11 ms·

BART is pretty unreliable in part due to maintenance problems, but also due to system design. For example two days ago there was a horrific final-destination-e

BART is pretty unreliable in part due to maintenance problems, but also due to system design. For example two days ago there was a horrific final-destination-esque crash in which a motorcyclist happened to be in front of the train. https://twitter.com/sfbart/status/1570997016347680768 https://twitter.com/sfbart/status/1570997016347680768 This crash caused the entire system to be disrupted for hours, even very far away from the crash. According to BART, "We don’t have extra tracks to maneuver around problems. That’s why our system comes to a halt from one incident."

lostdog 4y ago
"We shared the info [of an early report of someone being on the tracks] and some took to twitter declaring that the person was a junkie on our tracks and it is BART's fault. We hope you have all since deleted your tweets." I am looking forward to the future of aggressive-aggressive tweeting from public transit agencies. I've also always wondered if there was any way to help BART, sort of in a USDS style, or if the problems really are paltry budgets and mismanagement, and so joining in an engineering capacity wouldn't help at all.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  My POV is that it's mostly corruption. They have plenty of money but are set up in service of the employee unions and bosses, not the riders or cities they service. Bart employees make obscene salaries and the system is very protective of their monopoly.
  - andbberger 4y ago
    believe it or not, BART is actually competent and does what they can with the cards they have been dealt. name another US transit agency implementing a takt
    - GauntletWizard 4y ago
      BART discovered conical instead of cylindrical wheels in 2018[1]. This is dawn-of-railroad technology. You can accuse BART of many things, but competency is not one of them. [1] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180606 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180606 Edit: Clarified what the issue was.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        > BART discovered cylindrical wheels in 2018 ?? This is a 2018 piece describing how they moved from cylindrical wheels to an advanced wheel profile. I don't think they're claiming the new, non-cylindrical profile is particularly advanced, either, but just carefully optimized to maintain a single point of contact even as the wheel wears.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - adolph 4y ago
        That doesn’t seem to be a charitable reading and in any case it has to do with wheel taper, more like cone than cylinder. More specifically the nature of the solution was getting two parts of the org, track and train, to work together. While that may seem elementary stuff, anyone at a big org can attest to how often it is tremendously difficult to do sometimes. I write this not as an apologist for commuter rail, which I find excessively expensive and inflexible outside of very circumstances, but as an excuse to link to the lovely Feynman description of why train wheels are tapered: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE
        gooseyman 4y ago
        I used to joke when the Subway wheels squealed “yeah that’s how the engineers designed that” Turns out, it was.
      - jjulius 4y ago
        >BART discovered cylindrical wheels in 2018. ... uhh, your own link says otherwise, emphasis mine... >To answer the question, the original BART wheel profile, you can consider it like a cylindrical section of pipe. While the new profile is tapered, like a curved barrel, if you could imagine that the cylinder shape pipe rolling down a slight incline it really just wants to go straight. It doesn’t want to turn to the left, it doesn’t want to turn to the right, it just wants to go straight. That’s what our original BART wheel is like. Whenever it would come to a turn the wheel flange is what makes that wheel turn and go around the curve and that results in a lot of extra wear. The new wheel shape that we call the BT-3 Wheel Profile tends to want to self-center between the rails and it even steers in the turns so the result is much less wear and noticeably less noise.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Every major public transit system in the world has employee unions and most of those systems are a lot nicer than BART. The problem is that the United States is not good at building this sort of transit, and it's going to suck no matter how much money we spend and how much we pay the employees because the systems are not well designed or maintained.
    - landemva 4y ago
      In my limited experience with transit districts, they don't recruit high performers. It's a hang-out type of career, and they hire people like them. As far as mechanics keeping older machines running, what is described in the article is typical. It is old and is being replaced. Giving mechanics MS Win 11 to download log files via a recent OS doesn't improve the outcome.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      In most countries the union is reasonable to work with. For that matter in most counties management is reasonable to work with. In the us neither cares for anything but making themselves better at their expense of anything else.
    - parkingrift 4y ago
      Feels pretty circular. It’s not the unions and it’s not the money. It’s the design and maintenance! Okay, but why would that be uniquely bad in America? The MTA in NYC spends about $19 billion per year. It’s hard to fathom that amount of spend, and equally hard to imagine how residents get so little for so much. https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MTA-Top-100-2019.pdf https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MTA-... A lot of people earning significantly over $200k. I’m sure all those OT hours are legit and necessary and not at all an obvious sign of corruption.
  - sgarland 4y ago
    None of these salaries[0] seem obscene, especially given the CoL in the area. [0]: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Salary%20Schedule%20-%202022.0101.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Salary%20Sched...
    - mgraczyk 4y ago
      Bart station attendants make over 3x the median rider. They do nothing but sit in the booth. They don't sell tickets or monitor fare evasion, and they are infamously unhelpful at answering questions.
      - evil-olive 4y ago
        > Bart station attendants make over 3x the median rider. which job title specifically are you referring to? from the pay schedule linked above, the closest thing I see is Station Agent, with a pay range of $73-86k. and where are you getting the data on the median salary of a BART rider?
        mgraczyk 4y ago
        That's their base pay, but they make huge amounts of overtime depending on seniority. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=san-francisco-bay-area-rapid-transit-district&q=Station+agent+&y=2021 https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=san-fra... Many of them make over 150k, some over 220k BART claims says their median rider makes 50k, based on a survey they conducted in 2020. You can find various sources by searching "rider profile" or something like that.
