of SUVs, with the highest vehicle-to-officer ratio in the bay area (if only there were some other way for them to get around!)

Fun exercise: compare the cleanliness of a Muni Bus/LRV to a BART car (even a new one at the start of the day). There is a huge difference.

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I think BART struggles with who it's meant to serve now, since it was clearly designed for ultra-peak weekday commute traffic. Recovery for weekend ridership is way better than weekday.

I also agree that the governance structure for BART is weird and overly complex. Why do I elect a BART director? Why are they in their own special BART districts completely discontinuous from the 10 other ways we have sliced up the Bay Area?

All that being said, BART has done some good stuff too. The new cars really are way better, and they were not easy to procure since BART has its own weird, non-standard rail gauge. They have increased frequency and shortened trains on weekends to respond to the ridership changes.

Most of all, BART remains the only form of Bay Area transit genuinely faster than driving in real-world circumstances: it averages above 60mph in parts of the east bay, and goes from downtown Oakland to downtown SF in 11min, which is often 2-3x faster than driving. It's the primary transit system that can compete head-to-head with driving. For that reason, I do hope they keep increasing frequency (shortening trains if necessary).

Wait, BART director is an elected position? Why don't I get to vote on it?

(Also, while I am biased towards Caltrain, the new trains beat traffic on 101/280 San Francisco↔San Jose during rush hour).

You do. San Jose’s districts were not up in the most recent election https://www.bart.gov/about/bod/elections

What district do they have? I don't see anyone on this list that seems like they cover the area: https://www.bart.gov/about/bod

Yep, I was wrong. I had assumed SCC joined up to get Berryessa

Santa Clara County is not part of the BART District. The extension to downtown San Jose is being funded by VTA as a service-purchase agreement.

Oh wow

It shouldn't be, though. There is way too much democracy in California localities.

There should be no elected school board, transit districts, utility boards, assessors, sheriff, and so much more. No one is properly informed about candidates for these positions.

For that matter, the Board of Supervisors should have no power other than oversight and impeachment. The Mayor should basically be a local dictator, with the power to do anything the State authorizes the municipality to do, at their sole discretion, with the oversight of an elected board.

Americans seem to have a view that if you get a part of an unengaged electorate to mark an x in a box every few years that’s democracy, and more is thus better.

Instead it removes accountability from public servants who can simply hide behind the “elected” excuse.

What terrifies me the most are elections for judges. I am not a legal scholar and I rely upon local bar associations for qualification ratings (and I’m not convinced I made the right call all the time); to my horror I’ve had educated colleagues tell me they just pick cool sounding names.

I do research on all judges before I vote and while I might not know what a good judge is, a bad judge sticks out like a sore thumb.

It’s kind of sad that BART’s first mover advantage means it’ll forever be a second-class railway. They’ll never do the “correct” thing and shut it down long enough to replace everything with standard equipment and gauge.

Being a first mover didn't prevent them from adopting standard gauge which already had existed for 100 years.

It has been said the broader gauge was chosen at the time to make trains able to run safely over Golden Gate Bridge with strong side winds. My physics is not good enough to calculate whether that argument makes sense. And I have no idea how realistic that route ever was.

I don't think the gauge is a major problem. Train orders are always a custom project, few urban networks use exactly the same standards. Railroad manufacturers are used to different gauges.

In particular the track gauge is a long way from being the only consideration. Structure gauge and Loading gauge are also crucial. When I first moved here despite this being an important port city a Victorian arch bridge carrying road traffic over the railway meant every single freight train carrying containers from the port to the rest of the country needed to either go on a circuitous route or use special low wagons with reduced capacity, which hold a container below axle height so as to fit under that bridge.

In that case blocking the road and dropping in a new road bridge was affordable given the economic value but generally you put up with what you've got.

True, when it comes to loading gauge one can no longer even about a standard. Most countries have several different loading gauges even for the same track gauge.

