https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220708-2

The larger engineering lesson from that is you're probably better off making standard solutions work for your situation than custom solutions. The wider gauge solved(?) the stability problem, but at the cost of always needing custom rolling stock, but more importantly, making Bart build-out significantly more expensive and unable to take advantage of existing track. That hurts the viability of the Bart ecosystem.

Serious train nerd, here!

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Pre-opening BART tubes were definitely used for George Lucas's first feature film, THX-1138: https://www.sfgate.com/streaming/article/bart-transbay-tube-...

A Streets of San Francisco episode, starting a very young Michael Douglas, was set in the BART tunnels, still under construction, as well.

Just came back from a vacation in Japan, and completely agree - even compared to the (much better than SF) danish public transport system the Japanese are orders of a magnitude better on so many levels!

Nu then - having 37 mio people just in one city, Tokyo, does require you to get the logistics in order (all of Denmark is just around 6 mio…)

They should fly everyone who works at BART to a conference in Tokyo for a week and make them ride the subways until the shame sets in.

When they return to their hotel rooms at the end of the week they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.

One way to look at this is that the Bay Area focuses on transportation technology that works and scales regardless of the rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible.

And the Bay Area, largely, eats its own dogfood.

There is no faster, more powerful public transportation system than a city that allows Uber to offer mototaxi service. Uber was allowed to turned that on in Rio at some point in the last couple years and it puts busses and subways to shame. The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero.

> The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues

Well and population / population density.

China is similar - the big 15-20m+ metros have crazy good subway systems. But SF bay area is half the low end? 7.5m or so? Harbin is 10m and its subway is kinda meh. Down at 5m metro population in e.g. Changchun or Jinan and it's a pretty piddling subway/city rail system.

That's a depressing take.

First off, you're not too busy to find it. Because you're probably not used to doing it. All you have to do is to tell your favorite map app where you want to go, then switch to the public transit tab. You should try it.

Right now if I look at routes from Newark to OAK or SFO, it shows around 40 minutes by car and 1:40 hour by public transportation. If I had a plane to catch in 2 hours, I'd never take the bus. Here's why.

About 40 minutes of that 1:40 involves walking to the nearest bus stop. You could take an Uber instead and cut it down to 10 minutes. But that's problem A, public transportation doesn't have enough coverage.

There are 2 bus changes involved. The first one, Newark to Union City or Palo Alto, depending on whether you're going to OAK or SFO, runs every 30 minutes. That's problem B, the routes are not frequent enough.

The last bus change, very close to OAK/SFO, are design flaw- problem C. You really should be able to get off BART and take a short walk or shuttle to terminal. Instead, it's another bus ride that'll take 40 minutes.

From a regular commuter's pov, problems A/B/C are the issues that'll discourage someone from taking public transportation. Like other comments mentioned, it's not really a resource, infra or tech issue. It's a social/political issue that's preventing public transportation from expanding, both in coverage, frequency and in terms of connecting big population centers where it matters. All the issues that you mentioned, like stopping million times, guarantee of arriving on time, bicycles, and even safety and cleanliness, will go away if you solve the problems I mentioned- speaking from my experience taking public transportation for 30+ years in the US and abroad.

I've been to Chicago once but yet to visit New York, and yes public transportation was very much accessible in Chicago as well.

Not to jump on your comment (since there have been quite a few other replies already) but just to add another personal anecdote: having been on the more senior end of a junior merge/deploy gone wrong and losing a Friday night or a weekend ping, I'm okay with an additional empty day throughout the week.

I've found that little things like that breed a growing resentment and stress that compounds, until someone wants to leave the company. Thursday night outage that I have to hop on? Much smaller deal than a weekend where I have established plans.

One can argue "why was the PR approved in the first place", but sometimes people make mistakes. It especially sucks when there are limited people that know how to troubleshoot and resolve the production issues with a system, even more so when the on-call individual may have not even reviewed the code initially.

All that said - I'd love to deploy as normal on Fridays! I've just found that the type of businesses I've worked at can wait until Monday, and that makes our weekends less risky.

It is not about fear, it is about risk management.

As an engineer I have absolutely no issue deploying on a friday. But friday bar starts at 4pm, and after that I am not sober before monday.

So leadership don't want me to do it - which is probably wise.

I enforce a work/life balance and this is how the team loses a weekend when something goes wrong.

I understand the article's emphasis on exercising good judgment around release timing, but read-only Fridays are not there for the people who generally exercise good judgment. If you are the sort of person/team that is likely to deploy late on a Friday afternoon despite the inherent risk, you are likely the kind of person/team who underestimates or ignores risks in general. This includes the risk of a given deployment, thus exacerbating the impact of your late-Friday deployments. It is therefore sensible to simply take the decision out of your hands.

