Sooooo much snark, and so little interest into what BART actually runs on!
Originally, BART was a master stroke of digital integration in the 70's, and it's digital voices announcing the next trains were a thing of the future: An early accessibility feature before we even knew what those were, really.
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.
Yeah 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.
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.
> I don't know what your frame of reference is, but BART is above average for US public transit payment systems.
That doesn't change anything in the comment you're replying to. Just because it's above average for the USA, does not mean it isn't also ancient by global standards.
> 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.
Chicago is pretty good too. IIRC they also have tap-to-pay. In fact, I think they had it before NYC
It’s almost like all of the Bay Area tech companies are too busy working on Blockchain / shitcoins, MetaVerse, or hyper optimization of advertising…
Also worth throwing some blame at VCs who are chasing hype cycles instead of investing in boring companies that would actually improve quality of life for the people around them.
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 Boring Company has attempted to develop tunnel boring technology which theoretically could someday allow for cheaper expansion of all subway and light rail systems. Although in practice they haven't accomplished much and their existing projects aren't even used for rail transit.
There are also several eVTOL startups aiming to improve quality of life through rapid point-to-point transportation. But I doubt they'll succeed on any widespread basis due to battery and noise limitations.
Public infrastructure is requested and funded by the government, not voluntarily done by companies that happen to base themselves nearby. Sounds more of an issue of government.
I mean it auto fills/pays from my card. It's just one extra step at setup. I agree it would be nice to just take my card at the rail, but "Shockingly outdated" seems a bit dramatic lol. It's certainly not comparable to "70s USSR" idk where that came from
I 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.
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.
In 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.
In 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.
But 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.
The 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.
It 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.
I lived mostly car free in Atlanta because the Marta station is one flight of stairs down from the airport terminal, and I could get to my lab in GSU in downtown Atlanta in less than 30 minutes, midtown Georgia tech campus in similar time, my first apartment in Lindberg in 40 minutes, and my second apartment in Sandy Springs on the other side of the city in less than an hour from the airport. Commute to and from my school/lab/apartment was always under 30 minutes and always faster by train compared to car.
These days I fly to the bay area to my office in East Bay. It's 2+ hours commute from either SFO or even OAK because you need to change buses 2 or 3 times. Add 1 more if you count taking the airport shuttle to the BART station. And SJC does not even have a BART connection.
There's fundamental design flaw in public transportation in the US, they almost never connect the population centers. Part of the reason why people are discouraged from using them and they don't get the funding to stay up to date.
I travel to Japan twice a year for business and for vacation, and coming back to the Bay Area and dealing with its transportation infrastructure is always jarring.
I find the Bay Area very difficult to get around. The roads are jammed with commuters who live far from their workplaces due to the housing situation. There is not enough housing near job centers, which bids up the prices of available housing to very high levels that requires FAANG-level salaries to clear unless one wants to have an army of roommates. Thus, many people have to commute, some from far-flung exurbs and even from Central Valley cities like Stockton and Modesto.
Public transportation in the Bay Area is better than most American cities, but it’s still underpowered for the size of the metro area. Not all residences are served by trains, and bus service is often infrequent and subject to delays. Missing a connection can lead to major inconveniences (such as a long 30-60 minute wait) or even being unable to reach your destination without an über-expensive Uber or Lyft ride. There’s also matters of safety and cleanliness on public transportation; every now and then I smell unpleasant odors like marijuana and urine, and occasionally I see sketchy people.
It’s a major step down from Tokyo, where public transportation is ultra-convenient, reliable in non-emergency situations, impeccably clean, and generally safe.
The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues. If it were merely technology, we’d have solutions by now.
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 Bay Area is crippled by people who live comfortably within biking distance of Whole Foods, Zeitgeist, and their Apple shuttle bus stop. These people can't fathom why anyone would want to drive a dirty car and blight the city with roads.
It costs almost a billion dollars to build a mile of BART, due to political corruption 65% of all MUNI service lines are to/from Chinatown, we keep the "iconic" cable car lines going even though they have the highest rate of accidents per mile and per vehicle in the country.
We just need to double or triple down on roads and let things like Waymo and Uber save us from ourselves.
Bikebrains rant about things like "induced demand" without actually understanding that building additional infrastructure simply serves pent up demand. They point to things like the Katy Freeway which was expanded to 26 lanes but "traffic got worse" - ignoring the fact that travel speeds increased by 60% for almost a decade until Houston's population ballooned to what it is today.
Because Grab is a copy of Uber and it would not exist without Uber. It may be that Grab is an equal (or perhaps better) implementation right now. But the entire category of app-based ride-sharing was created by Uber.
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…)
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.
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?
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.
Deploy to what? Staging on every merged PR (commit to stg), and prod deploy on every commit to main? That sounds reasonable to me, and I've done some variation of it on most projects for the last 10 years or so without issue.
Yeah, what happens when Team A makes a change and Team B makes a different, seemingly unrelated change, and they both get merged and pushed... only to have a dozen customers discover that if someone is using Feature X that Team A just worked on and Feature Y that Team B just worked on while they have Uncommon Option Q enabled, then their backend process server will crash taking down their entire instance.
Who's fault is that?
Asking because I have been the customer with Uncommon Option Q enabled.
