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I mean despite it's history the snark is well deserved. With so many companies and people in the bay paying taxes, where the hell does all the money go? Intere
by ninetyninenine 1y ago
I mean despite it's history the snark is well deserved. With so many companies and people in the bay paying taxes, where the hell does all the money go?
Interesting, tidbit you added here. But snark is needed for this situation.
- tomhow 1y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140823 and marked it off topic.
- octernion 1y agoyour tax money broadly speaking doesn't go to BART; it's massively underfunded. not sure why they are the target of the snark.
- nradov 1y agoUnder funded relative to what? What would the optimal amount of funding be? Are there ways that BART could cut costs to free up budget for IT upgrades? I'm not trying to be snarky, it's just that for regular citizens who don't have time to attend BART BoD and committee meetings it's almost impossible to tell whether existing money is being wisely spent. So people get the impression that taxes are going up while service quality declines and assume the money must be going into someone's pocket.
- lokar 1y agoIn nearly all of the US there is an unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) debate about to what extent public transit should get a subsidy vs pay for itself. The dominant position (even in CA) has been no or little subsidy.
- aafanah 1y agoThe bigger issue is not just the upgrade but how brittle the system is. Modern practices like rolling releases or safe fallback modes are standard elsewhere. Critical infrastructure should not be this fragile.
- lokar 1y agoI would assume the IT side is just as underfunded as the rest of the system, probably more (they will prioritize safety and rolling stock)
- flerchin 1y agoIn no way does BART pay for itself. 22% of their operating costs are covered by fares. Public transit is an amenity paid for by taxes. Private transport also has its own subsidy, but it's not even close. https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/BART_FY24%20PAFR_final.pdf https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/BART_FY24%2...
- roboror 1y agoBut if single-occupancy vehicles don't cover the costs of the infrastructure they use, the ridership moving from public to private may incur even higher costs.
- bell-cot 1y ago> Private transport also has its own subsidy, but it's not even close. So - what % of Cali's road construction & maintenance is paid for by gas taxes?
- flerchin 1y agoThat's difficult to untangle due to multiple agencies. Local, State, and Federal. However, the answer is the overwhelming majority of road construction and maintenance is paid for by gas taxes, car registration, and tolls.
- wbl 1y agoThe highway fund gets a massive amount of money from the general budget every year federally.
- ggreer 1y agoIf I'm reading this report correctly[1], California's car registration fees and gas taxes cover more than the cost of roads. Caltrans estimates $20.2 billion in revenue from fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, while their budget is $18.7 billion. It also looks like public transportation is mostly paid for with sales taxes, federal loans/grants, and $1 billion of taxes on diesel fuel. 1. See chart A on page 24, and chart F on page 28: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/budgets/documents/financial-package-summary-202526-signedadaa11y.pdf https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/budgets/docume...
- kelnos 1y agoAnd this is the problem. If you "don't have time" to be civically engaged, then you're woefully uninformed, and you shouldn't complain about how your tax dollars are allocated, because you simply have no idea what you're complaining or arguing about.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoNo it’s not. Bart is just really bad, and don’t blame lack of civil engagement. We don’t have time for this shit. Plenty of countries have good public infrastructure without the need for everyone to be engaged. It’s like saying crime is a problem in this world because of your lack of engagement in stopping crime. Bitching on HN is one small form of engagement I can afford and I’m hoping at least one bart official sees it and realize what a shit job he’s doing or one government official sees it and realizes what a shit government official he is and changes something. Minuscule hope but why not. Instead we get random people who will only benefit from fixing the bart actually trying to defend it as if it’s their favorite sports team.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ninetyninenine 1y agoOh yeah? Why do the train operators get paid a quarter of a million dollars? How about massive misuse of funds ALONG with underfunding.
- SuperHeavy256 1y agosnark is not productive.
- semiquaver 1y agoWhat form of comment on an online forum _would be_ productive?
- mring33621 1y agoCat memes. But HN doesn't support image comments.
