All BART trains were stopped due to ‘computer networking problem’
kqed.org206 points by ksajadi 5 days ago
206 points by ksajadi 5 days ago
I don't know the last time the entire BART system got shut down. There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there aren't any power outages.
No information as to the actual cause right now. Easy to speculate that it's a cyberattack, but I'm going to go for the free square and wildly guess it is a DNS issue.
Best wishes and godspeed to the folks who are working on fixing the issue, whatever it is.
My free square is one of their control computers’ parallel ports frying out and now they’re unable to find a replacement because they buy them all as old stock off of ebay [1].
The ports are used as hard realtime GPIO so if some of the electrical isolation failed downstream, it could take out the motherboard. Back before Vista’s security model change, drivers could fill DMA buffers to the parallel ports controller and get hard realtime time outputs on Windows so there’s a quite lot of old industrial control systems running on a thread.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-...
Wow that takes me back. My graduate physics experiment ran on two MS-DOS computers with Turbo Pascal programs exercising the parallel ports. Each machine had a grotesque board that I made, with multiple ADC and DAC channels. I finished in 1993. By that time, of course, everything was obsolete, but I wasn't going to delay my project by upgrading.
Obsolete is good! Hobbyists running mini CNCs and converting old manual Bridgeports exploited the obsoleteness well into the 2010s by buying up really cheap old machines to run Windows XP with MachCNC, which could drive the CNC via parallel port (with a proper expansion board, which used to be the expensive part).
It wasn't until the microcontrollers got powerful enough and Stratasys FDM patents expired that open source Klipper/Marlin firmware from the 3d printer community replaced MachCNC.
Indeed, PC interfacing was what got me into microcontrollers. I had already mastered microprocessor interfacing and coding, but on desktop machines. Our lab got a Mac, and the only reasonable interface port was serial. So it made sense to put a MCU on the other end of that serial port, to continue my explorations. I still had to program the MCU with my MS-DOS machine, using a device programmer that I hacked together -- using the parallel port, and a freeware 8051 assembler.
Today, that MCU is a Teensy.
> My free square is one of their control computers’ parallel ports frying out and now they’re unable to find a replacement because they buy them all as old stock off of ebay
The last time I experienced a BART shutdown, the cause was that someone had found a box in one of the stations somewhere, and they (1) assumed it was a bomb; and (2) shut down the entire system. I'm not sure what stopping the trains while you investigate the bomb you've found accomplishes, but I don't think there were efforts to find additional bombs. (The box was not actually a bomb.)
Forgive my arrogance, but nothing presented in that article should be such a big blocker. Spare parts for the traction gear sure, but none of the computing "problems" make any sense.
It's not like hard real time systems aren't available. More concretely, they talk about running a DOS virtual machine on a laptop to download logs from the cars, but there's no way that protocol is so complicated it couldn't be re-implemented reasonably.
This sounds more like "It's cheaper to just buy old stuff off ebay than it is to actually care about this system"
I'd wager it is technically a "cheaper" problem, but I'd also consider the axis that this is public transit, an industry known for being neglected budget-wise. Reverse engineering/reimplementation with competent parties may be laughably out of budget.
It's neglected because public transport is usually subsidized in almost every country. It's just not directly profitable, like roads.
US is in general very reluctant to invest into profitless projects.
No, but like roads, public transit leads to greater economic activity and boosts GDP. Good public transit also increases social and financial mobility, makes other clean air targets easier to hit, and decreases medical costs [0] while increasing the number of financially-productive hours a citizen can work - because a healthier citizen is a more economically productive one.
America seems utterly incapable of grasping many second-order effects. For another example, look to the ROI of investing in the (coninuously underfunded) IRS [1]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4917017/
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/irs-tax-audits-recover-12-do...
Yes, thanks for elaborating. I seem to be not clear in my point: that public transit is subsidized and it's a good thing, we should not expect to see an immediate profit from it, and should not expect a commercial company willing to invest into it.
I appreciate the clarification, my mistake taking your original comment the wrong way. I'm a little reassured too - what seems to be an Americanism (things that don't turn a profit aren't worth doing) feels like it's seeping into my locale as well, so I may be overly sensitive to it. It's nice to be told I was wrong in this instance.
> wildly guess it is a DNS issue
Riding around in Waymos here, in the Jaguar models there is a button on the console labeled "DNS" and I have no desire to grab the steering wheel or adjust any other control, except every time I climb in, I am sorely, sorely tempted to press this "DNS" button because (1) I do not know what it does and (2) I have always had a soft spot in my sysadmin's heart for DNS in particular.
Please do not reply to tell me what "DNS" means in a motor vehicle, because you will ruin the mystique.
Sorry I will ruin the mystique:
It's Do Not Schedule, carry over from when there was a human behind the wheel.
Do Not Slide. So just hit that if you lose traction, or if you're having a hard time getting your kid out of the park.
I don't see any reason other than sheer speculation to suspect a cyberattack. It can just as easily have been some car crashed into a fiber optic thingy.
The last time in recent memory there was a large BART disruption it had been caused by a motorcyclist who somehow flung himself over a fence into the trackway and died. That stopped service in and north of Oakland, which is more than half of the system by riders.
All sheer speculation--the reference to cyberattack was from a now dead comment suggesting it was ransomware.
It doesn't seem likely to be a physical obstruction on the tracks, though, as the entire system is down and trains aren't running anywhere. I don't know if that's happened before.
