A computer upgrade shut down BART
bart.gov
bart.gov
Originally, BART was a master stroke of digital integration in the 70's, and it's digital voices announcing the next trains were a thing of the future: An early accessibility feature before we even knew what those were, really.
Reading:
https://www.bart.gov/about/history
https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/traincontrol#:~:text=To%...
The larger engineering lesson from that is you're probably better off making standard solutions work for your situation than custom solutions. The wider gauge solved(?) the stability problem, but at the cost of always needing custom rolling stock, but more importantly, making Bart build-out significantly more expensive and unable to take advantage of existing track. That hurts the viability of the Bart ecosystem.
Why not use Indian rolling stock? Modern Indian metro trains are quieter and more comfortable than BART.
(It is the widest gauge in use of heavy-duty mainline railways in the world, but that's a separate thing).
For comparison to other US rapid transit systems (almost all others use 1,435mm/4'8.5"), see table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_transit_track_gauge and scroll down to "United States". Or else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tr... which does not list gauges.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_the_United_Stat...
These days I fly to the bay area to my office in East Bay. It's 2+ hours commute from either SFO or even OAK because you need to change buses 2 or 3 times. Add 1 more if you count taking the airport shuttle to the BART station. And SJC does not even have a BART connection.
There's fundamental design flaw in public transportation in the US, they almost never connect the population centers. Part of the reason why people are discouraged from using them and they don't get the funding to stay up to date.
People are constantly being encouraged to take public transpo, but once they finally do, they realize why they hadn't before.
I find the Bay Area very difficult to get around. The roads are jammed with commuters who live far from their workplaces due to the housing situation. There is not enough housing near job centers, which bids up the prices of available housing to very high levels that requires FAANG-level salaries to clear unless one wants to have an army of roommates. Thus, many people have to commute, some from far-flung exurbs and even from Central Valley cities like Stockton and Modesto.
Public transportation in the Bay Area is better than most American cities, but it’s still underpowered for the size of the metro area. Not all residences are served by trains, and bus service is often infrequent and subject to delays. Missing a connection can lead to major inconveniences (such as a long 30-60 minute wait) or even being unable to reach your destination without an über-expensive Uber or Lyft ride. There’s also matters of safety and cleanliness on public transportation; every now and then I smell unpleasant odors like marijuana and urine, and occasionally I see sketchy people.
It’s a major step down from Tokyo, where public transportation is ultra-convenient, reliable in non-emergency situations, impeccably clean, and generally safe.
The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues. If it were merely technology, we’d have solutions by now.
And the Bay Area, largely, eats its own dogfood.
There is no faster, more powerful public transportation system than a city that allows Uber to offer mototaxi service. Uber was allowed to turned that on in Rio at some point in the last couple years and it puts busses and subways to shame. The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero.
https://i.redd.it/rviipp7czy131.jpg
And the rail fatalities are only that high because of people using it for suicide.
It costs almost a billion dollars to build a mile of BART, due to political corruption 65% of all MUNI service lines are to/from Chinatown, we keep the "iconic" cable car lines going even though they have the highest rate of accidents per mile and per vehicle in the country.
We just need to double or triple down on roads and let things like Waymo and Uber save us from ourselves.
Bikebrains rant about things like "induced demand" without actually understanding that building additional infrastructure simply serves pent up demand. They point to things like the Katy Freeway which was expanded to 26 lanes but "traffic got worse" - ignoring the fact that travel speeds increased by 60% for almost a decade until Houston's population ballooned to what it is today.
I might argue that the bay area focuses on transportation technology that is flashy and gets around existing regulations because it is new, with hardly any regard at all for how it scales.
I’ll expound on the first point. European countries and East Asian countries generally have a stronger sense of cultural cohesion, while America has many deep divisions such as:
1. Social liberalism versus social conservatism, which also correlates to a secular versus cultural Christian worldview.
2. Racial and ethnic divides with sometimes centuries of bad blood
3. Class divides between the poor, the working class, the middle class, and the wealthy.
These divisions make it harder for people to come together to work for the common good. There are some politicians who shamelessly act in the interest of their voter bases with little regard for those outside their bases, and there are also people who are suspicious of even well-intended proposals since there may be hidden motives behind them.
I'd hazard a guess that an experienced cyclist would be able to beat most subway journeys too
Top Gear "London Race" episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1140803
is nonsense. EU countries have been building HSR for half a century already. Japan has HSR. China has HSR, nationwide. S Korea has HSR. At national/federal level. BRICS are next. The US is being left behind.
Your remark only holds true for US (and in particular California) politics and development laws, NIMBYism and the abuse of environmental process like CEQA [0], and how doing transit (in the US) involves coordinating multiple city govts and agencies - instead of it being a federal/state project. If Eisenhower's 1950s interstate highway system had had to be done like that and rely on permission from multiple local officials and govts and local revenue-raising, it'd be a patchwork mess too, if it had ever even gotten built at all. Eventually results in BART's 2003 Millbrae-SFO extension ($1.5b / only 8.7 miles of track). Address the root-cause, not the symptom.
After half a century of piecemeal transit in only some areas, this all causes the chicken-and-egg that US homeowners historically associate proximity to transit with negative property value.
As to the comparison to Uber, the non-viability of public transport in post-1950 US urban-planning cities/suburbs/exurbs is due to the low density, like why aren't there a grocery, cafes, services, banks, Amazon lockers, fractional car rental services etc. in/near any major transit node in the US? Amsterdam, Singapore, Barcelona prove you can have pleasant liveable world-class cities based on transit.
[0]: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101910935/balancing-need-for-...