        knowledge-clay 4y ago
        Sure, they can make 220k if they only take 4 days off in an entire year: https://abc7news.com/bart-news-building-a-better-bay-area-overtime-pay/5953726/ https://abc7news.com/bart-news-building-a-better-bay-area-ov...
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    I wouldn't call it "corruption" primarily, but BART is very much run to profit the union and its members. The union in turn gets it power by being able to paralyze the entire Bay Area with a strike. Last actual strike was in 2013: https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/18/bart-strike-throws-sf-commute-into-chaos.html https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/18/bart-strike-throws-sf-commut... Without this blackmail power over the region, BART'a costs would be considerably lower. Assuming 1/3 lower, we'd get 50% more BART for our money, and I think that would be much better than keeping a few thousand union members in nice lifestyles.
    - einpoklum 4y ago
      Oh yeah, the problem with BART is employee wages, look at all those millionaire stall clerks and attendants, they're what's holding back mass transit in the bay area - unlike in Europe, where public transit works so much better because there are no unions and no strikes anywhere... </sarcasm>
      - BurningFrog 4y ago
        American unions are quite different from European unions.
        pmyteh 4y ago
        More militant than Germany, way less militant than France. "Europe" isn't close to a monoculture for trades unions. Even the UK does public transport better than the US, and our union/management relations are very similar to yours.
        BurningFrog 4y ago
        In the US, unions have been outcompeted from almost all the private sector. They mostly remain in public sector monopolies, where they in some ways are stronger than politicians and management. I don't know of anywhere in Europe that's similar. It has little to do with "militancy" levels.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  I am looking forward to the future of aggressive-aggressive tweeting from public transit agencies. I'm not. Linton Johnson was plenty aggressive and aggressively stupid. He got shitcanned because it's a bad look.
_skel 4y ago
Caltrain also has limited ability to route around accidents, and in some cases has to run trains the "wrong way" on the other side of the tracks to get past certain areas. They also have no communication at all. Back when I had a Caltrain commute I would use Twitter to find out if there were accidents or delays, because the station signs were alway wrong and almost all of the stations are unstaffed. I would see posts on Twitter from people who were on a train that crashed into a car and the station signs would still say everything was on schedule.
- toast0 4y ago
  > They also have no communication at all. Their radios are (or were) unencrypted, and you can listen with the radio scanner apps.
- klinquist 4y ago
  Check out the twitter account / website I run. @bettercaltrain https://caltrain.live https://caltrain.live
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  Caltrain is basically an afterthought. Secondhand rolling stock, tracks shared with freight, and perpetually starved for funding. BART was a green field transit system. BART had every opportunity to design redundancy into the system and didn't. And yet Caltrain actually has dedicated passing tracks while BART doesn't.
chrisdhoover 4y ago
BART has grade crossings? Isn’t entirely underground or elevated? Caltrain has grade crossings along its entire length.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  No. BART tracks pass under the street at this point. This motorcyclist managed to fling himself over a prison-style fence while operating on a street with a posted 20 MPH limit.
Rebelgecko 4y ago
IIRC that's also why the hours of BART are so limited. They have to do all their maintenance when the train isn't running since they can't route around it
dehrmann 4y ago
> For example two days ago there was a horrific final-destination-esque crash in which a motorcyclist happened to be in front of the train. Isn't Bart entirely grade-separated? But yes, no ability to single-track is an issue. The non-standard rail gauge is also an ongoing issue. Everything has to be custom. Compare this to Caltrain. Several years ago, they wanted to add capacity. They bought off-the-shelf Bombardier cars from an agency in Socal. I'm not sure if they ever even painted them, but they could use them almost immediately.
- Anechoic 4y ago
  Isn't Bart entirely grade-separated? Yes, but portions run near/under/over/alongside/in the median of roadway traffic. If you read the tweet thread you can see that a driver on the road was ejected into the BART ROW and was hit by a train.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Bart is running India broad guage. While it's isn't a common standard, most off the shelf trains can be ordered with that wheel width. Though they might be stuck with made in America rules that limit their ability to order trains to fit.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  > But yes, no ability to single-track is an issue. Though it's not an absolute panacea, either. The Washington subway has crossovers every two to three stations and is set up for bi-directional operation on one track, and the two things I immediately noticed when I visited Washington eight or so years ago were: - service levels on weekends were already only meh even without construction works - there were construction works on a very small segment of the Red Line between two of those aforementioned crossovers – those works only required closing one track, so they decided to continue running a service on the remaining track. Unfortunately single-tracking severely limits the number of trains you can run, so that tiny closure meant that on that weekend the whole length of the Red Line (all 32 miles of it!) was only operating every 20 minutes or so (originally I had considered an accommodation along the Red Line, luckily I had reconsidered and chosen a different place to stay even before learning about those construction works). After some googling, it seemed that this (i.e. construction works on a tiny stretch of track significantly affecting the service of the whole line even during the daytime, at least at weekends) was not an uncommon occurrence in Washington. While single-tracking might be no problem late at night (when a reduced frequency doesn't matter that much, and might not be even all that much reduced as compared to normal service levels at that time of the day), or during unplanned short-term disruptions, for that kind of scheduled-in-advance all-day construction works I'd say it's at least debatable whether a complete closure of the affected stretch of track (with a bus replacement service) and a full service on the whole rest of the line might not be a better compromise…