Everyone here blaming BART and bureaucracy for being inefficient when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting (and zoning preventing housing/badly needed ridership near transit stops). Yes it's expensive to build transit just like it's expensive to build anything in America, which we should fix but that is not unique to BART.
Just last year we failed to pass a common sense bill to make it so we only need a 51% majority for transit bills in the future, indicative of how opposed we still are to transit in the Bay Area https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-proposi....
Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.
So let's be clear, most of the issues with BART are due to anti-transit and suburban voters starving it of support.
I wouldn't consider myself anti-transit - before Covid I took BART every work day and currently walk to my office. And have never regularly commuted by car in the Bay Area. But in SF, we seem to keep throwing money at transit orgs through ballot measures, and getting little tangible results in return. I voted for funding increases for Muni for years, with supposed reliability / service enhancements that never seemed to materialize. It's disappointing that rather than hearing that voters are more hesitant to fund this now vs previously, the reaction would be to try to lower thresholds to get things passed.
Even with the new Central Subway that opened in SF (which I assume cost billions given how long it took to develop), wasn't a clear net-win. Muni closed other Metro routes when those opened. Depending on where you're going, you might be worse off now.
While RTO may be increasing ridership numbers, Covid did change population and commuting dynamics. Transit orgs need to adapt, and maybe accept downsizing / focusing more on a smaller scope. In Bart's case, maybe it would be wiser to focus on the core Bart system, and not the more recent expansions (the East Bay trains that are totally separate from the rest of Bart, and the Oakland airport train). Maybe a stronger look should be taken at merging the disparate transit organizations themselves, to reduce administrative overhead?
Caltrain seems to be doing better than others - they have financing worries themselves, but are on a better track from my understanding. Pun semi-intended :)
Transit is important, and I feel like the current organizations keep letting us down.
Hilarious that from 2020 and to this day ridership has collapsed but BART operating expenses went up despite that and all the efficiencies they talk about in your link. Kind of tells you everything you need to know about where the money is actually going...
Just to compare with another expensive city - BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget.
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.
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.
If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km
> you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you
BART is not a typical metro system in that it serves a lot of suburbs that have very little population density, and was mainly built as a commuter service to get people to downtown SF. So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has without massive upzoning and more infill stations. Comparing it to the Tube which mostly serves the city of London is not an apples to apples comparison. Look at the costs of building new rail infrastructure in London and it's comparable to here.
> If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km
What you're talking about in that link is the extension to San Jose, not day to day BART operations. That one does deserve criticism as they've made poor decisions like not doing cut/cover because NIMBYs in San Jose don't want any disruption to streets. So instead we are tunneling to the Earth first. Elsewhere in the world municipalities understand that it's worth temporary disruptions to roads to bring down costs, but of course America is unique and we have to learn these lessons ourselves.
I'm not sure why we've drifted talking about new lines/stations. Both Tube and BART hardly built anything in the last 10 years. I was only remarking on operating costs for what was already built by pandemic and the fact that ridership seems completely untangled from it.
It seems to me that BART management did what most of other government bureaucracies did around here during covid - threw their feet on the desk and took an extended 2+ year sabbatical
The infill stations don't make much sense because they're also low density housing. The fundamental problem with mass transit in CA is the insane insistence to remain low density despite the overwhelming demand for housing. It's the sin that leads to all of the problems the state faces.
No, treating BART as a low-density transit system while granting them right of ways in some of the most dense areas of the country doesn't make much sense. 30th & Mission and 98th & San Leandro would've absolutely made sense while neither Millbrae nor SFO should've ever been built.
As a former tube-commuter and occasional BART-user, I'd wager that possibly a majority of the commuting trips in zone 1 are taking people from a mainline train station to somewhere, and then back in the evening. That option barely even exists in the Bay Area - indeed every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.
every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and
rent a car instead.
BART really made a mess of transit to SFO, unfortunately. BART ridership never met projections so they played around quite a lot with service between Millbrae and SFO in effort to save money. For a while there was a Millbrae-SFO shuttle. For a while one line provided service during the day and one provided evening and weekend service. Even today only one of the two transbay lines that runs down the peninsula offers service to Millbrae and SFO.
Once you actually get to Millbrae you then get to deal with BART's whole NIH problem manifesting as a refusal (up until recently) to offer timed connections with Caltrain. And, of course, up until 2021 actually getting between the BART and Caltrain platforms involved a ton of walking.
> when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting
Everyone wants more services and lower taxes, but they vote for the lower taxes and get made when there are no services. Those things often don't go together. It's okay to either accept fewer services with less tax burden, or higher taxes with more services (the side I generally lean towards, within reason).
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.
The failure of Proposition 5 doesn't indicate that California voters are opposed to transit. That was a very broad proposition which lowered the voting threshold for local governments to issue bonds for a wide variety of projects, not just transit. Local governments are already facing debt problems and making it easier to take on more debt would set them up for serious future fiscal problems.
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.
They did. They started before yesterday's shutdown, and worked all night, they tried to bring up the system for startup, and it came up, then crashed.
It was state of the art on 1962 when it was designed, and remained state of the art until the 1980s, when the signal system started breaking down, and the the late 80s upgrade which had a train presence glitch, which caused almost all the system to get resignaled.
So by the 2000s again it's showing its age, and they got a 32 processor zSeries mainframe.
Brake problem last week, and the this on Friday? Now it's getting like New York, even more. Whatsmatteryou?
