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Comment by wickedchicken | Hacker News Reader

And one day, there will be 24 hour BART looping around the entire bay. Nope. :(

BART running 24 hours is not an option. It would be epically expensive for what -- 6-7 additional hours of sparsely-used trains?

I'm not going to argue on how expensive it is, but consider this: a 24 hour subway means many fewer people would have to drive. If you don't have to drive, you don't have the choice between not drinking that night or leaving before midnight. If drunk driving is reduced by eliminating cars, then 'last call' can be extended to, say, 4am. Less traffic, less drunk driving accidents, more booze, more late-night coffee shops.

I hear ya, but it would require laying a second track along the entirety of the BART system.

This is a woulda/shouda thing going back 60 years to the original construction of the system. Even if we gave BART billions in funding, there are certainly better uses for that money (Build a rail line into OAK, extend service on all the currently-approved-but-unfunded routes, extend to San Mateo, and deal with some expensive, lingering issues with the transbay tunnel.)

Did you mean a third track? BART is already double-tracked or more along its entire length. The reason they close the system at night is because they can barely keep up with car and track maintenance.

If the trains were automated, the cost of running some short trains in the middle of the night would be (at least more) reasonable. The Copenhagen Metro runs 24/7, for example. I believe BART trains are actually capable of fully automatic operation, but haven't gotten regulatory permission to run without an operator.

See below -- BART has a single track. It wasn't laid as a dual-track like many are -- including Copenhagen if they're running all night.

In a single-track system 24/7 operation is not possible: they need to be able to power-down the track for maintenance.

I don't think that's true, unless I'm missing something about the definition of dual-tracking. Here's a map of the system's tracks, which seems to show that it's dual-tracked throughout: http://transbay.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/bart-track-map_2...

That's consistent with my recollection riding BART. Shutting down one of the two tracks for unexpected daytime maintenance ("single-tracking") is a common source of delays, since in single-track mode the system can't run nearly as many trains per hour due to the need to pass at specific points. But it can still run some trains, probably enough for a night service.

It's definitely true. BART has one track in each direction. Systems that run 24 hours have dual-tracks in each direction or segmentation that allows them to individually power-down segments of track, though that isn't really 24/7 operation anymore.

You can research this but I'm not going to do that for you. I'm comfortable that I'm correct, if you're not, well, meh. It's not personal, I'm sure you can understand.

And to your original point -- the engineer driving the train is a fraction of the cost of keeping the system running. Even if BART was dual-tracked, the salary of the engineer doesn't hardly move the needle on their costs, which include: Salaries of station agents and security, additional maintenance and wear-and-tear, janitorial (including dealing with higher janitorial costs between 2AM and 6AM than other 4-hour periods due to the nature of overnight passenger traffic), baseline power costs to keep the power rail hot at 1000+ volts over 100+ miles of track, etc.

Oh, yes, it has one track in each direction. I thought you were arguing it was actually single-tracked in portions, the way some commuter-rail lines are, and which was the original proposal for the SFO extension. The Copenhagen Metro is also one track in each direction, and runs 24/7. At night it will sometimes (if maintenance is needed) run in single-track mode, with one of the two tracks powered down in a segment, the same way BART operates during emergency daytime single-tracking. Perhaps that's not "really" 24/7 operation, but it does produce the effect of uninterrupted 24/7 service from the passenger's perspective, since it's able to maintain its scheduled nighttime headway of 20 minutes even when single-tracked through a segment, barring exceptional circumstances.

You are misusing the term - in rail systems, double-tracked means that the system (or line) has two tracks, typically one for each direction. Their are systems (MTA/NYCT most notably in the USA) that have more than two tracks, although in NY's case, it's to allow local trains and express trains to run on different tracks.

In a single-track system 24/7 operation is not possible:

In double-tracked systems, there are crossovers (typically located near stations, but they can be anywhere) or switches to storage tracks that allow traffic to be routed along single tracks as necessary to allow track segments to be taken out of service.

The primary argument against 24 hour operation is that it allows for track maintenance, and is required because BART lacks redundancy throughout its system. The system is shut down for 4 hours, from midnight through 4am, nightly (counting end-point departures, service actually runs slightly later from some intermediate stations).

That said, it's double-tracked in many (though possibly not all) sections, which might allow for running periodic service along one set of tracks, assuming switching and train control systems would allow for this. With a full circumnavigation of the Bay, it might also be possible to phase system downtime such that service might run on either eastern (Contra Costa) or western (Penninsula) lines, with service between SF and SJ. By phasing which specific track segments are down for maintenance at any one time, effective coverage of much of the system might be possible (at the cost of greater scheduling and maintenance complexity).

Triple-tracking the system could also provide for this, though at much greater infrastructure and land costs.