Nu then - having 37 mio people just in one city, Tokyo, does require you to get the logistics in order (all of Denmark is just around 6 mio…)
Well and population / population density.
China is similar - the big 15-20m+ metros have crazy good subway systems. But SF bay area is half the low end? 7.5m or so? Harbin is 10m and its subway is kinda meh. Down at 5m metro population in e.g. Changchun or Jinan and it's a pretty piddling subway/city rail system.
By my comment I mean that the things GP list aren't the only things that separate SF public transit and Tokyo public transit. You'd also need crazy high population and density too.
I don't disagree with GP's list of things, I just think they're not exhaustive. They might be sufficient to get SF to Berlin level of public transit.
That said, to "beat BART" isn't a milestone for any public transport system anywhere. Except ... in the US, where even BART stands out as great. Hmm. Relatively.
(one part of me is kinda curious how the 101 would look like if you didn't do any work on it for 20 years. Mostly because it'd probably be a rather cool setting for some dystopian movie. Anyway ... transport infrastructure, whether public transport or roads, costs a f*ckton of money)
When they return to their hotel rooms at the end of the week they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.
1. The community doesn't care. Leaving trash and making a mess is acceptable behavior. Or at least, it isn't called out (which I can understand, as there are safety issues around calling out bad behavior in public). This is the biggest factor: the vast majority of Japanese people wouldn't even consider leaving trash or making a mess on transit.
2. I'm sure BART leadership would be happy to combat this problem by cleaning more frequently and removing sketchy people from trains. But where is the funding for this going to come from?
> they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.
Even in jest, it's pretty fucked up to insinuate that someone should commit ritual suicide for any reason, let alone because they work for a transit agency that can't keep its trains clean. Please don't do that here. Or anywhere.
Maybe it's a matter of breaking down the costs for everyone to see, or maybe it's a matter of the city providing bus wifi so you can get some guaranteed access to the internet while riding, or maybe it's a matter of putting a police officer on every train.
But busses, aside from rush hour in probably the 10 largest cities in the nation, are always going to be way less convenient than a car. It has to stop a million times, there's no good way to guarantee you'll arrive on time (it's impossible to create a bus route where they stay evenly spaced like a train might handle better), and they never actually get you where you're going - just kinda nearby. Maybe you can transfer onto a bus now, but that's two modes of transportation. And God forbid there's a number of people combining their bus usage with a bicycle. Gotta wait for them to walk around front, unhook it, and hopefully put the bike rack back up so the driver doesn't have to get out and do it himself... etc, etc, etc.
Plus, I'm too busy to find it at the moment, but there's a study showing most people just want public transit so some other people use it and get off the highway. As in, they just want public transit so their car commute improves.
This will almost certainly never get major support; it's just too miserable of a system to overtake our already-crazy-convenient cars.
First off, you're not too busy to find it. Because you're probably not used to doing it. All you have to do is to tell your favorite map app where you want to go, then switch to the public transit tab. You should try it.
Right now if I look at routes from Newark to OAK or SFO, it shows around 40 minutes by car and 1:40 hour by public transportation. If I had a plane to catch in 2 hours, I'd never take the bus. Here's why.
About 40 minutes of that 1:40 involves walking to the nearest bus stop. You could take an Uber instead and cut it down to 10 minutes. But that's problem A, public transportation doesn't have enough coverage.
There are 2 bus changes involved. The first one, Newark to Union City or Palo Alto, depending on whether you're going to OAK or SFO, runs every 30 minutes. That's problem B, the routes are not frequent enough.
The last bus change, very close to OAK/SFO, are design flaw- problem C. You really should be able to get off BART and take a short walk or shuttle to terminal. Instead, it's another bus ride that'll take 40 minutes.
From a regular commuter's pov, problems A/B/C are the issues that'll discourage someone from taking public transportation. Like other comments mentioned, it's not really a resource, infra or tech issue. It's a social/political issue that's preventing public transportation from expanding, both in coverage, frequency and in terms of connecting big population centers where it matters. All the issues that you mentioned, like stopping million times, guarantee of arriving on time, bicycles, and even safety and cleanliness, will go away if you solve the problems I mentioned- speaking from my experience taking public transportation for 30+ years in the US and abroad.
Anyways, maybe if we solve all these issues, things will improve, and I hope it does! Still, I’m with those survey respondents - I really do not care how hard cities work to overcome public transit issues. I’ll never take it. I just have no incentive to do so, and I like my car. It’s private. It’s fast as hell. It’s pretty. It’s comfy. I wouldn’t get even one of those in a bus. I’d be pretty shocked if this wasn’t a standard response.
As an aside: it’s weird and disconcerting that you’re finding a different opinion to be depressing. Is it possible you’re just really disconnected?
But inside SF, even during rush hour, it'll still nearly always be faster for me to drive (or get an Uber). The reason is because there's precious little transit infra that doesn't share the road to some extent, and even when there are dedicated bus lanes or off-street train tracks, there's still traffic lights, and the buses and trains are slow and make enough stops that any gains are lost. Then on top of that, transfers take time, and if you're even slightly off on your timing, you might have to wait for up to 15 minutes for the next bus at your transfer point.
I agree with your assessment of inter-city trips as well; SFO airport to my house in SF is also so frustrating, because I live a few blocks from a Caltrain station, but having to go from SFO->BART->Caltrain->home... that transfer in the middle is a killer. My home is only a few blocks farther to the freeway than to the train station, so even in rush-hour traffic it's still only a 20 minute drive, while BART+Caltrain will take 30-45 minutes, and that's during a time of day the Caltrain trains run at their most frequent.