In practice I am not convinced the BART is severely impacted by their "weird" gauge (whatever is meant by that, not sure what their loading gauge is, for passenger trains the distance to and height of the platforms would be most relevant).

Stadler KISS series used by Caltrain is built at least in 3 different widths.

Auckland, NZ had (not sure whether still in use) rolling stock from the UK, converted from 1435 mm to 1067 mm track gauge, the loading gauge obviously was close enough.

Finland has engines (Sr3, Dr20) and railcars (Dm12) designed for smaller central European loading gauges. They look a bit tiny compared to other stock, but they are fully usable.

Speaking of BART, this story is priceless: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bart-seat-slasher-hur...

The firm that reupholstered damaged BART seats in the ‘80s paid people to slash them so they’d get more business.

I love these kinds of true snippets of general security history:

  It was estimated that "possibly 85 percent of the more than 7,000 BART train cushions damaged since August 1979" was the work of this company, the Examiner reported at the time.

  All said and done, BART had paid the company $115,000 for the repairs, a total of about $339,128 in today's money.

Always follow the money.

Under $50 per cushion repair in today’s money seems super cheap!

Genius Business Plan. Make repairs too cheap for competitors to be interested and drive up volume with criminal conspiracy

Big Cushion would defeat you at every step

The profit motive always incentiveses this sort of innovation and efficiency when it comes to making more profit.

My "favorite" story: BART Withholding Surveillance Videos Of Crime To Avoid 'Stereotypes' <https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholdin...>

>paid people to slash them so they’d get more business

Charlie Chaplin did it first https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izqhtBPd4VQ

Fun fact: Michael Healy in the second photo lives in Larry Ellison’s old house in Oakland. He also has a book on Amazon.

Yep, BART is pretty reviled by all the other transit authorities, and for good reason, based on what my friends who work some of the other authorities have said.

> with the highest vehicle-to-officer ratio in the bay area

There are 30% more violent assaults on BART vs Muni.

> if only there were some other way for them to get around!

Do you want them to respond rapidly or eventually?

Are you saying that they need vehicles to get to the crime locations faster? Are vehicles really faster than them being at the BART station on foot?

If anything that statistic you cited shows that their existing policies are not a deterrent. Perhaps because they are in their vehicles instead of on train cars where the crimes are happening.

> Are vehicles really faster than them being at the BART station on foot?

So you're sure you can create a deployment plan that will have the correct amount of officers on station at all times? What if they need backup? What if two incidents happen at once?

> their existing policies are not a deterrent.

I'm sure their vehicle strategy has little to do with deterrence. Or are you suggesting this is the _reason_ why there is more crime?

> instead of on train cars where the crimes are happening.

Crimes also happen on the platform, the turnstiles, and the curtilage. I get that people want to be "mad the vehicles exist" but this is not sensible.

My son and I visited San Francisco carless last year. Awesome trip!

BART and Muni were great. My only complaint was that BART from downtown to SFO was almost painfully loud.

> BART police

why does a transit system need its own police force? Aren't municipal and county police enough?

That's a good question, any I have no idea of the answer, but the port authority of NY and NJ has it's own police. I always figured it was because it spanned jurisdictions, but perhaps there are other reasons

Chicago has CTA police and the suburban rail system Metra has its own police also.

CTA doesn’t have its own police. That’s just normal CPD.

Hm, maybe CPD has a CTA detail then? I thought there was (or used to be) a CTA police division that had their own uniforms, cars, etc. I seem to also remember a CHA police for the housing projects, but it's been a long time since I lived there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police are actually a thing! It's not just transit either. Most of the big US railroads have their own private police forces. The officers are deputized by the state, and then by federal law their powers are valid in any state that railroad has track. They even have arrest powers.

CN and CPKC police are deputized in both the US and Canada, at the Federal, Provincial and State levels. Transnational private police.

BART exists in 5 counties (San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa, and Santa Clara) and multiple cities (SF, Oakland, San Jose, and multiple smaller ones).