It doesn't require a mainframe but that was the cheapest path to keep things running without rewriting the software. The IBM Z platform is very good at maintaining backward compatibility. If you don't constantly keep your applications software up to date with support for new platforms then eventually you find yourself with very limited platform options.
When GitHub was constantly failing, I finally got fed up and now I use my own private Gitea. It’s near-zero maintenance and has never had any unexpected downtime. Never looked back.
Stories like these make me feel the same way about California, which I called home for almost 20 years. So much to love, so many reasons never to live there again. Great place to visit when there’s not an active disaster unfolding.
I'm curious what percent of HN is based in the bay area for this to hit the front page so quickly. I suppose it could in part be that it was posted when people are commuting in?
A tech failure taking down a big government thing is certainly HN worthy. And BART is relatively famous, as such things go. It’s a name people know, as opposed to of it was the Minnesota DMV system. That would be a fine story too but no one knows the name for that.
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.
That's a shame. The Twin Cities set a relatively high bar for American public transit, too. The light rail is fantastic. I only wish you could take the green line all the way out to SLP or Plymouth.
Back when I lived in the cities 15 or so years ago, it was still notably slower than driving, so many if not most people still drove everywhere.
Public transit wasn't as gross as stories I've heard of elsewhere, but it also wasn't something I wanted to take on a regular basis if I could help it. I think I used it regularly for about six months or so one year in particular, and the lack of warm bus stops meant standing in freezing rain, sleet, snow and more.
Maybe things have improved since I lived there, but hearing that they are the high bar is pretty sad.
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.
Is it causation or correlation? Maybe bart being down caused all the people to browse HN while waiting for the issue to be resolved, thereby making this show up on the main page.
I’m not frustrated that this happened, I’m frustrated that it seems likely this won’t get better (witness their protracted incredibly high constructions costs that have not improved). I hope they prove me wrong.
Buses are the resilient backup for trains, especially if road infrastructure has been designed to prioritize transit (e.g. Chicago highways with shoulders designed to let Pace buses bypass traffic jams).
Traditional train systems themselves are extremely decentralized, though scheduling is not. Traditional interlockings form a mirroring mesh network parallel to the physical network of steel rails itself.
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.
BART is dual track around the entire system, except for side yard entrances. I have seen stopped trains, and it was worked around. One I was on caught fire I. The middle of a station and it did not close the line. It slowed it down a lot but did not stop. There are so many systems in place, it's a quite complex system.
The real heros? The bus drivers. The baddies? The planners, the management. The evil? Pure unadulterated evil? The AC Transit app. I would give it a -11.
If you can't send updated schedules or emergency alerts through the system, I also don't want service started. It doesn't have to be an individualized problem to render local-first useless.
Also, what do you mean by trains being local-first? Trains by definition need to share the same tracks with catastrophic consequences for getting it wrong. You can't figure out if a train is going to possibly be on the same route locally, or if your route has been obstructed. Somebody gets a schoolbus stuck on a crossing, it takes over a mile to stop a train.
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
Not quite that easy. What if two trains are both traveling towards separate green signals into the same block such that the second train gets a red signal, but not in time to stop? I think it's possible to overcome this, but it become vastly more complicated than just "turn the signals red for the current block if it's occupied".
You are right, reality is more complicated. In reality some blocks need more than two states and need to know the state of adjacent blocks. For example in a one-way track with two every points you would want to deny entry from one entry point if the track leading to the other entry point is occupied, to solve your case. And you probably want to call that state "reserved" instead of "occupied" to prevent a cascade if you have multiple such blocks right after each other.
But the point that you can do this local-first is still true. You will want to engage a couple bits of information with the neighboring block, but you don't need to know any global state, and if one block breaks down that only affects its direct neighbors
>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.
You can go down a very deep rabbit hole learning about the history of train signaling. Trains and subways have had centralized signaling for…I’d have to look it up, but 100 years surely? It’s the only way to safely have more than one train running at a time (i.e., sharing the track) with a dense schedule. The “local first” procedure when it fails is to radically reduce service and slow down the trains.
Block based automated signaling can technically be implemented as a primarily local system. Each block needs to know if there is a train in itself block (in which case all block entrance signals must show stop, and approach signals indicate that they can be entered, but the train must be slowing, so it can come to a stop by the block entrance signal). It must also know about a few preceeding blocks for each path leading into it, so as to know which contain trains that might be trying to enter this block, so it can select at most one to be given the proceed signal, and others to be told to brake to stop in time for the entrance signal. While it is nice if it knows the intended routes of each train so it can favor giving the proceed indicator to a train that actually wants to enter it, but if it lacks that information, then giving the indication to a train that will end up using points to take a different path doesn't hurt safety, just efficiency.
Of course, centralized signaling is better, allowing for greater efficiency, helps dispatch keep track better track of the trains, makes handling malfunctioning signals a lot safer, among many other benefits. But it doesn't mean local signaling can't be done.
The New York Times had a very visually compelling article a few months ago about how a good part of the city's subway system is still manually-operated.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for us to have higher standards for quality and safety than we did 100 years ago.
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks
Building a replica set of tracks that runs parallel to the current tracks just to avoid sharing doesn't strike me as a good use of anyone's time/money.
> "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded
And how are you going to notify them that they are excluded when the network is down?