I've lived in SF for 15 years, and I think I've only taken BART/Caltrain to or from SFO a handful of times. I can't even remember the last time; it's been at least 10 years (probably before Uber/Lyft was a thing). Nowadays I always take a Lyft, and while I cringe at the price ($30-$50, depending on time of day), it's so worth it when a) I'm worried about not making my flight if transit is slower than I expect, or b) I'm getting back home and just want to be home.
And yeah, I get that I'm privileged enough to be able to afford to take a car. Many people aren't; they have to pay with their time, which just really sucks. We never get that time back.
On May 8, 2025, from late Thursday night into Friday morning caused by a server upgrade
On November 25, 2013, from late Thursday night into Friday morning caused by a server upgrade
https://web.archive.org/web/20131124212037/http://www.bart.g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/us/bart-train-shutdown.ht...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/bart-transit-outage-ba...
As an engineer I have absolutely no issue deploying on a friday. But friday bar starts at 4pm, and after that I am not sober before monday.
So leadership don't want me to do it - which is probably wise.
"Deploy on every commit" lmao
"Shipping software and running tests should be fast. Super fast. Minutes, tops." hahah
And there are hints to what the author actually means, like "Each deploy should be owned by the developer who made the code changes."
That just isn't feasible in a system that's of any reasonable size.
Who's fault is that?
Asking because I have been the customer with Uncommon Option Q enabled.
You mean to tell me not everyone works on some SaaS product outside of critical path?
For "read only friday" to have been a novel idea in the first place, you needed a starting point where conventional practice already was making changes live without stopping to consider the time/day of week.
I really suspect the detractors represent a workflow that would break (or at least introduce pain) if unable to push to production for a few days. So they have to give the hard sell on the benefits of continuous deployment.
I've found that little things like that breed a growing resentment and stress that compounds, until someone wants to leave the company. Thursday night outage that I have to hop on? Much smaller deal than a weekend where I have established plans.
One can argue "why was the PR approved in the first place", but sometimes people make mistakes. It especially sucks when there are limited people that know how to troubleshoot and resolve the production issues with a system, even more so when the on-call individual may have not even reviewed the code initially.
All that said - I'd love to deploy as normal on Fridays! I've just found that the type of businesses I've worked at can wait until Monday, and that makes our weekends less risky.
The idea the author seems to be advocating for is is that, while maybe you sometimes/often shouldn't deploy on a Friday (or even not at the very end of any workday), there should never be a stated policy in place that freezes deployments.
And yeah, I've been at places where they have freezes on weekends, holidays, right around the company's conference, etc. But they're never 100% freezes: if something goes wrong or is necessary, you just get a manager to approve it, and off you go.
I think the author's exhortation that developers should all be able to exercise their judgment to make these calls is a nice idea in theory, but falls flat in practice. Every developer will not always have all the necessary context in order to exercise that judgment. Even those who do, and generally have good judgment, will screw up sometimes because they are tired or are working under some sort of time pressure, or something.
Having a policy -- with some flexibility and exceptions allowed -- makes it easier to avoid those sorts of lapses in judgment. And that's a good thing.
But the whole article is just all over the place to me. The author starts by implying that people should be "ashamed" about identifying with a no-Friday-deploy policy, but then softens to the point of saying it's fine to have a personal policy of no late-afternoon deploys, no shipping big changes right before the weekend, etc. But that somehow if that's instead company policy, that's a bad thing. Nope, I don't buy it.
It's quite possible the system will collapse next year if we don't pass increased taxes to fund it in 2026 https://www.bart.gov/about/financials/crisis.
Just last year we failed to pass a common sense bill to make it so we only need a 51% majority for transit bills in the future, indicative of how opposed we still are to transit in the Bay Area https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-proposi....
Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.
So let's be clear, most of the issues with BART are due to anti-transit and suburban voters starving it of support.
Just to compare with another expensive city - BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget.
Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data/
BART is one of the most cost efficient systems in the US: https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1d27dvo/us_cost_pe.... It's so efficient that pre-pandemic it got the majority of its funding through fares, not taxes.
By the way it costs exorbitant amounts to build highways too and you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you.
So quite frankly you don't know what you're talking about.
> Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data
If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km
> you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you
uhm what?
> If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km
What you're talking about in that link is the extension to San Jose, not day to day BART operations. That one does deserve criticism as they've made poor decisions like not doing cut/cover because NIMBYs in San Jose don't want any disruption to streets. So instead we are tunneling to the Earth first. Elsewhere in the world municipalities understand that it's worth temporary disruptions to roads to bring down costs, but of course America is unique and we have to learn these lessons ourselves.
So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has
without massive upzoning and more infill stations.
It seems to me that BART management did what most of other government bureaucracies did around here during covid - threw their feet on the desk and took an extended 2+ year sabbatical
As a former tube-commuter and occasional BART-user, I'd wager that possibly a majority of the commuting trips in zone 1 are taking people from a mainline train station to somewhere, and then back in the evening. That option barely even exists in the Bay Area - indeed every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.
every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and
rent a car instead.
Once you actually get to Millbrae you then get to deal with BART's whole NIH problem manifesting as a refusal (up until recently) to offer timed connections with Caltrain. And, of course, up until 2021 actually getting between the BART and Caltrain platforms involved a ton of walking.
Why? Last I checked, it's
* Depart SFO via BART
* Get off BART at the first stop, Millbrae
* Exit BART and enter Caltrain
Fortunately they've since reverted back to always running to Millbrae from the airport.
I would think increased ridership means increased efficiency.
