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Comment by CoffeeOnWrite | Hacker News Reader

I’m worried about BART. The new gate tap scanners work so poorly, somebody really screwed those up, and they haven’t publicly explained what went wrong. I don’t understand why the media doesn’t cover this apparent bad screw up. There were a number of articles on the selection of the design and the planned rollout and the demonstrated susceptibility to ongoing fare evasion, but silence on the adverse impact on paying passengers.

Every day the last week at my station there are piles of commuters held up by the semi-broken scanners. Kudos to the front line staff down there apologizing. I am not holding my breath it’ll be fixed anytime soon.

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It's interesting this is such a large problem there. In NYC, the tap-to-pay OMNY system is literally excellent. I swear it processes cards in a second or less and you save a lot of time by not buying a MetroCard. Are the BART scanners for some sort of RFID/NFC cards that are local to the train system, or do they accept credit/debit card payment? I'm curious how OMNY is so fast (compared to even going to a store and paying with tap to pay) and why BART is slow.

And OMNY will either accept a tap to pay credit card, a phone with tap to pay (including Apple's express card option, where it works even if your phone is dead), or a prepaid value dedicated OMNY card.

It does not actually run the transaction through the entire way - if a transaction fails, the card info gets placed on a blacklist and that particular NFC device won't receive an instant authorisation next time. Generally speaking, people don't have an easy way to generate lots and lots of fake NFC devices, so this hasn't been a problem for widespread fraud (vs just jumping over the turnstile).

I don't know if this is the case with BART, but I've seen in my own local public transit network an incredible inability or lack of will to use systems proven in other areas. Instead of going with quick, proven, and reliable, systems, they'll default to going for the cheap option, which is usually slow, re-inventing the wheel, and unreliable. I visit a city like NYC or London or Tokyo and see a transit system with decades of accrued understanding, technical experience, and optimization. Then I come home and ride something shiny but slow, janky, and bug ridden.

NYC wisely decided to license London's system.

My one huge gripe with Tokyo's/Japan's transit system is that you can't load money onto an IC card using a credit card. I was just in Japan last month; my last trip before then had been in 2017, and I really assumed that they would have fixed this deficiency by now.

I forgot to get a Tokyo metro pass along with my train ticket from Narita to Tokyo, so I ended up wandering around Nippori station looking for an ATM that would take my Visa debit card so I could get some cash in order to top up my Pasmo card[0] and take a local train to Shinjuku. I'd also forgotten how most random ATMs don't take foreign debit cards; after it dawned on me, I left the station, found a 7-11, and used the ATM there.

This was not something I enjoyed having to do, while carrying my bags, after a 10-hour flight, plus 2 hours waiting in line at immigration, followed by another hour-long train ride to the city.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that many many more businesses in Japan take credit cards nowadays though.

[0] I was also pleasantly surprised to find that Pasmo cards are still good up to 10 years after the last time you use them. I feel like something similar in the US would expire after no more than a year or two.

It works so well that I was severely confused the first time I used them, coming from the Bay Area. I spent ages trying to figure out how to instantiate and load a transit card into Google Wallet before realizing I could just tap any card I had.

The Clipper cards used by BART are 90s technology that took so long to fully deploy that it was outdated by the time most people started using it. There was a brief window where if you were an early adopter it was better than what was available in many places (or not-so-brief compared to OMNY, which came along a decade later), but unsurprisingly the things designed later have mostly improved on it.

The killer feature that also causes most of the quirks is that it can be used to make payments fully offline without allowing double-spending of balance. This is of course mostly a killer feature for transit operators rather than users. OMNY solves the same problem by just accepting that it'll occasionally permit free rides.

They replaced rechargeable mag stripe cards with sub-second processing time and near 100% reliability (unless the gate was offline).

I remember when the clipper cards rolled out. If I saw more than a few people holding one, I’d just go to the other gate.

I guess Clipper wasn't super reliable when it came out(?) (so long ago at this point it's hard to remember), but I don't really remember having much fondness for the old BART cards. (Not to mention the annoyance of having to pay for BART and Muni in different ways, or carrying around those silly paper Muni transfer slips.)

These days, I can't remember the last time I had an issue with my physical Clipper card. I do recall lots of issues when they first rolled out the ability to put a Clipper card on your phone, but I haven't run into a problem with that in at least a couple years.

Yesterday I went through Glen Park Bart, and every one of the scanners had a taped-on hand-written note in sharpie that said "hold 4 seconds". I doubt that the taller gates will ever pay for themselves (I thought in general fare-enforcement costs meaningfully more than systems lose in evaded fares), but I definitely don't understand why we needed to "update" gates with scanners that are clearly worse.

The gates are less about direct fare recovery and more about limiting the externalities that gate jumpers impose on other passengers. BART is definitely calmer and cleaner than it was a year ago.

The point of the new scanners is you can pay to ride with any payment instrument, not just a Clipper card.

Source on this?

https://www.futureofclipper.com/

> (I thought in general fare-enforcement costs meaningfully more than systems lose in evaded fares)

This is generally true for active fare enforcement, since you have to pay employees to do enforcement, there's appeals processes, and some people just don't pay the fine.

If the new faregates result in some more people (lets say 1%!) paying for trips (less freeriding), that's directly 1-2 million per year. If they also increase real-ridership, that's additional income. To make the cost back quickly you do need a significant increase (10-15%), that's not totally out of the question, though it's probably not only due to faregates.

BART isn't the only agency suffering from those new readers. The problem is the vendor, Cubic. They supply this junk to many agencies.

I lived in DC for a few years before I moved to SF, spending a few years there as well. DC Metro is not perfect by any means, but I was really surprised at how much better transit was in the district than the bay area considering they have zero weather issues to contend with and are - ahem - home to a tremendous amount of technological talent.

My personal observations are really that California are just truly fucking terrible at this sort of thing. Ironic considering they are such a huge economy and so wealthy. In northern California PCH (pacific coast highway) has been closed for over 15 months due to a rockslide. In southern california, a huge segment of ACH (angeles crest highway, one of my favorite places on earth) has been closed since 2023! You cannot drive from one end of the range to the other at this time.

China would have fixed these issues in weeks. For all the cash and people they have, Cali really manages to drop the ball on these things constantly. Don't even get me started on high speed rail that was built out in the middle of buttfuck farmland from Madera to Shafter. Like a stairway to nowhere.

DC Metro can use funds from developing property near Metro stations. This has been one of the positive things about Metro.

The Purple line has evolved into a financial disaster. It will be the most expensive train line ever constructed, $10 billion for a 16 mile segment.

BART ridership is 40% of what it was in 2019. There's no way you can lose 60% of your customers and not have major problems.

> There's no way you can lose 60% of your customers and not have major problems.

There is a way, but (with how much they used to crow that (unlike those other big, fat, LOSER mass-transit companies in the area) 80->95% of their budget came from rider fares) the BART management pretty clearly really hates to do it: Make up the shortfall with government money.

Are they actually building housing near the new bart stations?

South Bay is doing everything it can to make sure no new houses are serviced by existing train route. They even tore out the line that ran through most of the residential areas decades ago.

That line serviced Cupertino, Saratoga, Los Gatos, the San Lorenzo Valley and Santa Cruz. It ran all the way to SF, so it must have serviced many other cities on the peninsula.

IIRC it’s the same sensors as the old ones

I have no idea and didn’t comment on what the sensors are. Before the new gates, they worked. Now they only half work.

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