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks.
We're talking about BART, which uses a track gauge of 5'6" instead of the standard US rail gauge of 4'8.5". They can't run on the same tracks.
(Actually, this is generally true even for those systems that do use 4'8.5" gauge track--I suspect that the standard US freight car envelope doesn't actually fit on most subway systems.)
They would not, the term you're looking for is "Loading Gauge"[1]. The US freight loading gauge is one of the larger ones.
That said there are other reasons a subway could end up being subject to Federal Railroad Administration[2] rules. I will note that I'm not an expert on those rules. But, generally passenger rail systems in the US are subject to Positive Train Control[3] or equivalent. It appears BART is actually one of the earliest adopters of Automatic Train Control[4], which appears to be a PTC equivalent. If not more automated.
(Actually, this is generally true even for those systems that do use 4'8.5" gauge track--I suspect that the standard US freight car envelope doesn't actually fit on most subway systems.)
As a related aside, the Chicago Transit Authority still ran freight on its tracks until not that long ago. Maybe the early 2000's?
Standard US freight envelope doesn't even fit on the standard US freight line, famously there are tunnels and bridges in the East that prevent Superliner and other double-stack cars from getting into New York and other places.
It is certainly possible to send a freight train that will fit in most subway tunnels of the right gauge, but you may need a short locomotive and short cars.
(After all, what are the maintenance trains but a form of freight?)
> Standard US freight envelope doesn't even fit on the standard US freight line, famously there are tunnels and bridges in the East that prevent Superliner and other double-stack cars from getting into New York and other places.
The standard US freight envelope probably counts as Plate C, which is 10'8" wide by 15'6" above the rail. Plate H is the standard for double-stacked containers, which pushes the height to 20'2".
(The part of the loading gauge that I'd be most concerned about is actually the width of the cars at the bottom of the carbody--passenger cars tend to be somewhat narrower than standard boxcar, and given a desire to minimize the platform gap, I'd think there's a decent chance that most freight would strike the platform.)
The very first transcontinental railroad included telegraph communications infrastructure. [0] The dependence is necessary because it's so critical for safety and scheduling.
The US congressional committee that recommended construction of the railroad was called the "Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad and Telegraph".
So it seems very early it was decided that no, rail transit systems should not be built without communications/publishing infrastructure.
Our modern transit system has no correlation to the complexity of transit service previously. Enjoy fewer schedules, more delays, and higher costs; pick three.
Edit, for the pedantic: There's a huge difference between horizontal complexity (i.e. variety of transit options) and vertical complexity (complexity of a particular option). We have less horizontal complexity than we used to; but vertical complexity of a modern railroad is obscene compared to historical standards.
> 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 understand what you’re trying to say. Is it that we have more or less complexity? The public transit system was far more complex in the past. Between trolleys, inter urbans, and passenger trains, we’ve lost a LOT of routes.
Theres things police could/can attach to the rail to signal trains to stop.
I think our over reliance on the telecom network has lead to safety issues- mostly in terms of "what to do when the telecom goes down." Because on the whole, its astoundingly reliable.
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)
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.
There is a strong correlation between hiring low end people and being or becoming ever more bureaucratic. Bureaucracy like everything else is there for a reason.
I'll bite: Silicon Valley isn't known for good infrastructure, we are just able to roll back changes very easily. The cost of getting software wrong for BART is far higher than if my div is padded incorrectly.
BART barely goes into Silicon Valley. Fremont was the closest stop up until 2017. Now it gets to North San Jose. Even if was funded, any further extension wouldn't be complete for over a decade.
edit: lmao, so many upvotes yet my comment has been moved so low. No more snark than a loving brother would provide. TY for your attention to this matter
The bart is basically the crowning achievement of US public transit. As for the solutions coming from everyone's favourite bay Aryan Elon Musk, they are...somewhat lacking.
You're probably not going to believe this but the Hyperloop in Las Vegas:
- is now just "the loop."
- only has 8 stops
- doesnt go to the airport
- most stations are unprotected park benches in the desert sun
- vehicles arent driverless
- speeds are 26 miles per hour instead of 155
- it can take up to 20 minutes for a ride to show up
- it does not go to or from the airport.
- it only runs for 11 hours a day at some stations.
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.
If you compare it to the commuter rail systems in those places, BART feels impressive (though less so with the service cuts). I was a regular rider on the Metro North New Haven line and had experience with SEPTA and NJT commuter rail and I was really impressed with BART when I moved out here. Peak frequency was pretty good (at least on the Red line I primarily used) and when things were on time they were very on-time ("on-time" Metro North trains were always at least a few minutes late in my experience).
If you compare it to the NYC subway, it's obviously not impressive at all (though the tech is less dated). As a rapid-transit system, BART isn't exactly a commuter rail or subway system exactly, but I think it's closer to the former than the latter.
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.
This is not how software works. Although I guess this isn't quite as catchy:
Assume all software is broken at all times. Constantly try to ensure it works and is secure. Sometimes updates break things. Test before production. Ensure test environments are similar to production. You're going to break things.