lostdog 4y ago

"We shared the info [of an early report of someone being on the tracks] and some took to twitter declaring that the person was a junkie on our tracks and it is BART's fault. We hope you have all since deleted your tweets." I am looking forward to the future of aggressive-aggressive tweeting from public transit agencies. I've also always wondered if there was any way to help BART, sort of in a USDS style, or if the problems really are paltry budgets and mismanagement, and so joining in an engineering capacity wouldn't help at all.

mgraczyk 4y ago
My POV is that it's mostly corruption. They have plenty of money but are set up in service of the employee unions and bosses, not the riders or cities they service. Bart employees make obscene salaries and the system is very protective of their monopoly.
- andbberger 4y ago
  believe it or not, BART is actually competent and does what they can with the cards they have been dealt. name another US transit agency implementing a takt
  - GauntletWizard 4y ago
    BART discovered conical instead of cylindrical wheels in 2018[1]. This is dawn-of-railroad technology. You can accuse BART of many things, but competency is not one of them. [1] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180606 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2018/news20180606 Edit: Clarified what the issue was.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > BART discovered cylindrical wheels in 2018 ?? This is a 2018 piece describing how they moved from cylindrical wheels to an advanced wheel profile. I don't think they're claiming the new, non-cylindrical profile is particularly advanced, either, but just carefully optimized to maintain a single point of contact even as the wheel wears.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - adolph 4y ago
      That doesn’t seem to be a charitable reading and in any case it has to do with wheel taper, more like cone than cylinder. More specifically the nature of the solution was getting two parts of the org, track and train, to work together. While that may seem elementary stuff, anyone at a big org can attest to how often it is tremendously difficult to do sometimes. I write this not as an apologist for commuter rail, which I find excessively expensive and inflexible outside of very circumstances, but as an excuse to link to the lovely Feynman description of why train wheels are tapered: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE
      - gooseyman 4y ago
        I used to joke when the Subway wheels squealed “yeah that’s how the engineers designed that” Turns out, it was.
    - jjulius 4y ago
      >BART discovered cylindrical wheels in 2018. ... uhh, your own link says otherwise, emphasis mine... >To answer the question, the original BART wheel profile, you can consider it like a cylindrical section of pipe. While the new profile is tapered, like a curved barrel, if you could imagine that the cylinder shape pipe rolling down a slight incline it really just wants to go straight. It doesn’t want to turn to the left, it doesn’t want to turn to the right, it just wants to go straight. That’s what our original BART wheel is like. Whenever it would come to a turn the wheel flange is what makes that wheel turn and go around the curve and that results in a lot of extra wear. The new wheel shape that we call the BT-3 Wheel Profile tends to want to self-center between the rails and it even steers in the turns so the result is much less wear and noticeably less noise.
- twblalock 4y ago
  Every major public transit system in the world has employee unions and most of those systems are a lot nicer than BART. The problem is that the United States is not good at building this sort of transit, and it's going to suck no matter how much money we spend and how much we pay the employees because the systems are not well designed or maintained.
  - landemva 4y ago
    In my limited experience with transit districts, they don't recruit high performers. It's a hang-out type of career, and they hire people like them. As far as mechanics keeping older machines running, what is described in the article is typical. It is old and is being replaced. Giving mechanics MS Win 11 to download log files via a recent OS doesn't improve the outcome.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    In most countries the union is reasonable to work with. For that matter in most counties management is reasonable to work with. In the us neither cares for anything but making themselves better at their expense of anything else.