Last year in Paris Russian operations shut down the rail yards by tossing small wires over the rails - the train detector circuits work by shorting the rails together, so a handful of people were able to tell the rail network "do not proceed, stuck train ahead!"
> There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there aren't any power outages.
Loud explosions happen all the time in SF. Particularly in the Lower Nob Hill / Tenderloin area.
I lived an Lower Nob Hill for many years and heard countless explosions, most often in the middle of the night (2am-4am) or early hours (6am). Often times these explosions M80s-M1000s being dropped and detonated.
Someone was arrested back in 2019 and the explosions reduced dramatically.
This article[0] goes into detail about it.
[0]: https://maxleanne.medium.com/tracking-san-franciscos-mythica...
I thought I heard that explosion and then just attributed it to a dream. Thanks for confirming
Wow, you might have called the DNS issue. Nice. Can't be DNS, can't be DNS... It's DNS.
From the article: "Once the crews isolated that exact section that had the devices that were not properly communicating to each other, they were able to just simply disconnect them,” she told KQED. “That is what allowed us to finally get service back up and running.”
We changed the URL from https://www.bart.gov/ to an article that provides more information about what happened. See also:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bart-shut-down-t... (https://archive.ph/LnvJ1)
https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/09/bart-service-shuts-down-co...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/us/bart-train-shutdown.ht... (https://web.archive.org/web/20250509152319/https://www.nytim...)
https://abc7news.com/post/systemwide-bart-shutdown-due-train...
I used to live in Oakland, and am really sad to see continued failures of BART. They had started significant expansions right before the pandemic, allowing a long (but no traffic) ride possible from Oakland to San Jose. A key challenge for BART is that they depend a lot more on ticket sales than subsidies, and as a result, have been hit much harder with lower ridership.
As an occasional BART rider, the changes they've made since the pandemic have been in the right direction. I'm mostly indifferent to the new trains and payment cards, but they've increased the frequency so that missing a train doesn't mean you can be waiting for over 30 minutes, which can be longer than your entire trip.
The main problem which BART cannot fix is that the trains usually don't go to where you want to go.
BART can fix that by building dense mixed use -- office, commercial, and residential -- around their stops.
They are doing that in East Bay [1] on BART owned land. They had been blocked so far by the most virulent NIMBY trash leading to some of the most scathing coverage [2]. Most have been unblocked and are under construction. The one still being blocked is Ashby BART because of (say it with me folks), a "HIsToriC flEa MARkeT" (that mostly sells stolen goods)[3].
[1]: https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/magazine/housing-berkeley...
[3]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/09/17/berkeley-ashby-bart-...
Ok but “historic flea market” cannot possibly a real reason; this must be a parody. What’s the real reason (I won’t click the links due to the cognitive risk of having this ridiculous story confirmed).
> What’s the real reason
My links are worth clicking:
http://radicalcartography.net/bayarea.html
https://goldenstatswarrior.substack.com/p/the-great-migratio...
BART can't do that. The cities can do that.
I think that's part of the problem, bart stations should be the centerpiece of a really dense (micro)neighbourhood
Lol. That sounds like you’re saying “well the neighborhood sure is shit but at least we’ve got good public transit”.
have you ever lived in one of these places? Big cities in Europe are made entirely of them. They're pretty cool.
> sad to see continued failures of BART
I think this is overstated, at least from an operations point of view. My mom has been using BART to commute to work for over a year and I can't recall many incidents like this.
> They had started significant expansions right before the pandemic, allowing a long (but no traffic) ride possible from Oakland to San Jose.
They're still working on this, with four more stations planned beyond Berryessa (Little Portugal, Downtown San José, Diridon, and Santa Clara), plus an additional infill station on the Berryessa line. I think that would be really cool. Unfortunately it looks like this new extension won't be that competitive with Caltrain as a way to get to San Jose from San Francisco. Maybe at non-express times.
Also, it looks like it won't be complete until 2040!?
i mean yeah if you’re in SF caltrain is super convenient, so its fine. Getting from oakland to south bay without a car was hell though. This line would make it so much better.
Plus: Oakland is actually building homes for people while SF remains laughably behind on building quotas.
Try the transbay bus. Depending on station location, it’s often faster than the bart. Also, it doesn’t smell like piss, and I’ve never witnessed an assault on it.
Amtrak still has service on that corridor. Apparently it was a convenient way to get to SF back in the day (via ferry).
Of course most of Silicon Valley is closer to the San Francisco - Santa Cruz line, making the ferry service redundant.
It’s too bad they ripped all this stuff out, and will never rebuild it!
ever since I paid $8 for jumping in and out of a BART station b/c I meant to go into a Muni station... I lost all respect for them.
This is pretty common among transit agencies, I got on the wrong platform in Japan once and couldn't get back out until I talked to a station agent, the fare gate gave an error and wouldn't open the gates. Not sure if that's better or worse behavior than charging a fare.
It's called an "excursion fare", which is meant for those that just ride the train without getting off and come back to the same station. You can talk to a BART station agent (assuming you can find one) and they'll let you out, or call customer service and they'll reverse the charge.
Modern fare systems should be able to figure out when you've exited right after entering and not charge you. BART is supposed to be adding a 30 minute grace period so if you go in and out of the station within 30 minutes, you won't be charged.
Heh, I was in Japan a few weeks ago, and had left my bag in a locker at a station (inside the fare gates). I went back to get it later in the day (when I could check into my hotel), and the station attendant charged me 150 yen just to go in to get it and come right back out!