I hate how people hear "read only friday" and decide to turn it into a CI/CD dick measuring contest.

For "read only friday" to have been a novel idea in the first place, you needed a starting point where conventional practice already was making changes live without stopping to consider the time/day of week.

I really suspect the detractors represent a workflow that would break (or at least introduce pain) if unable to push to production for a few days. So they have to give the hard sell on the benefits of continuous deployment.

Perhaps. But what's the risk-reward? No matter how good your CI/CD is, the risk is nonzero. Do I really need to ship this today and potentially open a can of worms this afternoon?

this is just mindless blogospam/clickbait/"buy my thing" - the author even admits shipping big changes on friday is a bad idea

This reads like someone who works on a small and simple system.

"Deploy on every commit" lmao

"Shipping software and running tests should be fast. Super fast. Minutes, tops." hahah

To counter the counterpoint. Even if you are better at pushing to production than 90% of the rest of your industry it is still elevated risk and stress so you should avoid it for the sake of your employees. Productivity vs life. If your counterpoint is to claim that you are just as stable pushing to production as you are when you don't, then I would just suggest you're delusional or lying.

This post is weird to me, because it sorta feels like it's attacking a straw man.

The idea the author seems to be advocating for is is that, while maybe you sometimes/often shouldn't deploy on a Friday (or even not at the very end of any workday), there should never be a stated policy in place that freezes deployments.

And yeah, I've been at places where they have freezes on weekends, holidays, right around the company's conference, etc. But they're never 100% freezes: if something goes wrong or is necessary, you just get a manager to approve it, and off you go.

I think the author's exhortation that developers should all be able to exercise their judgment to make these calls is a nice idea in theory, but falls flat in practice. Every developer will not always have all the necessary context in order to exercise that judgment. Even those who do, and generally have good judgment, will screw up sometimes because they are tired or are working under some sort of time pressure, or something.

Having a policy -- with some flexibility and exceptions allowed -- makes it easier to avoid those sorts of lapses in judgment. And that's a good thing.

But the whole article is just all over the place to me. The author starts by implying that people should be "ashamed" about identifying with a no-Friday-deploy policy, but then softens to the point of saying it's fine to have a personal policy of no late-afternoon deploys, no shipping big changes right before the weekend, etc. But that somehow if that's instead company policy, that's a bad thing. Nope, I don't buy it.

You would not expect a ridership reduction to have any significant reduction in operating expenses. Full trains costs roughly the same as an empty trains.

> BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget

I would think increased ridership means increased efficiency.

That is mostly a zoning issue, have you seen the density around Tube stations? Compare that to the density around half of the BART stations which are big parking lots surrounded by single family houses. Of course it's cheaper to run a transit system in a city with twice the population density and population in the metro area.

Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data/

BART is one of the most cost efficient systems in the US: https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1d27dvo/us_cost_pe.... It's so efficient that pre-pandemic it got the majority of its funding through fares, not taxes.

By the way it costs exorbitant amounts to build highways too and you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you.

So quite frankly you don't know what you're talking about.

Do you have a sense of how much you're paying in taxes that is being mismanaged by BART? I think it's far less than you realize.

True, but it ignores the point of who various services are for. Wealthy professionals in the suburbs tend to vote against mass transit they don't plan on using.

Hey, the Boston T runs some of the time!

Jokes aside, I'd like to see a stack ranking of US public transit. I'd assume NYC and DC are top dogs, but I'm curious about other cities.

IMO, if LA can maintain its rate of progress from the last 10 years going forward, they will have a better system than SF before long.

It even has direct service from two metro lines to the airport.

Yeah this is basically the private market filling in for our lack of transit down south. Most every other major city doesn't have this, you just take the metro to work like a normal person.

didn't realize cage free pigs lead to such dramatic second order effects =)

Except, as always bureaucratic pay raises.

Interestingly enough, even with RTO, I’ve noticed that driving on a Friday morning is much smoother than Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. Despite the BART shutdown, it was smooth sailing southbound down 680 from Pleasanton to Milpitas. I normally commute from San Ramon to Fremont, and going through Pleasanton and Sunol on a midweek morning is rough.

I think there are many people in the Bay Area who start their weekend trips Friday afternoons and evenings.

It's people leaving home, for the weekend. Friday traffic extends along I-80 (and eventually Hwy 50) all the way to Nevada, and beyond.

Friday afternoon traffic is people leaving the Bay Area for weekend trips. The Bay Area is effectively completely surrounded by mountains so there are a very limited number routes out of the Bay Area relative to the number of people.

> Are there people that normally stay in the city during the week and only go home on Fridays causing more traffic?

In NYC people going out of the city for the weekend (Airbnb or their own house somewhere).