  - parkingrift 4y ago
    Feels pretty circular. It’s not the unions and it’s not the money. It’s the design and maintenance! Okay, but why would that be uniquely bad in America? The MTA in NYC spends about $19 billion per year. It’s hard to fathom that amount of spend, and equally hard to imagine how residents get so little for so much. https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MTA-Top-100-2019.pdf https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MTA-... A lot of people earning significantly over $200k. I’m sure all those OT hours are legit and necessary and not at all an obvious sign of corruption.
- sgarland 4y ago
  None of these salaries[0] seem obscene, especially given the CoL in the area. [0]: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Salary%20Schedule%20-%202022.0101.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Salary%20Sched...
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    Bart station attendants make over 3x the median rider. They do nothing but sit in the booth. They don't sell tickets or monitor fare evasion, and they are infamously unhelpful at answering questions.
    - evil-olive 4y ago
      > Bart station attendants make over 3x the median rider. which job title specifically are you referring to? from the pay schedule linked above, the closest thing I see is Station Agent, with a pay range of $73-86k. and where are you getting the data on the median salary of a BART rider?
      - mgraczyk 4y ago
        That's their base pay, but they make huge amounts of overtime depending on seniority. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=san-francisco-bay-area-rapid-transit-district&q=Station+agent+&y=2021 https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=san-fra... Many of them make over 150k, some over 220k BART claims says their median rider makes 50k, based on a survey they conducted in 2020. You can find various sources by searching "rider profile" or something like that.
        knowledge-clay 4y ago
        Sure, they can make 220k if they only take 4 days off in an entire year: https://abc7news.com/bart-news-building-a-better-bay-area-overtime-pay/5953726/ https://abc7news.com/bart-news-building-a-better-bay-area-ov...
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  I wouldn't call it "corruption" primarily, but BART is very much run to profit the union and its members. The union in turn gets it power by being able to paralyze the entire Bay Area with a strike. Last actual strike was in 2013: https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/18/bart-strike-throws-sf-commute-into-chaos.html https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/18/bart-strike-throws-sf-commut... Without this blackmail power over the region, BART'a costs would be considerably lower. Assuming 1/3 lower, we'd get 50% more BART for our money, and I think that would be much better than keeping a few thousand union members in nice lifestyles.
  - einpoklum 4y ago
    Oh yeah, the problem with BART is employee wages, look at all those millionaire stall clerks and attendants, they're what's holding back mass transit in the bay area - unlike in Europe, where public transit works so much better because there are no unions and no strikes anywhere... </sarcasm>
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      American unions are quite different from European unions.
      - pmyteh 4y ago
        More militant than Germany, way less militant than France. "Europe" isn't close to a monoculture for trades unions. Even the UK does public transport better than the US, and our union/management relations are very similar to yours.
        BurningFrog 4y ago
        In the US, unions have been outcompeted from almost all the private sector. They mostly remain in public sector monopolies, where they in some ways are stronger than politicians and management. I don't know of anywhere in Europe that's similar. It has little to do with "militancy" levels.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
inferiorhuman 4y ago
I am looking forward to the future of aggressive-aggressive tweeting from public transit agencies. I'm not. Linton Johnson was plenty aggressive and aggressively stupid. He got shitcanned because it's a bad look.