I get that they want to charge people who ride the trains for... fun?... and then get off at the same station, but it felt really silly.
I think those tickets are for people who train watch on the platform or see off friends/family from the platform.
If it was good enough in 1980, Japan might computerise it but they won't change it.
Fun fact: the reason it's like that is because both levels were envisioned for BART usage before the Peninsula lines got cut. In the original design both levels would have been the same fare area and you would have been able to walk between them instead of having to take the big escalators down to BART caged off from the Muni level. It's comical to watch one of the Muni trains crawl to one end of the giant platform that was sized for 10-car BART trains.
Ah, I've always wondered why the Muni platforms (especially Powell) are so ridiculously long compared to the Muni trains themselves. Makes so much sense that they were originally designed for BART cars.
And here's a citation — Engineering Report: Rapid Transit for the San Francisco Bay Area, June, 1961: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50-years/1961-...
“The San Francisco Downtown element of the Bay Area regional rapid transit system consists of a four-track, two-level subway beneath Market Street and a two-track, single-level subway beneath Post Street.”
“At Montgomery Street, the Market Street subway joins the San Francisco approach to the Trans-Bay Tube. The subway extends up Market Street to about Van Ness Avenue where it swings lo the south to become the Peninsula Line in Mission Street. The lower level of the subway provides through regional service by joining the Peninsula and the Trans-Bay Lines. The upper level is built to accommodate local rapid transit trains at a future time and will be utilized initially by the streetcars of the San Francisco Municipal Railway.” (emphasis mine)
And the flow map of estimated 1975 passenger counts makes it clear why they would want to double up on platform capacity along that stretch: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50-years/1961-...
Imagine if we got this BART: https://i.imgur.com/hon9nEf.jpeg (1956)
I too learned that the hard way when dropping a family member off. I naively assumed it wouldn't charge me if I tapped out at the same station 10 minutes later.
London Underground has nice clear policies around this, both about what you'll be charged
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
And about refunds (typically you'd get an automatic refund for a one-off event)
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/touched-in...
I always have high levels of respect for companies with such clarity
In The Netherlands you get a full refund if you tap out at the same station within 20 minutes. If you travel with NS (National Railways), you even have 60 minutes to tap out.
Having someone pay just to wave off someone is incredibly customer-hostile. Besides, how many people are even committing fraud like that?
A parallel comment suggests it might be an “excursion fair.” Although it is not really the intended use of a train, some reasons an individual might ride the train might be sight-seeing, or because they are homeless and want somewhere warm to hang out. In that case, IMO it isn’t really a fraud attempt to get off on the same stop you got in, it is just unexpected use of the system.
Did they ever fix this as announced in 2022? https://sfist.com/2022/12/08/rejoice-bart-is-dumping-the-6-4...
Oh! I thought they were going to get rid of that fee: https://sfist.com/2022/12/08/rejoice-bart-is-dumping-the-6-4...
You can talk with the clerk to get a refund. But I thought they were doing away with it entirely…
I don't see how it ever comes back. You used to have business people and engineers riding the train. But with Covid the enforcement policies got really bad and the trains and atmosphere are so trashy now. It's far easier for the aforementioned group to just hire an Uber than deal with the crime and trashiness that's plaguing the system now.
I ride the system all the time and I don't think it's trashy. Also there are the new gates all over that block people from jumping in as easily and that has been cut down quite a bit. I think it's tough for Bart to probably come back still because people don't need to be in downtown SF as much as they used to because a lot of people work from home now, but yeah I just don't think it's fair to say that the system is some trashy system. I think it's mostly pretty nice.
Good to hear.
I heard they reopened the bathrooms (they closed them system wide in response to 9/11). If true, I’m guessing that helps a lot.
BART's doing great. good headways, same schedule all day everyday. name another american transit agency doing a takt
BART is unfortunately doomed. It had been running on federal aid, and with a deficit. Ridership is down 60% from 2019 (50 million vs 118 million). Now with San Francisco and Oakland in a long, slow downturn, it is unlikely to improve.
I'd say the BART administrators overpaying themselves is the bigger moneysink. Not to mention the spending 73M dollars to overhaul the gates to stop fare evaders, when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
The problem is that the Bay Area needs a single transit agency. All the agencies fighting each other for funding doesn’t help. It’s a much easier task to levy a minuscule tax on the entire region that pays for free public transit. If BART wants to do that at the moment, they can’t.
I live in an area with a county-wide transit sales tax, and it just seems to result in them running a lot of empty buses around and building (and eventually abandoning) transit centres. Full price is $1.50 (which if paying cash means fiddling around with coins) except for the 50+ mile express routes which are $2.50.
Well you could be in the Bay Area where you’d have 27 agencies, that still run a lot of empty routes and build useless and expensive transit centers, and then charge way more than what you have.
They also need to get the roads, busses and ferries on board with this plan.
The goal (by law) should be twofold:
1) increase the number of people with a 90th percentile commute under 15, 30 and 60 minutes. (i.e., improve quality of life and encourage economic growth)
2) sharply reduce the average CO2-equivalent emissions of each commuter.
The current statewide policy (by law) is to reduce commute miles.
In practice, this means intentionally sabotaging commute corridors, which slows economic growth (fewer available workers and fewer reachable jobs) reduces quality of life and increases CO2 emissions (due to repeated idling and hard acceleration).
The MTC is that organization for the Bay Area.
Bay Area has 27 transit agencies and MTC has limited control over them beyond dictating how the state funds are allocated. Thats not what I’m talking about. What I’m suggesting is that the 27 agencies be one agency operationally and get funded as such. You’ll have much better outcomes.