The problem of course then is that you create a whole in the bucket. Fewer trains -> BART becomes less convenient -> people choose other options -> lower ridership -> fewer trains -> less convenient ....
Jokes aside, I'd like to see a stack ranking of US public transit. I'd assume NYC and DC are top dogs, but I'm curious about other cities.
NYC is definitely the top dog. There was a recent ranking for metro areas ranked by walkability, bike-ability, public transit, and some other urban score, but divided by average rent price for a 1BR apartment. NYC still came out #1 despite the rather large denominator.
It even has direct service from two metro lines to the airport.
Didn't bigTech start buses going directly to their campus as a perk?
Everyone wants more services and lower taxes, but they vote for the lower taxes and get made when there are no services. Those things often don't go together. It's okay to either accept fewer services with less tax burden, or higher taxes with more services (the side I generally lean towards, within reason).
Even with the new Central Subway that opened in SF (which I assume cost billions given how long it took to develop), wasn't a clear net-win. Muni closed other Metro routes when those opened. Depending on where you're going, you might be worse off now.
While RTO may be increasing ridership numbers, Covid did change population and commuting dynamics. Transit orgs need to adapt, and maybe accept downsizing / focusing more on a smaller scope. In Bart's case, maybe it would be wiser to focus on the core Bart system, and not the more recent expansions (the East Bay trains that are totally separate from the rest of Bart, and the Oakland airport train). Maybe a stronger look should be taken at merging the disparate transit organizations themselves, to reduce administrative overhead?
Caltrain seems to be doing better than others - they have financing worries themselves, but are on a better track from my understanding. Pun semi-intended :)
Transit is important, and I feel like the current organizations keep letting us down.
[1] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/FY26%20Adop...
BART taxes are not even in the top 100 list of expenses I worry about personally.
I wish there were more bus options that connected the outer East Bay (Dublin, Pleasanton, San Ramon, Walnut Creek, etc.) to the inner East Bay.
I've never understood the Friday traffic issue. Are there people that normally stay in the city during the week and only go home on Fridays causing more traffic? How is there more traffic on Friday and the rest of the week? Friday being one of the forced RTO days, but the Friday traffic thing was known well before WFH/RTO fights. Then again, the root cause of most traffic always seems much more anticlimatic
I think there are many people in the Bay Area who start their weekend trips Friday afternoons and evenings.
In NYC people going out of the city for the weekend (Airbnb or their own house somewhere).
When GitHub was constantly failing, I finally got fed up and now I use my own private Gitea. It’s near-zero maintenance and has never had any unexpected downtime. Never looked back.
Stories like these make me feel the same way about California, which I called home for almost 20 years. So much to love, so many reasons never to live there again. Great place to visit when there’s not an active disaster unfolding.
By "self hosted" I'm not referring to it being run directly by the government, but that in comparison to every other government-run transit system, everything at BART is done the BART way, limiting access to an entire industry of light rail infrastructure, reducing safety and reliability, while significantly increasing costs.
Public transit wasn't as gross as stories I've heard of elsewhere, but it also wasn't something I wanted to take on a regular basis if I could help it. I think I used it regularly for about six months or so one year in particular, and the lack of warm bus stops meant standing in freezing rain, sleet, snow and more.
Maybe things have improved since I lived there, but hearing that they are the high bar is pretty sad.
> it was still notably slower than driving, so many if not most people still drove everywhere
I'd argue that those folks are missing the point. Sure, when I was commuting by Minneapolis public transit, it was slower than driving. But you know what I wasn't doing while I was on the bus/train? Driving! I was reading, writing, daydreaming, sleeping, any number of activities more pleasant than sitting on I-94.
Standing out there in the winter could be brutal, I'll admit. Then again, the light rail stops were heated, and the park & ride I transferred at in Plymouth had a nice climate-controlled lobby. The only time I was really out there was standing in the driveway in front of my office, waiting for the shuttle to pick me up.
Twin Cities public transit is a damn sight better than what we have in Milwaukee, that's for sure. Low bar, but the Twin Cities clear it handily.
Sadly, my neighborhood had long waits between buses that connected to university ave, and neither my neighborhood or university ave had heated stops. So, odds were pretty good that I'd suffer the weather for 20-30 minutes each trip.
I also tend to get motion sickness if I read or use a laptop in cars or busses, so there really wasn't anything I could do on them that I couldn't do by driving anyway.
It is a microcosm, a bit of a litmus test, and an ideological battlefield of the embattled sides. But this example specifically is also a kind of infighting, of the more anarcho-libertarian tech camp that enjoys highlighting and dripping with self-righteousness about any tech related failure of government, i.e., or at least government that does not align with their ideology or control over it.
This fault line of America runs right through things like BART like an effigy or idol that America performs a kind of ritual form of battle on as proxies for all out civil war. Think of tribes you may have seen videos of where they do all kinds of elaborate dances and blustering displays and fake charges to demonstrate their power.
The glee about this outage happening to BART is very much because the libertarian tech progressive types are amused and validated by it, where something more like rashes of violent attacks on BART riders by menaces to society might be something that the "heartland" may become gleeful about, as evidence for how the ideology of SF is messed up. In the cases of violent attacks on BART riders, another camp/tribe would come out and demonstrate their fierceness; the "socially liberal" types from all over the country and even world, would rush to the defense of their ideological idols with a bewildering storm of rationalization, delusion, and excuse making for violent attackers and in defense of their ideology/cult.
It's just elaborate war dances around an idol/ideology to demonstrate how fierce and powerful each party is. BART is just one of the idols in America around which these displays of simulated conflicts happen.
Cars are anti-fragile and decentralized.
Cars fail open in the short term.