- nomel 1y agoWhy do you think HN is a place to engage in a productive (necessarily means resulting in something) discussion that would improve BART? Do you think this audience is in any way qualified to discuss the monetary or tech troubles of a uniparty government run service? Instead, we could have an interesting discussion, maybe even one involving technology, that nerds would enjoy! You don't have to be an activist wherever you go. In fact, it's almost alway inappropriate soap boxing/virtue signaling.
- jeffbee 1y agoIt certainly doesn't go to Bay Area software companies. When BART originally began letting out the contract to redesign the then-already-obsolete control system in 1992, they awarded it the Hughes Aircraft. That project failed. The current attempt to deploy CBTC was awarded to Hitachi. The supplier of their fare gate system integration was originally IBM and is now CUBIC, a San Diego defense contractor. If anything the Bay Area has utterly failed to provide systems software of lasting value to address public needs like these.
- lokar 1y agoThose types of contracts have much worse margins then Bay Area tech companies expect (or aspire to)
- inferiorhuman 1y agoLikewise neither Rohr nor Westinghouse are Bay Area based.
- buckle8017 1y agoA significant amount of BARTs budget goes to inflated salaries for operators and ticketing staff. They have very little money left for paying engineering and construction staff.
- lazyasciiart 1y agoInflated compared to what? Software engineer salaries in the BART region?
- mdorazio 1y agoDo you think train operators should make a quarter million a year to drive the same train on the same route every day? https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=train+operator&y= https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=train+o...
- __loam 1y agoYeah. It's an actually useful job compared to writing surveillance advertising software.
- JudasGoat 1y agoThe "train operators" cited were averaging around $80k for a 40 hour week. That comes to an hourly pay of around $38, when not working overtime. I don't see that as crazy high pay for a place like SF.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoThe total pay is quarter of a million. 80k + "other pay" whatever the fuck "other pay" is.
- dehrmann 1y agoWhat's "other pay?"
- IshKebab 1y agoYeah I was pretty blown away when I visited San Francisco just how archaic it was. In the same place you have driverless cars you have a metro payment system from like 70s USSR or something.
- jeffbee 1y agoThe mag stripe 1960s technology worked much better than the new one, I'm sorry to report.
- kelnos 1y agoI'm sorry to report that you're looking at that tech through rose-tinted glasses. I remember electronic systems that would routinely fail to properly scan the mag stripes. I remember all the people working retail who had special tricks to try to get a card to scan, which would help maybe 25% of the time. I remember cards becoming demagnetized for random reasons and becoming useless. I remember when merchants would have to take a physical carbon imprint of the card, and would have no idea if the card was even real until the paper was processed, days or weeks later.
- jeffbee 1y agoWe are talking specifically about the BART fare gates, which worked perfectly for 50 years.
- xattt 1y agoSo tokens and kopeks? Because there were no mag stripe systems in 1970s. > https://www.ebay.ca/itm/174311087766 https://www.ebay.ca/itm/174311087766
- saghm 1y agoI remember when I was in college in the early 2010s finding it amusing that SEPTA still used tokens in Philadelphia. On a whim I looked it up, and apparently they did finally stop using them, but only in 2024.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoIt's hard to think of a single situation that's ever been improved by snark. Or passive aggressiveness in general.
- mistrial9 1y agoit is a vent. potentially you could say that snark is the lesser path, it's virtue is it's banality
- ants_everywhere 1y agoRight, but venting is for a long time understood to be bad. In the same way punching your pillow or the wall is bad when you're angry. Venting is different from expressing your negative emotions healthily. E.g. telling your significant other you are frustrated because of a problem at work is healthy. Venting about the problem, complaining, being sarcastic etc is known to reinforce anger and generally lead to unhealthy outcomes.
- __loam 1y agoUsually the snarky guys have precious little useful to say in the service of having any understanding of civics or its processes.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoIt causes shame, and shame paves the way for change. I'm a bay area native, and I'm fucking ashamed of the pathetic excuse of public transportation called the bart. Absolute travesty. Think in terms of evolution. If snark didn't convey any survival benefit, why tf does it exist?
- nomel 1y agoSeems like voting for someone else is the correct answer. If the uniparty that exists there today was in an away threatened, they might be motivated to competence. Complaining on HN won't motivate them. The snark is meant to be heard not just said to a void.