MTC is not just concerned with allocating state funds, though. They administer RM2 and RM3 and the AB1107 sales tax, and they put on a trench coat to act at BATA collecting and using bridge tolls.
But unless MTC is concerned with the operations, you cannot have decent outcomes. If BART has an over reliance on fare but MUNI doesn’t, a single agency would be better able to balance the budget. Similarly if one agency is spending more of the state funding on creating new routes while other is spending more on creating more frequent service on existing routes, MTC won’t be able to direct what needs to happen. If BART is running more often, but the bus I take to the BART station just cut service, I’m not taking BART anymore.
Point of a single agency is not just to collect taxes. It is to make sure there are better outcomes, so that when you do need more taxes to fund public transit, you don’t get the pushback from the public.
I guess I just don't believe in your thesis that larger scale leads to better outcomes. Wouldn't we just end up with Caltrans Lite Edition, spending all the money on car junk? BART already has this problem, with two elected directors who are more likely the chew off their own legs than to ever ride BART.
> when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
There was a study done on this. It turns out that the median income of someone riding under the Bay Bridge in BART is higher than someone driving a car across it.
In other words the wealthier people are using BART. So if you made it free, you'd be subsidizing the wealthy.
That’s a very wrong conclusion to draw from the study. If median income of someone riding the bart is higher than someone driving, it could also mean that they drive because it is cheaper to do so. If you make it free, they would probably ride BART too, making it more accessible and equitable.
The study was more in depth than that. It found that BART goes to more places that wealthy people go (financial district, SOMA, etc) than where poorer people need to go.
That makes perfect sense. Poor people are attracted to cheaper real estate (residential and commercially). Real estate is cheaper because it is less accessible and convenient.
One area is concentrated and the other is decentralized.
So, force the rich people to use the bridge, and increase commute times for everyone?
Seems like a much better plan than synchronizing and expanding the train networks so they cover more neighborhoods in all parts of the bay (except Marin, of course…)
Please forgive me for the ignorance, but is there some significance of “under the bay bridge” for this study, or did they just pick it arbitrarily? It seems like picking a point arbitrarily like that could introduce some skews.
I'm pretty sure it's just being used as a turn of phrase here. Under the bridge means commuters are riding BART, over the bridge means they're driving.
> when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
Absolutely not.
I think there should be options for low income residents to ride for free or heavily discounted rates (which exists now). But it's all about implementation: simply letting anyone jump on turns the system into a madhouse. Making sure everyone pays (even if through a government issued pass) and works with the system helps balance equity considerations with maintaining safety and cleanliness.
BART has several discounts: https://www.bart.gov/tickets/discounts
Discounts are fine. Free riding isn’t.
Why is free public transport bad? Could get even more folk out of their cars, or expand employment opportunities.
Because people are people. You won’t be able to get on the train to commute when people are sleeping there.
People don’t value free things, and it’s hard to plan things without pricing demand.
Because people in America have being taught to think that way. Plenty of countries run free (or near free) public transit just fine.
The price is not the barrier for most people using transit. The service reliability and availability is more important. Would you rather pay fare for frequent bus or wait around for free fares?
> Discounts are fine. Free riding isn’t.
Why not? Could you not make a pretty strong argument that avoided negative externalities (CO2 and air pollution from car engines and tires) make public transport worthwhile by itself, and just fund transport by taxing those (gas/cars)?
Saves you all the infrastructure for billing/access control and some enforcement, too.
1) it’s a funding source for transit agencies which are already facing shortfalls and at the mercy of voters for any tax increases or bonds.
2) we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it on their own in order to avoid tragedy of the commons situations which actually suppress ridership by people who can afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
If you live in a region of the world that doesn’t have these issues, great, do what you want. We’re talking about the Bay Area specifically, and the thing keeping BART ridership down is that people don’t want to ride BART because it sucks. The actual service is mostly fine. The issue lies in the people.
I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay. In the years prior to the new fare gates being installed, I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
>we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it ...
Public transit should be free (Or very inexpensive) to anyone who wants to use it. It's better for the environment, people's wallets, and the transit system itself if it was disconnected from ticket revenue. BART can certainly do more to enforce cleanliness and making sure no one is doing drugs on the trains, but that also requires more funding.
>I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay.
Cars are subsidized endlessly via roads, associated maintenance, and parking on public property that could otherwise be used for something more productive. Many people with decent paying jobs own multiple cars banking on the fact that they can use public property to store their personal car, so they're also casually freeloading.
Living in a car-dependent world significantly drives up housing costs for everyone in the region. Many of BART's stations are surrounded by and zoned exclusively for single family homes with a lawn and a garage, which is ridiculous.
> Public transit should be free (Or very inexpensive) to anyone who wants to use it. It's better for the environment, people's wallets, and the transit system itself if it was disconnected from ticket revenue. BART can certainly do more to enforce cleanliness and making sure no one is doing drugs on the trains, but that also requires more funding.
The only mode of transportation that is truly free is walking. BART is already the economical choice compared to the $8 bridge tolls plus gas, but cutting off an existing revenue source hoping to increase service is either going to degrade service frequency, service quality, or both.
> Cars are subsidized endlessly via roads, associated maintenance, and parking on public property that could otherwise be used for something more productive. Many people with decent paying jobs own multiple cars banking on the fact that they can use public property to store their personal car, so they're also casually freeloading.