The real heros? The bus drivers. The baddies? The planners, the management. The evil? Pure unadulterated evil? The AC Transit app. I would give it a -11.
EDIT: It was not.
I thought it was interesting and I'm sorry a hint at it is all I can offer right now
Oh huh. I certainly see these tiles on maps, but in 21 years in the bay area, I have only ever heard of one highway where people sometimes call it by the name (Skyline) rather than the number (35). And even then, I think that's pretty rare. I wonder what's different about the people you and I interact with that makes it different for you.
Also, what do you mean by trains being local-first? Trains by definition need to share the same tracks with catastrophic consequences for getting it wrong. You can't figure out if a train is going to possibly be on the same route locally, or if your route has been obstructed. Somebody gets a schoolbus stuck on a crossing, it takes over a mile to stop a train.
In the days before systems existed for publishing such schedules and emergency alerts, should public transit service not have been attempted at all?
> Trains by definition need to share the same tracks with catastrophic consequences for getting it wrong.
Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks. But if it did, I assume "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded when an emergency in the local system necessitates it.
Edit, for the pedantic: There's a huge difference between horizontal complexity (i.e. variety of transit options) and vertical complexity (complexity of a particular option). We have less horizontal complexity than we used to; but vertical complexity of a modern railroad is obscene compared to historical standards.
> But if it did, I assume "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded when an emergency in the local system necessitates it.
No dice; as consider just 14 hours ago:
https://x.com/SFBARTalert/status/1963772853947355630?ref_src...
How does a local-first train safely operate if it could go through a police zone? You need communication, by definition, not local-first.
I think our over reliance on the telecom network has lead to safety issues- mostly in terms of "what to do when the telecom goes down." Because on the whole, its astoundingly reliable.
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks
Building a replica set of tracks that runs parallel to the current tracks just to avoid sharing doesn't strike me as a good use of anyone's time/money.
> "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded
And how are you going to notify them that they are excluded when the network is down?
Wikipedia has a good survey [0].
Of course, centralized signaling is better, allowing for greater efficiency, helps dispatch keep track better track of the trains, makes handling malfunctioning signals a lot safer, among many other benefits. But it doesn't mean local signaling can't be done.
I don’t know, but I would imagine, there’s still a block based setup as a failsafe backup in most or all modern rail systems.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/20/nyregion/nyc-...
For me, this was the best picture:
https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2025-03-10-subway-...
Someone has to stand at that machine 24 hours a day and push and pull levers to keep the trains from whacking one another.
The US congressional committee that recommended construction of the railroad was called the "Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad and Telegraph".
So it seems very early it was decided that no, rail transit systems should not be built without communications/publishing infrastructure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_railroa...
BART has a non-standard rail gauge size that precludes it from interoperability with other rail networks.
Other ones I'm aware of are Washington DC's metro, and Toronto's subway and streetcars.
We're talking about BART, which uses a track gauge of 5'6" instead of the standard US rail gauge of 4'8.5". They can't run on the same tracks.
(Actually, this is generally true even for those systems that do use 4'8.5" gauge track--I suspect that the standard US freight car envelope doesn't actually fit on most subway systems.)
That said there are other reasons a subway could end up being subject to Federal Railroad Administration[2] rules. I will note that I'm not an expert on those rules. But, generally passenger rail systems in the US are subject to Positive Train Control[3] or equivalent. It appears BART is actually one of the earliest adopters of Automatic Train Control[4], which appears to be a PTC equivalent. If not more automated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loading_gauge
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Railroad_Administratio...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit#Automat...
As a related aside, the Chicago Transit Authority still ran freight on its tracks until not that long ago. Maybe the early 2000's?
It is certainly possible to send a freight train that will fit in most subway tunnels of the right gauge, but you may need a short locomotive and short cars.
(After all, what are the maintenance trains but a form of freight?)
The standard US freight envelope probably counts as Plate C, which is 10'8" wide by 15'6" above the rail. Plate H is the standard for double-stacked containers, which pushes the height to 20'2".
(The part of the loading gauge that I'd be most concerned about is actually the width of the cars at the bottom of the carbody--passenger cars tend to be somewhat narrower than standard boxcar, and given a desire to minimize the platform gap, I'd think there's a decent chance that most freight would strike the platform.)
Eh? I thought we (TTC, in Toronto) were the only ones making that mistake.
Modernization efforts focus on trains broadcasting position and speed so trains can travel closer together and still maintain a safe stopping distance, but that's again possible locally.
Operating switches is where it gets trickier. Some rail operators maintain the possibility to operate them locally, but that requires either stopping the train at each switch you want to change, or to deploy lots of people into the field to do it on schedule
But the point that you can do this local-first is still true. You will want to engage a couple bits of information with the neighboring block, but you don't need to know any global state, and if one block breaks down that only affects its direct neighbors
If air traffic control can fall back to pen and paper in a pinch, I think it would be cool IF trains had a decent fallback. ;-)
Riding without a ticket? Jail.
Littering on the platform? Straight to jail, right away!
Doing any violent crime in NK transit? Believe it or not - death by firing squad.
Here is a quick overview of how the system works: https://youtu.be/eiyfwZVAzGw?si=CnOMa8F6NkiyhifE
Setting aside safety for a moment, consider just hygiene: BART is shockingly dirty. Which suggests mismanagement, above and beyond just a lack of detterence of criminality.
As for safety -- firing squads are probably not in the cards, but would jailing the violent be too much to hope for?
Not saying SF politics is great, but at least point to the correct boogeyman.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=compute...
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=compute...
It seems to me that they are over-worked & under-paid and are doing a good job given the circumstances.