I’m at a conference at Stanford University right now. I was going to take BART and the Dumbarton Express to avoid having to drive in traffic, but when I drove to the Dublin BART station, I found out BART wasn’t running. I ended up having to drive to Stanford, since the only public transportation over the hills separating Dublin/Pleasanton from the inner East Bay is the Altamont Commuter Express, which is much less convenient due to its few runs. Thankfully traffic wasn’t that bad today, but going home is going to be a traffic nightmare since it’s a Friday.
I wish there were more bus options that connected the outer East Bay (Dublin, Pleasanton, San Ramon, Walnut Creek, etc.) to the inner East Bay.
> but going home is going to be a traffic nightmare since it’s a Friday.
I've never understood the Friday traffic issue. Are there people that normally stay in the city during the week and only go home on Fridays causing more traffic? How is there more traffic on Friday and the rest of the week? Friday being one of the forced RTO days, but the Friday traffic thing was known well before WFH/RTO fights. Then again, the root cause of most traffic always seems much more anticlimatic
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.
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.
You make it sound like this is a Bay Area thing. It's not. I've never lived in the Bay Area, yet everyone still dreads Friday afternoon traffic. I get holiday weekends but just a random Friday still gets that vibe
Sooooo much snark, and so little interest into what BART actually runs on!
Originally, BART was a master stroke of digital integration in the 70's, and it's digital voices announcing the next trains were a thing of the future: An early accessibility feature before we even knew what those were, really.
Reading:
https://www.bart.gov/about/history
https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/traincontrol#:~:text=To%...
I believe in one of the Planet of the Apes sequels, they used a BART construction site, because of how futuristic it looked.
[delayed]
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-...
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.
Yeah 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.
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.
> I don't know what your frame of reference is, but BART is above average for US public transit payment systems.
That doesn't change anything in the comment you're replying to. Just because it's above average for the USA, does not mean it isn't also ancient by global standards.
> 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.
Chicago is pretty good too. IIRC they also have tap-to-pay. In fact, I think they had it before NYC
It’s almost like all of the Bay Area tech companies are too busy working on Blockchain / shitcoins, MetaVerse, or hyper optimization of advertising…
Also worth throwing some blame at VCs who are chasing hype cycles instead of investing in boring companies that would actually improve quality of life for the people around them.
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 Boring Company has attempted to develop tunnel boring technology which theoretically could someday allow for cheaper expansion of all subway and light rail systems. Although in practice they haven't accomplished much and their existing projects aren't even used for rail transit.
https://www.boringcompany.com/
There are also several eVTOL startups aiming to improve quality of life through rapid point-to-point transportation. But I doubt they'll succeed on any widespread basis due to battery and noise limitations.
Public infrastructure is requested and funded by the government, not voluntarily done by companies that happen to base themselves nearby. Sounds more of an issue of government.
This is government procurement being broken not the companies themselves.
How did you pay? I made a Clipper account that I fill up with my credit card and tap my phone to pay...
Which is still shockingly outdated compared to e.g. London, where I just use my tap to pay method of choice on entry and exit, done.
Oooh, even behind e.g London, the first city in the world to offer tap and pay with bank cards!
They introduced tap-to-pay with your credit card a few weeks ago.
I mean it auto fills/pays from my card. It's just one extra step at setup. I agree it would be nice to just take my card at the rail, but "Shockingly outdated" seems a bit dramatic lol. It's certainly not comparable to "70s USSR" idk where that came from
You can do that on BART as well.
So tokens and kopeks? Because there were no mag stripe systems in 1970s.
> https://www.ebay.ca/itm/174311087766
I 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.
The mag stripe 1960s technology worked much better than the new one, I'm sorry to report.
A 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.
Inflated compared to what? Software engineer salaries in the BART region?
your tax money broadly speaking doesn't go to BART; it's massively underfunded. not sure why they are the target of the snark.
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.
In 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.
In 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%2...
But 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.
> 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?
The 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.
I would assume the IT side is just as underfunded as the rest of the system, probably more (they will prioritize safety and rolling stock)
It 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.
Those types of contracts have much worse margins then Bay Area tech companies expect (or aspire to)
Those types of contracts always seem to go massively over-budget anyway.
Arguably the Hughes contract had a gross margin of infinity.
Likewise neither Rohr nor Westinghouse are Bay Area based.
snark is not productive.
What form of comment on an online forum _would be_ productive?
I lived mostly car free in Atlanta because the Marta station is one flight of stairs down from the airport terminal, and I could get to my lab in GSU in downtown Atlanta in less than 30 minutes, midtown Georgia tech campus in similar time, my first apartment in Lindberg in 40 minutes, and my second apartment in Sandy Springs on the other side of the city in less than an hour from the airport. Commute to and from my school/lab/apartment was always under 30 minutes and always faster by train compared to car.
These days I fly to the bay area to my office in East Bay. It's 2+ hours commute from either SFO or even OAK because you need to change buses 2 or 3 times. Add 1 more if you count taking the airport shuttle to the BART station. And SJC does not even have a BART connection.
There's fundamental design flaw in public transportation in the US, they almost never connect the population centers. Part of the reason why people are discouraged from using them and they don't get the funding to stay up to date.
I travel to Japan twice a year for business and for vacation, and coming back to the Bay Area and dealing with its transportation infrastructure is always jarring.
I find the Bay Area very difficult to get around. The roads are jammed with commuters who live far from their workplaces due to the housing situation. There is not enough housing near job centers, which bids up the prices of available housing to very high levels that requires FAANG-level salaries to clear unless one wants to have an army of roommates. Thus, many people have to commute, some from far-flung exurbs and even from Central Valley cities like Stockton and Modesto.