This is out-of-scope, but I have literally zero issues with making driving more expensive, however this also isn't the counter that you think it is. Both Bay Area roads and Bay Area public transit agencies are subsidized, in addition to having associated fees that add to the cost of each of them.
> Living in a car-dependent world significantly drives up housing costs for everyone in the region. Many of BART's stations are surrounded by and zoned exclusively for single family homes with a lawn and a garage, which is ridiculous.
Once again, out-of-scope, but I have literally zero issue with and would even advocate for upzoning around BART. I still would not make BART free after doing so.
>2) we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it on their own in order to avoid tragedy of the commons situations which actually suppress ridership by people who can afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
These demographics have no issue jumping the gates/going through with someone else, are already present, and will be whether the ride is $1 or $1000. You're just excluding the honest people who can't afford it. I also don't know what makes you think that criminals have to be poor and can't afford a ride.
> I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
I'm envious of your ability to access people's bank accounts and occupations by looking at them.
> These demographics have no issue jumping the gates/going through with someone else, are already present, and will be whether the ride is $1 or $1000. You're just excluding the honest people who can't afford it. I also don't know what makes you think that criminals have to be poor and can't afford a ride.
Something you may have missed in this discussion is that BART has hardened its most frequently-used gates and is still in the process of hardening all of them with new fare gates and other infrastructure. This has noticeably decreased the frequency in which people are casually engaging in theft of service. In all of Downtown San Francisco with the new fare gates installed, you can't just step over them anymore, nor is circumventing them a subtle and quick matter.
> I'm envious of your ability to access people's bank accounts and occupations by looking at them.
It doesn't require magic to look at someone and assess their clothes, the items they're carrying and general hygiene and clock that with the time of day, or even figure out what their occupation is: mostly office workers and others who work in downtown San Francisco. Most of BART's passengers are commuters with jobs after all, they're not just riding it for fun which is what you would expect from a commuter rail system. Paying for transportation whether that is the bridge toll or the BART ticket is each person's responsibility, and notably there are tax incentives for public transportation within the Bay Area already, and as I noted up thread, plenty of discounts.
> Paying for transportation whether that is the bridge toll or the BART ticket is each person's responsibility...
Sure. And you can do that with taxes, rather than charging at point-of-use.
I mean, we (very wisely) subsidize the absolute hell out of road construction and maintenance, and noone bats an eye. Folks get weirdly up in arms when the method of transportation being subsidized doesn't require a (typically) many-thousand-dollar up-front investment to use.
> Sure. And you can do that with taxes, rather than charging at point-of-use.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. As I addressed way above this comment chain:
> 1) it’s a funding source for transit agencies which are already facing shortfalls and at the mercy of voters for any tax increases or bonds.
Having a funding source tied to use is also pretty nice if you want to financially justify further BART expansions in e.g. the directions of Tracy/Stockton, Santa Cruz, Vallejo or an in-fill Diablo Valley run from Martinez to Pleasanton and provide more comprehensive coverage. It’s also nice to keep it segregated from having to compete within the legislature and on the ballot with highways.
> I mean, we (very wisely) subsidize the absolute hell out of road construction and maintenance, and noone bats an eye. Folks get weirdly up in arms when the method of transportation being subsidized doesn't require a (typically) many-thousand-dollar up-front investment to use.
We also subsidize the hell out of BART and public transportation. There isn’t a single mode of transportation within and between cities that isn’t heavily subsidized by the government. Maybe a smattering of fully private roads somewhere.
Those subsidies are also not mutually exclusive with direct fees for service and direct fees and taxes (e.g. vehicle registration and fuel taxes), nor do they justify removing fee-for-service from BART.
> Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you shouldn't.
> We also subsidize the hell out of BART...
For ages, BART crowed about how it got like 80->95% of its operating expenses from rider fares. If what you're saying is true, then one or more of the following must be true:
1) The BART directors were lying to the public
2) This change in funding mix happened when BART ridership fell off a cliff as folks fled the SF Bay Area
3) Rider fares have never actually been expected to cover system expansions to any significant degree
If #3 is true, then it seems to me that talking about fares in conjunction with future system expansions is totally pointless and a waste of time.
> Having a funding source tied to use is also pretty nice if you want to financially justify further BART expansions...
And yet we frequently build new roadways without any significant usage-based funding.
> Those subsidies are also not mutually exclusive with direct fees for service and direct fees and taxes...
Duh.
> ...nor do they justify removing fee-for-service from BART.
Nope, not in isolation. Of course not.
> As I addressed way above this comment chain:...
As you also said way above this comment chain:
> [I support suppressing] ridership by people who can['t] afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
On this, we disagree. I'm going to be kind and assume that the important part of your expressed concern is crime. The criminals are on trains with well-known stops; they're simply not going to force their way off of the train between stops. Like many other municipal railways BART has its own police force. Deploy the BART cops and get the bad guys at the next stop.
You might argue that this will be expensive, or that it will be ineffective. I'd argue that criminals have been able to jump over the faregates for nearly fifty years, so this thing we're discussing isn't a new problem.
> For ages, BART crowed about how it got like 80->95% of its operating expenses from rider fares.
BART has had a long history. If you want to see for yourself, here's their most recent budget, page 25 is what you want:https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/FY25%20%26%...
As far as I remember, capital expansions have never relied on rider fares per se.
> And yet we frequently build new roadways without any significant usage-based funding.
And arguably we shouldn't be, or that we should be doing less of this. To be clear here, you are not going to find anywhere in this discussion in my own words that I am a friend of the institution of the automobile, the many highways built to support them, or suburbs.