NIMBYs have blocked BART in Silicon Valley. BART doesn't reach Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Stanford, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Santa Clara, or Cupertino. A few years ago, it finally reached San Jose.
A separate train (CalTrain) goes from SF through Silicon Valley. Last year they switched to electric trains which are faster and run more frequently. The SF CalTrain station is inconvenient (20-mins walk from downtown, under a highway), but they are working to extend CalTrain to the central SF station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce_Transit_Center#Futu... .
So Silicon Valley transit is getting better, slowly.
Interesting, tidbit you added here. But snark is needed for this situation.
Instead, we could have an interesting discussion, maybe even one involving technology, that nerds would enjoy!
You don't have to be an activist wherever you go. In fact, it's almost alway inappropriate soap boxing/virtue signaling.
I'm not trying to be snarky, it's just that for regular citizens who don't have time to attend BART BoD and committee meetings it's almost impossible to tell whether existing money is being wisely spent. So people get the impression that taxes are going up while service quality declines and assume the money must be going into someone's pocket.
The dominant position (even in CA) has been no or little subsidy.
https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/BART_FY24%2...
So - what % of Cali's road construction & maintenance is paid for by gas taxes?
It also looks like public transportation is mostly paid for with sales taxes, federal loans/grants, and $1 billion of taxes on diesel fuel.
1. See chart A on page 24, and chart F on page 28: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/budgets/docume...
- Prior to the pandemic, BART got >60% of its operating costs from riders (p9 in your linked doc)
- Ridership is still way down relative to 2019 even though costs are up in absolute terms
- Even from 2020 data, BART was hitting 50% https://lovetransit.substack.com/p/most-profitable-public-tr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_...
The subsidy in BART is higher than anyone would like it now, but I do think that's still a transient response to the pandemic; either more people will have to eventually go back to riding public transit, or we'll need to drop the emergency funding it's been receiving.
Public transit is widely touted as being more efficient than the alternatives, but for most trips it's cheaper (factoring in maintenance, depreciation, gas, etc, and pretending that BART is as convenient and reliable) to drive than to take BART, and not by a little bit.
Income just from gas taxes, tolls, and registration cover ~half the infrastructure maintenance, so there exists effectively another $200-$300 per capita per annum subsidy, but that's nowhere near enough to make BART cost less than just driving, even if I had to account those extra fees against my driving.
Why is that? How is BART worse than driving and still losing money when it's supposedly a more efficient solution? Is it just low volume? Is the organization making bad bets? Is the premise that trains are more efficient flawed?
Transit in the bay area fails at pretty much all of those things. Service is just infrequent enough to make things difficult, and unreliable enough that you worry that a late or missing bus or train will make you late. Cleanliness is inconsistent, and there are often people on drugs riding around all day, spouting nonsense. We do have some subways, but not enough of them, and there is no light rail line in SF that runs only underground, so they can only be a maximum of two cars long (otherwise they'd be too long for a single city block in some areas). All of the above-ground light rail is at mercy of car traffic (with tracks in some areas actually running in the same lanes as cars), stop signs, and traffic lights (which do not prioritize the trains). We do have some dedicated bus lanes, but they're dedicated bus+taxi lanes, and Ubers/Lyfts and regular passenger cars abuse them with little risk of being ticketed.
The end result of this is that people see that it takes 10 minutes to drive and 40 minutes to take public transit, but that they really need to add on an extra 15 minutes to the transit trip to account for delays and unreliability. So even though they don't want to to deal with parking, or pay 5-10x as much for an Uber/Lyft fare, they value their transit time more, and drive or get a car ride from an app.
Earlier this year, SF Muni was experiencing a large budget shortfall. They managed to save many jobs from being cut, which is commendable, but instead they reduced service. This just causes more people to look at the situation and choose to find an alternative that will get them where they're going faster, and more reliably.
I once looked at how long to get to work by public transit (~20 miles each way) - it was estimated at 1.5 hours each way (multiple buses + some walking), and costing ~$12-15 each way (15+ years ago). It took 25 minutes each way to drive on a good day, 45 each way on a bad day. Worst case was ~60 minutes to get home.
On average, it would take 2+ hours less PER DAY to drive, and cost $5-10 less, calculating driving cost at $0.50/mile. Plus I could go on my own schedule, no walking in the rain, etc. There was very little "win" for public transit in any way.
It’s like saying crime is a problem in this world because of your lack of engagement in stopping crime.
Bitching on HN is one small form of engagement I can afford and I’m hoping at least one bart official sees it and realize what a shit job he’s doing or one government official sees it and realizes what a shit government official he is and changes something. Minuscule hope but why not.
Instead we get random people who will only benefit from fixing the bart actually trying to defend it as if it’s their favorite sports team.
If anything the Bay Area has utterly failed to provide systems software of lasting value to address public needs like these.
They have very little money left for paying engineering and construction staff.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=train+o...
BART does now accept credit cards at the turnstiles now (I think this started 2 years ago). Agreed that it took a long while to get there, much much longer than in other places.
Personally I prefer the Clipper method, as it's generally faster to scan than a contactless credit card payment (that's going to always be the case for closed-loop payment system). I also like that BART (and Muni, Caltrain, etc.) will pay less to Visa/Mastercard/whomever in transaction fees if I use my Clipper card and periodically top it up (which, as I have my Clipper card on my phone, happens automatically if the balance ever falls below $10). Credit card tap-to-pay is a nice convenience for out-of-town visitors and for locals who rarely use transit and don't have Clipper (or who use a physical Clipper card but forgot it at home), but I don't think it's a great way to pay for transit day-to-day.
https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/contactless-payments....