As it is, the 4 hour shutdown doesn't affect too many patrons, and service during operating hours is very reliable (much more so than other regional transit sywtems, or driving).

http://www.bart.gov/guide/latenight.aspx

I think late-night CalTrain (or late-night BART on the peninsula) would be more useful than 24-hour BART.

First, the city has buses running at night and there are 8xx buses that run along BART lines after BART is closed. While one's experience on BART is much better than on a bus, current options don't require that much more time.

Second, the last north-bound CalTrain leaves Palo Alto a little before 11 pm making it really difficult for people living in the city/East Bay without a car to do evening activities there. If one wants to get back, the best options are spending two hours on a SamTrans bus into the city or taking an expensive cab.

It should be feasible to run it 24hrs during weekends only. Stockholm's subway does this and is closed normally at night weekdays. The headways are long enough (30+ minutes out on the branches) that repairs can be carried out if need be by switching to the other track (not sure if they actually do this regularly).

The bay is sufficiently less population dense, making lots of projects "bang for the buck" seem off.

Hella less traffic on 101 though.

Population density is certainly part of it. Manhattan has about 4x the population density of San Francisco. But 24 hour subway service can be practical with lower population density. E.g. Chicago has a lower population density than San Francisco, but has 24 hour service on the red line (along the lake shore) and a very robust commuter rail service. The key difference is commuting patterns. In the Bay area, people commute haphazardly between suburbs. In NYC and Chicago, everyone from the suburbs commutes downtown in the morning and back out to the suburbs in the evening. It's much easier to have an effective transportation system when everyone is going in the same direction.

Most suburban Chicago commute lines have much lower service frequency than BART. More comparable to CalTrain along the Penninsula, with some 1-2 hour midday gaps in service.

Yes, Metra is to the "L" as Caltrain is to BART. But Metra has 488 miles of track versus Caltrain's 78 miles of track. It carries 300,000 riders per weekday versus Caltrain's 42,000 riders per weekday. Chicagoland is bigger than the SF Bay, but not dramatically so. 10 million people versus 7 million people, at roughly the same density.

Caltrain map: http://www.caltrain.com/stations/systemmap.html

Metra map: http://www.mrl.ucsb.edu/~yopopov/rrt/us/chicago/rr_chicago_m...

To be fair, when you include BART's ridership (379,000), the Bay Area beats Chicago. You might also want to include the Capitol Corridor and ACE lines, which have minuscule ridership (5300 and 3700 daily, respectively), but add considerable trackage (168 and 84 miles). San Francisco's Muni Metro is a hair under 37 miles, but transports 162,000 riders daily. There's also San Jose's LRT, but let's leave that out for now.

A comparable rail map for the San Francisco Bay Area: http://www.urbanrail.net/am/snfr/sf-bay-area-map.htm

That puts the Bay Area commuter rail at 472 track miles and 598,000 passengers daily. Rather closer to your Chicago numbers.

But we've got to add in Chicago's CTA 'L line (709,000 daily riders, 108 miles). Tips lead to Chicago again.

Chicago benefits greatly from having grown up around (and not torn down much of its) commuter rail lines, including significant urban and suburban growth from 1860 - 1910, pre-automobile. It's occasionally noted in both areas that commute times a century ago were comparable to, or faster than, today (dedicated rights of way, less traffic, arguably fewer safety restrictions). The Bay Area notably tore down its old Key System commute rail, and several counties (San Mateo, Marin) have fought BART extensions for a half century, and saw much of its growth in the car-friendly post-WWII era.

The Bay Area's layout is actually fairly rail-friendly, with a few major transportation corridors (Peninsula, East Bayshore, CA-24, I-580, I-80, US 101 north of SF), though overall densities are low. Chicago has experienced a great deal of sprawl in the past 30 years, as well as employer flight to the suburbs, greatly increasing suburb-to-suburb commuting, though both SF and Chicago have also seen an increased appeal of the inner urban core especially for younger professionals.

The problem here is that BART is not a metro service - MUNI is supposed to be, but doesn't do a particularly good job of it, so BART has been co-opted over the years by residents in some neighborhoods to pick up the pieces.

San Francisco first needs to figure out what BART is - if its future is as a rapid transit municipal system (that's tied together with other municipalities), or if it should be strictly a commuter and inter-city transport system.

The current operating model is not a bad one assuming what you want is a regional commuter rail system, it fails utterly at being municipal transport.

I'd suggest that the "failures" of BART are really the extension of the massive, completely unmitigated clusterfuck that is MUNI. Looking at the recent history of MUNI is like watching a really bad slapstick act - it'd be funny if it weren't so damned sad. MUNI is broken, its system of governance is broken, and the propensity for California/Bay Area to engage in hyper-democracy is keeping it broken (ballot measure ALL the things!)

San Francisco holds 800K people in 47 square miles of land - the argument that this is insufficient density for a proper rapid transit and municipal transport system is IMO complete bunk.

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