> On this, we disagree. I'm going to be kind and assume that the important part of your expressed concern is crime.
The most important part is crime, but all the pieces matter. If you want to attract new ridership, that means improving service, improving QoL on BART (keeping both low level and overt crime at bay), and ultimately expanding BART's service area both making it more comprehensive in the areas it does serve and expanding it outwards to serve additional communities adjacent to its core service area attracting new paid riders who would otherwise probably drive. People who can take BART or MUNI but don't tend not to because to them, it is not a pleasant place for them to be and they will choose to drive or take a Lyft or make other choices. I'm sorry to say, but getting someone to drive you around no matter how many other people are riding with you is a small luxury[1] that people are not entitled to, nor should they be.
> Like many other municipal railways BART has its own police force. Deploy the BART cops and get the bad guys at the next stop.
> You might argue that this will be expensive, or that it will be ineffective.
I don't know why you think I would be making that argument. Part of having laws is the cost of enforcing them. If anything, I'd make the laws somewhat harsher and have a more active police presence throughout the BART system. One of the weak points now in the additional hardening that BART has been doing is that at some point, there's just no one minding the emergency exits and toll gates around downtown San Francisco. Take a page out of Japan's book, stop relying so much on patrol cars and install some kouban (and also better CCTVs) within the station infrastructure, enabling them to say, virtually fill in for when no one is visibly minding the booths. In terms of labor costs, I couldn't tell you if it would cost more because to be honest, I have no clue what BART Police are doing now when they're not actually on the trains and platforms.
> I'd argue that criminals have been able to jump over the faregates for nearly fifty years, so this thing we're discussing isn't a new problem.
Yeah, and we're discussing it because for the first time in BART's history, they're doing shit to actually address it in a productive fashion, rather than throwing up their hands and saying "free BART for everyone!". I think I like their new way at least directionally a bit better.
> Duh.
Bruh, that's how I felt when you explained we can "pay for things with taxes", or informing me that BART police exist, or that fare evasion isn't new. So, you actually want to go down this path? I know I don't want to. Let's be nice to each other.
[1] I know it doesn't feel like any kind of luxury, but it's true!
Contrary to the popular belief, more ridership makes it more safe and less dangerous. Pretending that a fee excludes the less desirable is laughable. Plenty of people that you describe, ride the trains even now, they just don’t pay the fee. By adding the fee you’re mostly excluding the people who would ride it if it were free: law abiding people who work hard to provide for their families, but can’t afford the fee.
And as for funding shortfall, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You don’t fund transit, the agency needs to make cuts, making it less reliable, less safe and reducing capacity. Once that happens, even fewer people ride transit, creating even more funding deficits. This also increases the unwillingness of people to fund transit.
We use similar funding structures for roads all the time. Everyone pays, and people who own cars get to drive to their suburbs 50 miles away from the city. I don’t see people complaining about that at any point in time.
> Contrary to the popular belief, more ridership makes it more safe and less dangerous. Pretending that a fee excludes the less desirable is laughable. Plenty of people that you describe, ride the trains even now, they just don’t pay the fee. By adding the fee you’re mostly excluding the people who would ride it if it were free: law abiding people who work hard to provide for their families, but can’t afford the fee.
I've repeated this a couple of times already responding here, so clearly there's a bunch of people chiming in that just haven't on BART recently or haven't taken it into downtown San Francisco or Oakland. BART is currently in the process of hardening the paid areas against casual theft of service. IIRC most of their fare infrastructure has already been upgraded with the new gates that you can't just step over, nor even easily hop or climb over. There are still weak links, but it has had a noticeable impact. Beyond that, you should note that taking BART is the economic option, so if someone is law abiding and needs to get to work, then unless they live right by their job or have no commute at all, they're probably taking BART and paying for it.
> We use similar funding structures for roads all the time. Everyone pays, and people who own cars get to drive to their suburbs 50 miles away from the city. I don’t see people complaining about that at any point in time.
We use a mix of both fees and tax subsidies for both BART and public roads. If you have to cross a bridge and you're taking public transportation, you're paying at a minimum $8 plus gas which includes gas taxes which non-drivers are not paying for directly. Your other option is the Ferry which is like $9 or something like that.
Because capitalistic incentives work. More riders = more money => incentive to get more riders. More riders = more cost/hassle => incentive to have fewer riders.
Postmortem thread posted: https://x.com/SFBART/status/1920945151419003225
>The root cause of the disruption was related to network devices having intermittent connectivity. Staff in the Operations Control Center lacked the visibility of the track circuits and the train positions necessary for safe operations. Visibility of this system in the Operations Control Center is required to run service.
> BART’s Network Engineering team identified and isolated a redundant sector of the network that was causing intermittent visibility and disconnected it. This allowed service to begin.
A "redundant sector of the network that was causing intermittent visibility and disconnected it"? That sounds like some sort of network loop?
Not quite but nearly totally unrelated, but I love that Debian ships a package of a PDP-8 PAL-like cross-assembler written at BART:
"Poorer" countries with a per-capita GDP that's 1/5th of Bay Area have exceptional public transport.
How about fix the country public transport first instead of spending 2 Trillion on BS AI?
Very poor countries also have exceptional public water wells where people can draw water with buckets.
That is because those are inconvenient, slow but necessary amenities in the areas where most people are poor. And that is why US currently doesn't need either.