I think the problem with BART is that it is self hosted.

By "self hosted" I'm not referring to it being run directly by the government, but that in comparison to every other government-run transit system, everything at BART is done the BART way, limiting access to an entire industry of light rail infrastructure, reducing safety and reliability, while significantly increasing costs.

Isn't that kinda what people are doing when they commute in private cars?

Ironically, the Northstar rail line (one part boondoggle, one part "would have worked if it went all the way to st cloud", depending on who you ask) is shutting down Jan 3 or 4 in 2026, so I wouldn't be surprised to see articles on it and/or the met council before then.

BART specifically is also a kind of lighting rod of the political, social, economic fissure that runs through American culture; the difference in perspective of the adversarial camps, like different tribes.

It is a microcosm, a bit of a litmus test, and an ideological battlefield of the embattled sides. But this example specifically is also a kind of infighting, of the more anarcho-libertarian tech camp that enjoys highlighting and dripping with self-righteousness about any tech related failure of government, i.e., or at least government that does not align with their ideology or control over it.

This fault line of America runs right through things like BART like an effigy or idol that America performs a kind of ritual form of battle on as proxies for all out civil war. Think of tribes you may have seen videos of where they do all kinds of elaborate dances and blustering displays and fake charges to demonstrate their power.

The glee about this outage happening to BART is very much because the libertarian tech progressive types are amused and validated by it, where something more like rashes of violent attacks on BART riders by menaces to society might be something that the "heartland" may become gleeful about, as evidence for how the ideology of SF is messed up. In the cases of violent attacks on BART riders, another camp/tribe would come out and demonstrate their fierceness; the "socially liberal" types from all over the country and even world, would rush to the defense of their ideological idols with a bewildering storm of rationalization, delusion, and excuse making for violent attackers and in defense of their ideology/cult.

It's just elaborate war dances around an idol/ideology to demonstrate how fierce and powerful each party is. BART is just one of the idols in America around which these displays of simulated conflicts happen.

Train tracks are a form of centralization. Without the ability to reroute around disruptions (like cars and buses) a single stopped train (e.g. due to mechanical or passenger issues) can stop everything.

Socal says "The 101" because its a holdover from names like the Hollywood Freeway, before freeways were numbered. No idea why Norcal didn't do the same; you still hear "The Bayshore Freeway" or "The Nimitz Freeway" sometimes. My theory is the rest of the country picked up on what Socal does through media and assumed it's a California thing.

Trains traditionally operate on signalling blocks: a section between two signals is a block, a block is occupied if any part of a train is inside of it, if it's occupied any signals leading into the block are red. This can be decided entirely locally (as in: local to the block). When a wheel sensor detects a wheel entering the block, the block is occupied, signals switch to red and the number of wheels is counted. As soon as another wheel sensor counts an equal number of wheels exiting the block the block is free and signals switch to green. You need a wire along the block to communicate this, but from a safety perspective there is no need for global communication.

Modernization efforts focus on trains broadcasting position and speed so trains can travel closer together and still maintain a safe stopping distance, but that's again possible locally.

Operating switches is where it gets trickier. Some rail operators maintain the possibility to operate them locally, but that requires either stopping the train at each switch you want to change, or to deploy lots of people into the field to do it on schedule

>If you can't send updated schedules or emergency alerts through the system, I also don't want service started.

In the days before systems existed for publishing such schedules and emergency alerts, should public transit service not have been attempted at all?

> Trains by definition need to share the same tracks with catastrophic consequences for getting it wrong.

Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks. But if it did, I assume "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded when an emergency in the local system necessitates it.

I don't think it needs to be taken that literal. The train orchestrator can set signals on connected tracks and read out the block statuses without needing to also be able to reach HN and the wider internet. Local can be the track you're on, not merely driving on sight (but, yes, worst case you'd hope there's still procedures for that, too)

It would be cool IF. I said if. I also included busses which do operate autonomously from a safety perspective.

If air traffic control can fall back to pen and paper in a pinch, I think it would be cool IF trains had a decent fallback. ;-)

Sure pal, that's why the internet enabled the existence of buses and trains.

Why is a site that needs to be ADA2-compliant showing anything modal?

Apparently there was too much Rust on the Rails?

Not having redundant rails in case of breakdowns is something BART is well known for

If you've ever been in, on, or near bart you wouldn't be.

Maintaining roll backs is incredibly expensive for what you get.

North Korea? If you think it is a good example of a low bar of transit quality/safety to meet, then you’re comically far off.

SF doesn't run BART, though.

Not saying SF politics is great, but at least point to the correct boogeyman.

No. It is pretty typical for anything gov to be pretty bad. Most dont work there due to how bureaucratic it is rather than the comp. This is what my friends who work in gov say at least.