Public transportation in the Bay Area is better than most American cities, but it’s still underpowered for the size of the metro area. Not all residences are served by trains, and bus service is often infrequent and subject to delays. Missing a connection can lead to major inconveniences (such as a long 30-60 minute wait) or even being unable to reach your destination without an über-expensive Uber or Lyft ride. There’s also matters of safety and cleanliness on public transportation; every now and then I smell unpleasant odors like marijuana and urine, and occasionally I see sketchy people.
It’s a major step down from Tokyo, where public transportation is ultra-convenient, reliable in non-emergency situations, impeccably clean, and generally safe.
The sad thing is the reason the Bay Area lacks Tokyo-style transit is not technology, but social and political issues. If it were merely technology, we’d have solutions by now.
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 deaths per mile on the subway must be 3 orders of magnitude lower than the skilled motorcyclists.
Especially if they're lane splitting in a crowded city street to speed through traffic jams. That's incredibly dangerous.
https://i.redd.it/rviipp7czy131.jpg
And the rail fatalities are only that high because of people using it for suicide.
The Bay Area is crippled by people who live comfortably within biking distance of Whole Foods, Zeitgeist, and their Apple shuttle bus stop. These people can't fathom why anyone would want to drive a dirty car and blight the city with roads.
It costs almost a billion dollars to build a mile of BART, due to political corruption 65% of all MUNI service lines are to/from Chinatown, we keep the "iconic" cable car lines going even though they have the highest rate of accidents per mile and per vehicle in the country.
We just need to double or triple down on roads and let things like Waymo and Uber save us from ourselves.
Bikebrains rant about things like "induced demand" without actually understanding that building additional infrastructure simply serves pent up demand. They point to things like the Katy Freeway which was expanded to 26 lanes but "traffic got worse" - ignoring the fact that travel speeds increased by 60% for almost a decade until Houston's population ballooned to what it is today.
Why is Uber so much better than Grab?
Because Grab is a copy of Uber and it would not exist without Uber. It may be that Grab is an equal (or perhaps better) implementation right now. But the entire category of app-based ride-sharing was created by Uber.
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…)
Part of the reason why people are discouraged s/from/by/ using them and they don't get the funding to stay up to date.
People are constantly being encouraged to take public transpo, but once they finally do, they realize why they hadn't before.
Chicago (Blue Line from O'Hare) and NYC (M60 from Laguardia or Skytrain to MTA/LIRR from JFK) are also good in that regard.
Broke the read-only Friday rule…
I know this is a tongue in cheek casual comment, but this article is a really good and important counterpoint: https://charity.wtf/2019/05/01/friday-deploy-freezes-are-exa...
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.
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.
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 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?
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 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
> "Shipping software and running tests should be fast. Super fast. Minutes, tops." hahah
You mean to tell me not everyone works on some SaaS product outside of critical path?
Deploy to what? Staging on every merged PR (commit to stg), and prod deploy on every commit to main? That sounds reasonable to me, and I've done some variation of it on most projects for the last 10 years or so without issue.
Well people aren't talking about not deploying to staging on Fridays.
And there are hints to what the author actually means, like "Each deploy should be owned by the developer who made the code changes."
That just isn't feasible in a system that's of any reasonable size.
Yeah, what happens when Team A makes a change and Team B makes a different, seemingly unrelated change, and they both get merged and pushed... only to have a dozen customers discover that if someone is using Feature X that Team A just worked on and Feature Y that Team B just worked on while they have Uncommon Option Q enabled, then their backend process server will crash taking down their entire instance.
Who's fault is that?
Asking because I have been the customer with Uncommon Option Q enabled.
Wait... (Obligatory) Did they forget to mount a scratch monkey?
Everyone here blaming BART and bureaucracy for being inefficient when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting (and zoning preventing housing/badly needed ridership near transit stops). Yes it's expensive to build transit just like it's expensive to build anything in America, which we should fix but that is not unique to BART.
It's quite possible the system will collapse next year if we don't pass increased taxes to fund it in 2026 https://www.bart.gov/about/financials/crisis.
Just last year we failed to pass a common sense bill to make it so we only need a 51% majority for transit bills in the future, indicative of how opposed we still are to transit in the Bay Area https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-proposi....
Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.
So let's be clear, most of the issues with BART are due to anti-transit and suburban voters starving it of support.
I wouldn't consider myself anti-transit - before Covid I took BART every work day and currently walk to my office. And have never regularly commuted by car in the Bay Area. But in SF, we seem to keep throwing money at transit orgs through ballot measures, and getting little tangible results in return. I voted for funding increases for Muni for years, with supposed reliability / service enhancements that never seemed to materialize. It's disappointing that rather than hearing that voters are more hesitant to fund this now vs previously, the reaction would be to try to lower thresholds to get things passed.
Even with the new Central Subway that opened in SF (which I assume cost billions given how long it took to develop), wasn't a clear net-win. Muni closed other Metro routes when those opened. Depending on where you're going, you might be worse off now.