Source: lived in a poor country with exceptional public transit and didn't ever drive till 29; and carried water with buckets from a well only a block away for an aggregate of 1-2 years.
But rich cities can also have great public transit. New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Singapore... in fact rich cities with transit as awful as the Bay Area seem to be the exception, not the rule
They are all much more dense than the bay area, and I don't get the sense that many people want them to be denser other than, again, for affordability reasons.
I don't have data but in Moscow where I'm from the typical well to do thing was moving to a "cottage village", something between a suburb and a gated community, despite good transit and horrendous traffic. In the 90ies it was stereotyped as a nouveu riche thing but in 2010s I even knew a senior dev who did it as it became more affordable. When I was visiting Tokyo iirc most local devs I was working with lived in the city but their manager lived in an outlying less dense area, since presumably he could afford it). I get a sense that people are likely to move to have more space and privacy, unless it's locally difficult or expensive.
Equating having access to public transport with lack of running water is wild to me. A rich country is not one where poor people drive but rather one where rich people take public transport.
> A rich country is not one where poor people drive but rather one where rich people take public transport.
You've mixed a subjective measure "rich country" with an objective one "rich people." I can't think of any situation where people of greater means accept more limitations.
Anyways do you have any examples of "rich countries" that have solved this problem?
Good public transport, in a city at least, doesn't feel like a limitation! It's rather convenient, really. There is no problem with making rich people use it, they do it voluntarily.
I think it does genuinely feel like a limitation in a lot of cases, and I think it's unhelpful to pretend it doesn't. However it also is very convenient in others.
Everything has it's place, in an ideal area if I was wanting to go a short-medium distance I'd go on a bike, if I wanted a drink or to carry more than practical on my bike or to go a medium length I'd take public transport, and if I wanted to take a lot of stuff, or go in a time sensitive manner, or not want to worry about the last bus, or go somewhere rural I'd take the car.
I don't think good public transport can replace cars in all situations, but it is an extremely good option to have for situations that suit it (which for most people is likely most, but probably not all, of the time).
No, not absolutely all situations. But take my situation - I live in Berlin and I use my car less than once a month. A major reason to drive is to have a car at the destination. I've also had streaks where I drove to the supermarket every couple of weeks, but I haven't done so in months. Main upside is that I can buy whole cases of beer and a bunch of other drinks and heavy stuff, less trouble carrying. Otherwise, the closest supermarkets are about five minutes by foot.
> Anyways do you have any examples of "rich countries" that have solved this problem?
Rich countries that have good public transit? Sure, that's easy.
Denmark Singapore Japan Germany Switzerland France UK ...
Here are some middle income countries that have good public transit also:
China Spain Portugal Italy Taiwan
Okay, so to come back to the goal posts, do "rich people" ride the public transit in those countries?
Yes, because it's faster. Doesn't really matter if you can afford a 400,000 dollar Rolls Royce if you're stuck in downtown London traffic for 30 minutes. You could've just taken the underground in 5...
They sure do. The ones that can't or don't want to hire a personal driver or go everywhere by taxi anyway. Because driving yourself isn't much fun in a city and you need to be sober every time, too.
I'm skeptical. For nearly any definition of "rich", someone can afford to take an Uber/Lyft/taxi everywhere, at least.
I think the real reason your average rich person would take transit is because in some places, at some times of day, it's significantly faster than driving. But I do believe there's some -- probably fairly small -- subset of rich people who ride public transit simply because they prefer to.
Yes rich people take the Tube/trains in London. It's convenient and often faster than driving, especially at rush hour. Basically everyone uses the Tube except for like, royalty or billionaires or whatever. In fact, people pay a premium (in rent) to live close to Tube stations.
Also, planes are a form of public transport and rich people take them all the time.
This part of your earlier comment confuses me:
> I can't think of any situation where people of greater means accept more limitations.
What "limitations" are you talking about here?
Probably not billionaires, but millionaires do. I know multi millionaires (6-7 figures) in the US who ride public transportation in places like SF and NYC.
> I know multi millionaires (6-7 figures)
Er, 6 figures is a hundred-thousand-aire, not a millionaire. Perhaps you meant 7-8?
I'm not doing that. I am equating on a spectrum not being able to, as a society, afford running water infrastructure to not being able to afford cars and infrastructure.
Note that this includes environmental arguments - saying that 8bil people cannot all live like people in Houston may be true but it's basically saying we cannot afford to have nice things.
But the thing is US, and especially major cities, currently can afford them!
Why would "rich people take public transit"? Except for extremely dense areas, driving is faster especially accounting for overhead; goes exactly where one needs, any time; and is way more comfortable. Only those who prefer extremely dense areas and also cannot live close to work/amenities (kind of the point of density) would want it.
> Due to a computer networking problem BART service is suspended system wide until further notice. Seek alternate means of transportation.
That's worth a screenshot.
Any idea whether the political and technical will is there, to post-mortem this, and make the system more robust and resilient?
>“Once the crews isolated that exact section that had the devices that were not properly communicating to each other, they were able to just simply disconnect them,” she told KQED. “That is what allowed us to finally get service back up and running.”
Should it not be "they were able to just simply reconnect them"?
Surprise to see no exact problem been given in the article and comments section. Curious to see is it a legit computer networking problem, and if yes what they actually were? Could they install a proper fail over connection to prevent the outage in the first place?
Once the initial shock of “how the hell do I get to work” wore off, it was nice taking the ferry and F to SOMA. Took an extra 20 minutes, but better than the time it would have taken waiting in bridge traffic.