_skel 4y ago

Caltrain also has limited ability to route around accidents, and in some cases has to run trains the "wrong way" on the other side of the tracks to get past certain areas. They also have no communication at all. Back when I had a Caltrain commute I would use Twitter to find out if there were accidents or delays, because the station signs were alway wrong and almost all of the stations are unstaffed. I would see posts on Twitter from people who were on a train that crashed into a car and the station signs would still say everything was on schedule.

toast0 4y ago
> They also have no communication at all. Their radios are (or were) unencrypted, and you can listen with the radio scanner apps.
klinquist 4y ago
Check out the twitter account / website I run. @bettercaltrain https://caltrain.live https://caltrain.live
inferiorhuman 4y ago
Caltrain is basically an afterthought. Secondhand rolling stock, tracks shared with freight, and perpetually starved for funding. BART was a green field transit system. BART had every opportunity to design redundancy into the system and didn't. And yet Caltrain actually has dedicated passing tracks while BART doesn't.

chrisdhoover 4y ago

BART has grade crossings? Isn’t entirely underground or elevated? Caltrain has grade crossings along its entire length.

jeffbee 4y ago
No. BART tracks pass under the street at this point. This motorcyclist managed to fling himself over a prison-style fence while operating on a street with a posted 20 MPH limit.

Rebelgecko 4y ago

IIRC that's also why the hours of BART are so limited. They have to do all their maintenance when the train isn't running since they can't route around it

dehrmann 4y ago

> For example two days ago there was a horrific final-destination-esque crash in which a motorcyclist happened to be in front of the train. Isn't Bart entirely grade-separated? But yes, no ability to single-track is an issue. The non-standard rail gauge is also an ongoing issue. Everything has to be custom. Compare this to Caltrain. Several years ago, they wanted to add capacity. They bought off-the-shelf Bombardier cars from an agency in Socal. I'm not sure if they ever even painted them, but they could use them almost immediately.

Anechoic 4y ago
Isn't Bart entirely grade-separated? Yes, but portions run near/under/over/alongside/in the median of roadway traffic. If you read the tweet thread you can see that a driver on the road was ejected into the BART ROW and was hit by a train.
bluGill 4y ago
Bart is running India broad guage. While it's isn't a common standard, most off the shelf trains can be ordered with that wheel width. Though they might be stuck with made in America rules that limit their ability to order trains to fit.
iggldiggl 4y ago
> But yes, no ability to single-track is an issue. Though it's not an absolute panacea, either. The Washington subway has crossovers every two to three stations and is set up for bi-directional operation on one track, and the two things I immediately noticed when I visited Washington eight or so years ago were: - service levels on weekends were already only meh even without construction works - there were construction works on a very small segment of the Red Line between two of those aforementioned crossovers – those works only required closing one track, so they decided to continue running a service on the remaining track. Unfortunately single-tracking severely limits the number of trains you can run, so that tiny closure meant that on that weekend the whole length of the Red Line (all 32 miles of it!) was only operating every 20 minutes or so (originally I had considered an accommodation along the Red Line, luckily I had reconsidered and chosen a different place to stay even before learning about those construction works). After some googling, it seemed that this (i.e. construction works on a tiny stretch of track significantly affecting the service of the whole line even during the daytime, at least at weekends) was not an uncommon occurrence in Washington. While single-tracking might be no problem late at night (when a reduced frequency doesn't matter that much, and might not be even all that much reduced as compared to normal service levels at that time of the day), or during unplanned short-term disruptions, for that kind of scheduled-in-advance all-day construction works I'd say it's at least debatable whether a complete closure of the affected stretch of track (with a bus replacement service) and a full service on the whole rest of the line might not be a better compromise…