While RTO may be increasing ridership numbers, Covid did change population and commuting dynamics. Transit orgs need to adapt, and maybe accept downsizing / focusing more on a smaller scope. In Bart's case, maybe it would be wiser to focus on the core Bart system, and not the more recent expansions (the East Bay trains that are totally separate from the rest of Bart, and the Oakland airport train). Maybe a stronger look should be taken at merging the disparate transit organizations themselves, to reduce administrative overhead?
Caltrain seems to be doing better than others - they have financing worries themselves, but are on a better track from my understanding. Pun semi-intended :)
Transit is important, and I feel like the current organizations keep letting us down.
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.
Hilarious that from 2020 and to this day ridership has collapsed but BART operating expenses went up despite that and all the efficiencies they talk about in your link. Kind of tells you everything you need to know about where the money is actually going...
Just to compare with another expensive city - BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget.
> 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.
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.
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.
BART service area population is comparable to Greater London
> Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data
If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km
> you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you
uhm what?
BART is not a typical metro system in that it serves a lot of suburbs that have very little population density, and was mainly built as a commuter service to get people to downtown SF. So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has without massive upzoning and more infill stations. Comparing it to the Tube which mostly serves the city of London is not an apples to apples comparison. Look at the costs of building new rail infrastructure in London and it's comparable to here.
> If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km
What you're talking about in that link is the extension to San Jose, not day to day BART operations. That one does deserve criticism as they've made poor decisions like not doing cut/cover because NIMBYs in San Jose don't want any disruption to streets. So instead we are tunneling to the Earth first. Elsewhere in the world municipalities understand that it's worth temporary disruptions to roads to bring down costs, but of course America is unique and we have to learn these lessons ourselves.
I'm not sure why we've drifted talking about new lines/stations. Both Tube and BART hardly built anything in the last 10 years. I was only remarking on operating costs for what was already built by pandemic and the fact that ridership seems completely untangled from it.
It seems to me that BART management did what most of other government bureaucracies did around here during covid - threw their feet on the desk and took an extended 2+ year sabbatical
The infill stations don't make much sense because they're also low density housing. The fundamental problem with mass transit in CA is the insane insistence to remain low density despite the overwhelming demand for housing. It's the sin that leads to all of the problems the state faces.
No, treating BART as a low-density transit system while granting them right of ways in some of the most dense areas of the country doesn't make much sense. 30th & Mission and 98th & San Leandro would've absolutely made sense while neither Millbrae nor SFO should've ever been built.
> have you seen the density around Tube stations?
As a former tube-commuter and occasional BART-user, I'd wager that possibly a majority of the commuting trips in zone 1 are taking people from a mainline train station to somewhere, and then back in the evening. That option barely even exists in the Bay Area - indeed every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.
> ...every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.
Why? Last I checked, it's
Is there some complication I'm missing (other than the fact that neither BART nor Caltrain are 24/7 services)?Depending on the year and day of the week it also involved a transfer at San Bruno.
Fortunately they've since reverted back to always running to Millbrae from the airport.
Once you actually get to Millbrae you then get to deal with BART's whole NIH problem manifesting as a refusal (up until recently) to offer timed connections with Caltrain. And, of course, up until 2021 actually getting between the BART and Caltrain platforms involved a ton of walking.
> when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting
Everyone wants more services and lower taxes, but they vote for the lower taxes and get made when there are no services. Those things often don't go together. It's okay to either accept fewer services with less tax burden, or higher taxes with more services (the side I generally lean towards, within reason).
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.
It's pretty hard to keep from drowning in despair when one realizes that almost everywhere else in the USA except maybe NYC, the situation is worse.
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.
The failure of Proposition 5 doesn't indicate that California voters are opposed to transit. That was a very broad proposition which lowered the voting threshold for local governments to issue bonds for a wide variety of projects, not just transit. Local governments are already facing debt problems and making it easier to take on more debt would set them up for serious future fiscal problems.
> Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.
Didn't bigTech start buses going directly to their campus as a perk?
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.
What metro :/
Good ol' Prop 12, guaranteeing that everything will be underfunded one way or another.
didn't realize cage free pigs lead to such dramatic second order effects =)
must have meant Prop 13
Whoops, yes, that was the one. Caught it too late for an edit.
Except, as always bureaucratic pay raises.
Was this related to the CBTC rollout by any chance?
EDIT: It was not.
Are there any technical details yet? What was upgraded?
Seems like BART should do these upgrades only at low traffic times, like overnight Saturday night.
They did. They started before yesterday's shutdown, and worked all night, they tried to bring up the system for startup, and it came up, then crashed.
It was state of the art on 1962 when it was designed, and remained state of the art until the 1980s, when the signal system started breaking down, and the the late 80s upgrade which had a train presence glitch, which caused almost all the system to get resignaled.
So by the 2000s again it's showing its age, and they got a 32 processor zSeries mainframe.
Brake problem last week, and the this on Friday? Now it's getting like New York, even more. Whatsmatteryou?
What on earth does it do that requires a mainframe?
It doesn't require a mainframe but that was the cheapest path to keep things running without rewriting the software. The IBM Z platform is very good at maintaining backward compatibility. If you don't constantly keep your applications software up to date with support for new platforms then eventually you find yourself with very limited platform options.
They're highly resilient - as in the hardware/OS itself is, so the applications dont have to be.
That and IOPS are the primary advantage of mainframe systems.
sorry using throwaway for this.