If the ferry+F commute is only 20 minutes longer than your car commute, why don't you do it more often?! If I was in that situation, I would never drive!
The last time I had a long car commute, it was 45-60 minutes driving, or 2+ hours via various transit options, so driving was unfortunately the only reasonable choice. But 20 minutes extra to avoid driving? I'd do that in a heartbeat.
(Hell, I do that often enough just inside SF, taking a bus or train instead of an Uber/Lyft or driving myself... sadly it's not uncommon for a 15-minute car ride to be the equivalent of a 40 minute transit ride.)
My usual commute is a <15 minute walk to BART, and a 5 minute walk off BART. The car is mostly for driving around South/East Bay and getting bulk goods in Berkeley. Trying to wean myself off of using it in Oakland but bus service isn’t amazing where I am. I’m with you on avoiding the car commute - would much rather the walk, and feels safer when I’m sleepy. Plus, fuck the 880, drivers on it are crazy even on a calm day - every time my wife and I drive down it, she has the same reaction - “you were driving in this every day?!”
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> (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.
It seems that many BART supporters are suffering from a fatal fallacy which I also believed until recently.
What is the purpose of public transit? Do you believe that public transit is designed so that poor people can commute to jobs?
Wrong. Public transit is designed so that people can go shopping. Buses and trains move people around to shopping centers and stores and malls.
It is only by accident that poor people can commute to some jobs with public transit. There are far, far more jobs that are more-or-less unreachable by bus or train, and poor people end up walking, cycling, or moving closer to those jobs.
When I was a young child, Grandma didn't drive, and so our weekends were consumed by walking around the neighborhood, shopping and eating in restaurants. We'd hang out at the 7-Eleven playing Centipede, Missile Command, and Asteroids. We'd pick up some sodas and Cracked magazine and go home.
Then later in life, we started going to malls. None of the malls were walking-distance from Grandma's house, so we rode the bus. And I fell in love with public transit; we'd ride the bus to any one of 3-4 malls nearby, walk around to our heart's content, and ride the bus back home carrying our spoils for the day. It was always a treat to do this.
What I definitely noticed was that a lot of poor people rode the bus. What I didn't realize is that mostly, they didn't have anywhere else to go. It wasn't a matter of commuting to their jobs, but just hanging out for the day.
Here in Phoenix, most bus stations are in shopping malls, or they become de facto shopping centers, and the light rail corridor is basically a commerce incubator by the way stores and shopping centers are popping up now that the track is permanently laid down.
On the weekends it may be common to see working-class Hispanic moms take their children to church on the free buses, but the free buses are intended to get tourists and residents into the shopping areas and/or connect them to the full-fare routes so that they can really do some hardcore "shop 'til you drop" activity.
In fact, the public transit sectors that are designed for commuting are the Express buses, which have a higher base fare and serve 9-5 white-collar office workers. It's transparently upper-crust. None of those Express routes can possibly help poor people get to poor-people jobs. Express buses get people into the city center so they don't need cars there: attorneys, civil servants, accountants, clerks. That's the Express system only. The rest of transit: shopping, shopping and more shopping.
Some system wouldn't power up this morning. System is back in service now, with major delays in all directions.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/no-bart-trains-runnin...
Request: Make titles more accessible to global audience.
BART doesn't automatically mean anything unless you are familiar with the region.
I lived 7 years in the US and still took a while (even after opening the linked article -- given the website was a local media outlet, there were no immediate clues in the article which country/state/city it is referring to)
NYC MTA has an old mechanical system in place to prevent collisions. And they also have a new system in place to keep things safe. And the directors insisted both run side by side. This delayed so many projects for so many years. It took ten years to put in place train time estimation.
I guess today those same people feel a level of validation on what they insisted.
I don't know if years of delays is better than an outage of only a few hours.
Most people I know wouldn't take Bart if it was free. Dirty, noisy, and unsafe. I can't imagine anything can be done to make Americans take trains at scale unless atleast the unsafe part is handled, and then the dirty part atleast.
137 comments as I write this and not a single one says "spanning tree loop".
Due to human failure when operating computer systems*
Right now I am a subcontractor on a project to replace the Liebert unit in the server room that runs my metro area’s transit system, my worst nightmare is my tech calling and telling me the servers are down, glad this isn’t me!!
Their HQ lost power yesterday, maybe related?
Did they finally run out of old new stock 5.25-inch floppy disks?
it's always DNS
I would like to find the person who started this stupid meme and shake them by the neck.
The majority of times it's SSL.
I took a trip to Europe last month and watching America fail at all manners of transportation is embarrassing
Ok, but please don't post flamebait, including nationalistic flamebait, to HN threads. It just leads to flamewar hell.
Trust me it’s embarrassing for a lot of us that have traveled to countries with decent rail travel. Part of it is the shamelessness of the car industry for lobbying for decades to shackle everyone to a car. Now the car is an engrained part of American culture and makes our cities much more ugly, isolating, loud, and dangerous than they need be.
You must not travel very often then. European public transit is extremely unreliable due to strikes. I, as a tourist, have been screwed over countless times having to pay $150 to take an Uber to an airport that is nowhere near the city it's meant to service. It's so unreliable that in some cities the brand new trains have displays that show which lines are currently having strikes. Now that's embarrassing.
Hey, at least we're ahead in self-driving cars!
But yes, public transit in the states is rather pathetic.
[flagged]
That's not exactly common. You might say it's very very rare. Probably as rare as in US.
Now this could make a great anime episode.