Having people who have jurisdiction in any bart station is useful. And for example, consistent foot patrols are valuable to BART but not necessarily valuable to the city of Hayward, or whatever. As a concrete example, BART has more or less a goal to be able to put an officer on the car within a stop or two if you report on the app. That's logistically challenging for like a half dozen reasons if the bart police wasn't it's own org.

East Bay Regional Park District also has its own police force, for the same reasons.

It's pretty common around the country. If it isn't a separate entity you end up having a department of the normal local police doing it separately anyway. Also BART goes through several different police jurisdictions and trains... move. I can imagine the mess and disagreements about which police department was responsible for answering a call or riding in a car as it moved between cities/counties.

Presumably because police usually only have jurisdiction within their employer’s city limits, and sheriffs’ employees only have jurisdiction within their counties, so if mass transit moves between multiple jurisdictions, then their police can have jurisdiction wherever the mass transit goes (even across state lines, because a lot of metropolitan regions served by the same mass transit system span two or more states).

Wouldn't they just have jurisdiction in the transit area though? Like it's not like a BART employee could pull you over for speeding?

If they are a sworn law enforcement officer they probably could, but probably wouldn’t.

With prior consent, the authority of California peace officers extends to any place in the state. [1]

You would think that the counties could get together and work out an MoU.

1. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

Most city police and sheriffs officers have jurisdiction anywhere in their state, AFAIK. They typically stay in their area, but if they’re pursuing a suspect they don’t break off if they cross the city limits.

Which nearly any campus police will tell you during orientation.

It's a chain of command (i.e. BART police report to BART, Campus police report to the school, way less messy than BART or the school having to convince the jurisdiction how to police the area) and prioritization thing. Bespoke police agencies exist to police their niche to an extent that would be unjustifiable if it were coming your normal police department and taking resources away from their other tasks.

Transit police, campus police, DEA, ATF, etc, etc, etc. Their entire job is to harass people that the equivalent generalist police couldn't justify allocating resources toward.

Irate homeless? SFPD won't show, but BART Police will.

Drunk college kids shenanigans? Normal cops don't care, but campus police does.

Weirdos making machine guns or huge amounts of LSD? FBI don't care as long as you're not trafficking, they got real crime with real victims to chase. ATF and DEA care though.

Wash rinse repeat this pattern for literally every bespoke police agency.

Yeah, jurisdiction can be a theoretical reason for these agencies but once again it's still a priority thing. When agencies care jurisdiction and coordination isn't a problem. Having one agency span multiple only helps if you're chasing stuff so petty it would get dropped.

Except for the last one in your list, the others are quality of life problems. I have no problem if police interfere with either. Even the last one, is at best borderline. If there is a weirdo making machine guns in my neighborhood and I have kids, I sure as hell want police to interfere.

That works in theory, until the police are overrun with things they don't specialize in and don't have the officers to handle the day to day plus illegal arms dealers.

The US is underpoliced per capita

By what standard? The US is more policed per capita than Europe.

I hate Reddit but having both in one image is really convenient.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/x2d7v7/num...

Actually, train systems having its own assigned branches of police is common enough that there's a Wikipedia article[1]. Unique part is that the US doesn't have an umbrella national or state agency that such branches would be part of.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police

Massachusetts has a state level Transit Police, at least.

They're not actually "assigned branches" of the police, they're private police. The US/Canadian railway police are not government employees, they're employees of the Class I railways and deputized with general law enforcement powers. They're spiritual successors to the old timey Pinkertons.

Two of the biggest are Canadian National Police and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Police -- and those two are deputized, in both Canada and the US, with Federal, State and Provincial police powers. Despite being railway employees they can cite you for, e.g. speeding if they catch you doing so. Either on or off railway property.

No, there are a lot of jurisdictional issues and motivational issues.

An example of how it goes wrong is NYC. NYPD absorbed the transit police years ago and the role basically degraded to an overtime sink.

Also, with normal railways rails generate property taxes and towns often make deals where slivers of tracks get annexed to nearby towns or cities.

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