I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area CA, Portland OR, and Philadelphia PA over the last 10 years. All of those metros have comparable public transit payment systems with auto-loading special use cards and are at various stages of adopting support for tap to pay. Honestly, within the US I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted.
Internationally I think there is a larger range of experiences. I don't travel enough to properly gauge it, but I was in Paris in the last year and I don't think public transit payment was better. Still had to acquire specialized fare cards and navigate different payment systems between RATP and RER. Honestly, SF Bay comes out slightly ahead of Paris if only because Clipper is unified between various transit options (BART, Bus, Ferry, CalTrain) IMO.
That doesn't change anything in the comment you're replying to. Just because it's above average for the USA, does not mean it isn't also ancient by global standards.
Chicago is pretty good too. IIRC they also have tap-to-pay. In fact, I think they had it before NYC
Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Dubai, Japan, UK. The USA is supposed to be among the top in terms of technology but infra is just garbage. The BART is pathetic. I don't know why you defend it with pride. Attack it, because if you hate it and you are vocal about it, things are more likely to change.
I'm sick of people defending something that's shit because of pride. It's garbage.
Does Caltrain still count entering the BART station at Milbrae as not tapping off? That was always my favorite quirk of the Clipper system.
(For those not familiar... Caltrain is a tap on / tap off "proof of payment" system. You're charged the full fare when you tap on, and refunded what you didn't use when you tap off. BART and Caltrain share a platform at Milbrae. You can get off Caltrain and be right at the gate to get into BART by tapping your Clipper card. Well. This taps you into BART, but doesn't tap you off of Caltrain. To get your refund, you had to know this was a thing and go find a fare validator before tapping on to BART. You also end up being inside Caltrain's proof of payment required area without proof of payment while you walk along the platform from Caltrain's fare validator to BART's entry turnstile. I am probably the only person to ever care about this, but...)
Does Caltrain still count entering the BART station at Milbrae as not tapping off?
I can still use an auto-loading special use card if I want. I do that so I can have a free transfer between different transit systems during my commute.
I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were
first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted.
I was in Paris in the last year and I don't think public transit
payment was better.
> The multi-stage turnstiles at the RER stations… ugh.
Ah yes, had one of many, "I look like the tourist I am," moments navigating those visiting the Versailles.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/1awweix/trimet_ex...
When I moved to the bay area, I thought it was so rad I could use the clipper card for vta + bart + caltrain + muni + ferry all in one.
Venting is different from expressing your negative emotions healthily. E.g. telling your significant other you are frustrated because of a problem at work is healthy. Venting about the problem, complaining, being sarcastic etc is known to reinforce anger and generally lead to unhealthy outcomes.
Think in terms of evolution. If snark didn't convey any survival benefit, why tf does it exist?
I'm not complaining to a void. All the readers of HN have heard me and other people complaining hear will be heard too. In aggregate many people complaining on many different venues creates an aggregate sentiment that hopefully will motivate the right people.
Cancel culture on social media has made big changes to this country and not everything necessarily good. But one thing is clear, it makes change effectively. Why not use it for the right thing?
Either way, I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece. Bart IS categorically fucking garbage, that's less of a complaint and more of a statement. I'm just stating facts.
I can't comprehend the thought that polluting this not-bay-area specific forum with complaints will somehow eventually, hopefully, make its way to a politician.
> because I need some platform to say my piece.
This is soap boxing. To affect change, it would be better to do something directly in the real world, rather than hoping for the snark to overflow and leak out of here into the real world.
Dude, fuck off. The full quote which you've taken out of context is this: "I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece."
I hate it when people twist statements. I literally said I am not doing that. I am just stating the god awful truth which is: Bart is total shit. But here's another truth: When you manipulate my statement and take it out of context it makes you a shit head too.
But, your whole thing still fits the definition of soapboxing.
> To "soapbox" means to deliver a passionate or self-important public speech or express one's strong opinions, often on a topic one feels strongly about, originating from the literal practice of standing on an empty soapbox as an improvised platform to address a crowd. The term is frequently used figuratively to describe speaking forcefully or at length about a personal issue or belief.
One thing that's made a huge impact on our society is that many people participating in cancel culture and promoting shame and anger as solutions also tell people not to vote.
I watched it happen three times before the last three presidential elections and it was a big part of the voter suppression messaging tracked by democracy watchdogs. I'd argue that the biggest impact cancel culture has had is electing Donald Trump twice, weakening faith in democracy, and increasing the appeal of authoritarianism.
Shame, anger, and other tactics of using abuse to promote change is simply not effective. That's beyond the fact that it's unethical.
Cancel culture is appealing because hate and anger are addictive and they make you feel powerful. But they also make it hard to feel empathy. This is basically the main point of Star Wars, beyond just wanting to make a swashbuckler film set in space.
Also in a separate window ask it for specific examples of how anger and hate has changed society for the better.
Tons of examples.
ChatGPT will give you correct answers on most of these topics, but you have to walk it through the actual research first and then ask the question. That is, you have to load in the academic context rather than the political context.
This falls into the category of things like religion where the LLMs won't tell you the truth with a simple prompt like that because that would make too many of its users angry. They're aligned not to say anything negative about religious leaders. Similarly, they're aligned not to say anything negative about even terrorist groups if they have a lot of vocal defenders.
There’s tons of examples of hatred, anger and cancel culture doing good for the world and making the world a better place.
Maybe ask it for examples of how snark has impacted the world in a positive way.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68bcde6c-5960-8001-93ce-63a026a7c6...
Point is the world doesn’t work in the same idealist way that you think.