Those types of contracts have much worse margins then Bay Area tech companies expect (or aspire to)

Likewise neither Rohr nor Westinghouse are Bay Area based.

I don't know what your frame of reference is, but BART is above average for US public transit payment systems.

I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area CA, Portland OR, and Philadelphia PA over the last 10 years. All of those metros have comparable public transit payment systems with auto-loading special use cards and are at various stages of adopting support for tap to pay. Honestly, within the US I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted.

Internationally I think there is a larger range of experiences. I don't travel enough to properly gauge it, but I was in Paris in the last year and I don't think public transit payment was better. Still had to acquire specialized fare cards and navigate different payment systems between RATP and RER. Honestly, SF Bay comes out slightly ahead of Paris if only because Clipper is unified between various transit options (BART, Bus, Ferry, CalTrain) IMO.

How did you pay? I made a Clipper account that I fill up with my credit card and tap my phone to pay...

So tokens and kopeks? Because there were no mag stripe systems in 1970s.

> https://www.ebay.ca/itm/174311087766

Being built in 1960s-1970s it has proper ventilation. Unlike older systems, like in Boston, where you are forced to breathe in brake dust.

The mag stripe 1960s technology worked much better than the new one, I'm sorry to report.

The Moscow metro system is actually supposed to be pretty good.

I just use my phone to pay for BART?

I mean the answer is in the question--why are the self-driving cars (largely funded by billion-dollar private companies and VC) available in the same city as this anarchic public transit system (funded by largely by regional taxes and ridership fees)

Under 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.

Oh yeah? Why do the train operators get paid a quarter of a million dollars? How about massive misuse of funds ALONG with underfunding.

Inflated compared to what? Software engineer salaries in the BART region?

What form of comment on an online forum _would be_ productive?

Usually the snarky guys have precious little useful to say in the service of having any understanding of civics or its processes.

it is a vent. potentially you could say that snark is the lesser path, it's virtue is it's banality

It 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?

Makes sense :) Nothing is for everyone, all the time.

Addition of the last phrase had truly the worst impact; Drumpf meme was not well-timed/placed

Train rolling jokes aside, that makes sense... until it doesn't work.

A traffic control system, the thing that makes sure all trains are in known locations, safely spaced, etc.... might be necessarily centralized. There isn't really a "rolling release" you can do for a single system.

Should they have a separate test system for release before "production", sure. Do they? No idea. Is it identical to production? Clearly not. How does the saying go....

> Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough enough to have a totally separate environment to run production.

I feel like some BARTs moving and some stuck might be a bit of a worse problem.

I think the rolling stock may be stationary right now. Updates relying on stationery.

>The bart is basically the crowning achievement of US public transit.

Hardly. People in this country outside of the Northeast Corridor have absolutely no idea what public transit can actually be.

I prefer the public transit systems of NY, Chicago, and San Diego.

Maybe LA is even better now but I haven’t ridden it recently.

The hyperloop idea (which was just a presentation with no plans to build it) is an entirely different thing from the boring company tunnels

Is it even better than the LA subway anymore? (I haven’t been down since the improvements everyone says are so good)

Is it better than systems in New York, Boston, Chicago, or uh, even Philadelphia before recent septa cuts? Honest question, I haven’t been all those places, but BART seems… fine to me.

Just because the Hyperloop is a boondoggle doesn't mean public transit is bad.

but does it go to the airport at least?

BART isn't even the best light rail system in the SF Bay area, let alone the US in general.

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There isn't much different about bart. Slightly wider wheel spacing and such are things anyone making trains can handle.

the real problem is thinking they are different or that they need to innovate. Trains are common and they need not innovation but minor improvements over time.

> BART is unique and doesn't share much in the way of infrastructure with any other public transit system. You can't build a scalable startup targeting BART because you'd have a maximum of one customer.

The notion of a startup running BART is fucking horrifying.

I didn't read the comment criticizing VC's for not investing in BART or a company to make BART better, I read it as a criticism of the American system for letting things like VC's and other rich entities/people lock up unconscionable amounts of wealth for either hoarding or funding stupid shit as opposed to make sure our country still functions and people can eat.

And please just spare me the capitalist apologia. I get it, people wanna be rich. On balance I don't give a shit, get as rich as you can, just as long as it doesn't require millions of people to suffer so you can. If you having objectively, factually, more than anyone needs to be happy requires a ton of people to go without necessities, IMO, that is not a right you should have, and I don't care how communist that makes me.

You could take 90% of Bezos', Musk's, or Gates' wealth and they would still never have to work again and live in exceptional luxury. There is no goddamn reason in the world to let them keep it while we have people starving.

What on earth does it do that requires a mainframe?