10 ms·

"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

"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.
    - andbberger 4y ago
      like i said, they do what they can with the cards that they were dealt. the initial design of the system was flawed in many ways, one of them being the cylindrical wheel profile
    - Animats 4y ago
      More technical article on BART wheel geometry.[1] The old wheels were cylindrical but the rails were tapered to provide self-centering. This works well for straight track and large radius-curves. The trouble with conical wheels is that too much self-centering can induce sideways oscillation at high speeds. BART was designed for 80MPH, a high speed for the time and still fast for a transit system. BART was also the first rail system to have active suspension. Rail geometry, wheel geometry, and suspension all interact. High speed rail wheel and track profiles are a complicated problem. The Shinkansen system in Japan did a lot of work on this, as did the TGV developers in France. It took a while to get wheels, rails, and suspension to all work together well enough for high speeds. Now this is reasonably well understood, but it wasn't when BART was designed. [1] https://www.wheel-rail-seminars.com/archives/2016/rt-papers/RT%2006%20WRI%202016%20BART%20Final.pdf https://www.wheel-rail-seminars.com/archives/2016/rt-papers/...
      - inferiorhuman 4y ago
        Now this is reasonably well understood, but it wasn't when BART was designed Claiming that BART was ground breaking and could've never predicted the consequences of their design choices is quite revisionist. They got called out for their dangerous train control almost immediately. 80 MPH is not and was not high speed. Amtrak trainsets were cable of over 100 MPH back in the mid-70s. BART just reinvented everything poorly (that's their MO). Anyways here's a technical piece about BART wheels: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/noisereport.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/noisereport.pd... With trued wheels and smooth ground rail on ballast and ties, BART is one of the quietest vehicles. in operation at U.S. transit systems. Problem is BART is exceptionally hard on their track. Even with conical wheels you can feel the new trains bounce up and down on wildly out of round wheels. You can feel the rumbling on the decrepit track between Lake Merritt and 19th St. Normal railways often lubricate their tracks, but BART can't. Normal railways increase the track gauge slightly in curves (because most train cars don't use differentials), BART pretty much doesn't. This was my favorite bit: Of these two types of curving noise, wheel squeal is the more prevalent, while wheel howl may be limited to lightly damped aluminum centered wheels such as used at BART. In fact, wheel howl may be unique to BART, because BART is the only transit system employing rigid aluminum centered wheels. Whoops.
- 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.

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.
  - andbberger 4y ago
    like i said, they do what they can with the cards that they were dealt. the initial design of the system was flawed in many ways, one of them being the cylindrical wheel profile
  - Animats 4y ago
    More technical article on BART wheel geometry.[1] The old wheels were cylindrical but the rails were tapered to provide self-centering. This works well for straight track and large radius-curves. The trouble with conical wheels is that too much self-centering can induce sideways oscillation at high speeds. BART was designed for 80MPH, a high speed for the time and still fast for a transit system. BART was also the first rail system to have active suspension. Rail geometry, wheel geometry, and suspension all interact. High speed rail wheel and track profiles are a complicated problem. The Shinkansen system in Japan did a lot of work on this, as did the TGV developers in France. It took a while to get wheels, rails, and suspension to all work together well enough for high speeds. Now this is reasonably well understood, but it wasn't when BART was designed. [1] https://www.wheel-rail-seminars.com/archives/2016/rt-papers/RT%2006%20WRI%202016%20BART%20Final.pdf https://www.wheel-rail-seminars.com/archives/2016/rt-papers/...
    - inferiorhuman 4y ago
      Now this is reasonably well understood, but it wasn't when BART was designed Claiming that BART was ground breaking and could've never predicted the consequences of their design choices is quite revisionist. They got called out for their dangerous train control almost immediately. 80 MPH is not and was not high speed. Amtrak trainsets were cable of over 100 MPH back in the mid-70s. BART just reinvented everything poorly (that's their MO). Anyways here's a technical piece about BART wheels: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/noisereport.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/noisereport.pd... With trued wheels and smooth ground rail on ballast and ties, BART is one of the quietest vehicles. in operation at U.S. transit systems. Problem is BART is exceptionally hard on their track. Even with conical wheels you can feel the new trains bounce up and down on wildly out of round wheels. You can feel the rumbling on the decrepit track between Lake Merritt and 19th St. Normal railways often lubricate their tracks, but BART can't. Normal railways increase the track gauge slightly in curves (because most train cars don't use differentials), BART pretty much doesn't. This was my favorite bit: Of these two types of curving noise, wheel squeal is the more prevalent, while wheel howl may be limited to lightly damped aluminum centered wheels such as used at BART. In fact, wheel howl may be unique to BART, because BART is the only transit system employing rigid aluminum centered wheels. Whoops.
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.