At any rate I see your point. People have used snarkiness in the past and it does drive engagement, which is what I said above.
The disconnect is that that engagement has not improved society in any way. It feeds the anger junky and helps them feel smug and righteous. But it doesn't drive change.
Nothing personal, but I find this conversation dreadfully tedious. I've had it almost word for word with probably dozens of people with anger issues now. Every one of them feels their anger is righteous and good. The few I've known well spiralled into increasingly unhappy lives as their anger became the only way they could socialize.
Anger prevents you from thinking clearly. That's why people who crave power like to make others angry. It's also why you should be deeply skeptical of anyone promoting anger or hate as a solution to anything.
Shame is like other kinds of abusive and toxic behavior. Does child abuse convey a survival benefit? Or spousal abuse? Evolution can be a useful guide, but it takes work and research to establish an evolutionary cause of a behavior.
If an attribute of humanity is universal and historically prevalent it becomes for sure through induction that the attribute survived the gauntlet of natural selection. There is a huge survival benefit here.
All of evolutionary psychology can only be formulated through induction as there’s no way to find causal evidence for psychological attributes short of time travel.
> Does child abuse convey a survival benefit? Or spousal abuse?
We don’t know if it does. But abuse is possibly not evolutionary and possibly not beneficial. The reason is because it’s not universal across societies. Not like Shame.
Though there is evidence that it is beneficial. Hitting children in Asia is normal. The high achievement and IQ and work ethic of those in China are often achieved through physical abuse not to the extent where it injures the child extremely but to the extent where pain changes behavior. A large part of the economic success of the Chinese is due to high industriousness of the society which is very much influenced by physical abuse of children.
Additionally, the overwhelming majority of human societies have men as the dominant sex and often hitting a wife is equivalent to spanking a child in societies where men have power. Was this beneficial? Who knows. One thing is that in societies where men dominate women rate their lives as happier and the divorce rate is significantly down. While the data on this isn’t fully solid this isn’t strictly evidence it’s food for a thought. It’s also the overwhelming dominant paradigm of humanity where men dominate women. Modern society as we know it where women are equal to men is experimental we’ve never done it and there’s no way of knowing if natural selection will select for this.
Another thing to note is that modern societies are all experience population decline. There is enough of a correlation here that we believe modernity is causal to population decline. What part of modernity? We don’t know. Likely it is very complicated but male domination could be an aspect of it. Take India. Spousal abuse is much more common and men hold a dominant place in the family unit and they also follow more traditional arranged marriages. Indias population is not declining, it is growing and it is quite possible spousal abuse or the attributes that lead to spousal abuse are causal.
We don’t know. So my long winded explanation here is that you cannot use abuse as an example of evidence against the evolutionary benefits of shame. It doesn’t follow from the logic or the evidence and you only said it as if it was like dropping the mic because you’re heavily influenced by modern culture. Abuse = universally bad to you but from an impartial and objective standpoint it is not.
edit: lmao, so many upvotes yet my comment has been moved so low. No more snark than a loving brother would provide. TY for your attention to this matter
Probably what's happened is you ended up with a lot of upvotes, but also a lot of downvotes. I would expect HN's software to downrank "controversial" posts, since those are likely to lead to flamewars. So even if you see +30 on your comment, the overall tallies might be something along the lines of +100 -70.
Addition of the last phrase had truly the worst impact; Drumpf meme was not well-timed/placed
The Boring Company has attempted to develop tunnel boring technology which theoretically could someday allow for cheaper expansion of all subway and light rail systems. Although in practice they haven't accomplished much and their existing projects aren't even used for rail transit.
https://www.boringcompany.com/
There are also several eVTOL startups aiming to improve quality of life through rapid point-to-point transportation. But I doubt they'll succeed on any widespread basis due to battery and noise limitations.
the real problem is thinking they are different or that they need to innovate. Trains are common and they need not innovation but minor improvements over time.
If you had to buy a special car to be allowed to drive on Bay Area roads because they weren't the same as the roads in Chicago or Boston then a Honda Civic would cost $1M.
then a Honda Civic would cost $1M.
There isn't much different about bart.
If it can be made differently or done differently BART will absolutely try to do so.
the real problem is thinking they are different or that they need to innovate.
The notion of a startup running BART is fucking horrifying.
I didn't read the comment criticizing VC's for not investing in BART or a company to make BART better, I read it as a criticism of the American system for letting things like VC's and other rich entities/people lock up unconscionable amounts of wealth for either hoarding or funding stupid shit as opposed to make sure our country still functions and people can eat.
And please just spare me the capitalist apologia. I get it, people wanna be rich. On balance I don't give a shit, get as rich as you can, just as long as it doesn't require millions of people to suffer so you can. If you having objectively, factually, more than anyone needs to be happy requires a ton of people to go without necessities, IMO, that is not a right you should have, and I don't care how communist that makes me.
You could take 90% of Bezos', Musk's, or Gates' wealth and they would still never have to work again and live in exceptional luxury. There is no goddamn reason in the world to let them keep it while we have people starving.
Their first reflex when it comes to paying for infrastructure and maintenance is to think what that'll do to their short term CAP rates. And then they get angry.
It was state of the art on 1962 when it was designed, and remained state of the art until the 1980s, when the signal system started breaking down, and the the late 80s upgrade which had a train presence glitch, which caused almost all the system to get resignaled.
So by the 2000s again it's showing its age, and they got a 32 processor zSeries mainframe.
Brake problem last week, and the this on Friday? Now it's getting like New York, even more. Whatsmatteryou?
That and IOPS are the primary advantage of mainframe systems.