When GitHub was constantly failing, I finally got fed up and now I use my own private Gitea. It’s near-zero maintenance and has never had any unexpected downtime. Never looked back.
Stories like these make me feel the same way about California, which I called home for almost 20 years. So much to love, so many reasons never to live there again. Great place to visit when there’s not an active disaster unfolding.
mate we can't self host BART
Isn't that kinda what people are doing when they commute in private cars?
fair enough!
I'm curious what percent of HN is based in the bay area for this to hit the front page so quickly. I suppose it could in part be that it was posted when people are commuting in?
A tech failure taking down a big government thing is certainly HN worthy. And BART is relatively famous, as such things go. It’s a name people know, as opposed to of it was the Minnesota DMV system. That would be a fine story too but no one knows the name for that.
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.
That's a shame. The Twin Cities set a relatively high bar for American public transit, too. The light rail is fantastic. I only wish you could take the green line all the way out to SLP or Plymouth.
Back when I lived in the cities 15 or so years ago, it was still notably slower than driving, so many if not most people still drove everywhere.
Public transit wasn't as gross as stories I've heard of elsewhere, but it also wasn't something I wanted to take on a regular basis if I could help it. I think I used it regularly for about six months or so one year in particular, and the lack of warm bus stops meant standing in freezing rain, sleet, snow and more.
Maybe things have improved since I lived there, but hearing that they are the high bar is pretty sad.
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.
I'm not even on the same continent but I'm still reading this, including the comments...
HN has always had a huge bay area focus.
Is it causation or correlation? Maybe bart being down caused all the people to browse HN while waiting for the issue to be resolved, thereby making this show up on the main page.
Yeah the BART needs some love.
Windows, upgrading again?
Nah, we upgraded the network configuration. Should have no impact. No there is no source control.
I’m not frustrated that this happened, I’m frustrated that it seems likely this won’t get better (witness their protracted incredibly high constructions costs that have not improved). I hope they prove me wrong.
Public transportation is inherently centralized.
Cars are anti-fragile and decentralized.
Cars fail open in the short term.
Buses are the resilient backup for trains, especially if road infrastructure has been designed to prioritize transit (e.g. Chicago highways with shoulders designed to let Pace buses bypass traffic jams).
Tell that to someone in a two-hour traffic jam on the highway.
No. Cars rely on centralized road systems.
Traditional train systems themselves are extremely decentralized, though scheduling is not. Traditional interlockings form a mirroring mesh network parallel to the physical network of steel rails itself.
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.
BART is dual track around the entire system, except for side yard entrances. I have seen stopped trains, and it was worked around. One I was on caught fire I. The middle of a station and it did not close the line. It slowed it down a lot but did not stop. There are so many systems in place, it's a quite complex system.
The real heros? The bus drivers. The baddies? The planners, the management. The evil? Pure unadulterated evil? The AC Transit app. I would give it a -11.
It'd be pretty cool if busses and trains were local-first.
If you can't send updated schedules or emergency alerts through the system, I also don't want service started. It doesn't have to be an individualized problem to render local-first useless.
Also, what do you mean by trains being local-first? Trains by definition need to share the same tracks with catastrophic consequences for getting it wrong. You can't figure out if a train is going to possibly be on the same route locally, or if your route has been obstructed. Somebody gets a schoolbus stuck on a crossing, it takes over a mile to stop a train.
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
Not quite that easy. What if two trains are both traveling towards separate green signals into the same block such that the second train gets a red signal, but not in time to stop? I think it's possible to overcome this, but it become vastly more complicated than just "turn the signals red for the current block if it's occupied".
You are right, reality is more complicated. In reality some blocks need more than two states and need to know the state of adjacent blocks. For example in a one-way track with two every points you would want to deny entry from one entry point if the track leading to the other entry point is occupied, to solve your case. And you probably want to call that state "reserved" instead of "occupied" to prevent a cascade if you have multiple such blocks right after each other.
But the point that you can do this local-first is still true. You will want to engage a couple bits of information with the neighboring block, but you don't need to know any global state, and if one block breaks down that only affects its direct neighbors
>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.
You can go down a very deep rabbit hole learning about the history of train signaling. Trains and subways have had centralized signaling for…I’d have to look it up, but 100 years surely? It’s the only way to safely have more than one train running at a time (i.e., sharing the track) with a dense schedule. The “local first” procedure when it fails is to radically reduce service and slow down the trains.
Wikipedia has a good survey [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_signalling
Block based automated signaling can technically be implemented as a primarily local system. Each block needs to know if there is a train in itself block (in which case all block entrance signals must show stop, and approach signals indicate that they can be entered, but the train must be slowing, so it can come to a stop by the block entrance signal). It must also know about a few preceeding blocks for each path leading into it, so as to know which contain trains that might be trying to enter this block, so it can select at most one to be given the proceed signal, and others to be told to brake to stop in time for the entrance signal. While it is nice if it knows the intended routes of each train so it can favor giving the proceed indicator to a train that actually wants to enter it, but if it lacks that information, then giving the indication to a train that will end up using points to take a different path doesn't hurt safety, just efficiency.
Of course, centralized signaling is better, allowing for greater efficiency, helps dispatch keep track better track of the trains, makes handling malfunctioning signals a lot safer, among many other benefits. But it doesn't mean local signaling can't be done.
Yes, block based signaling is what I interpreted “local first” to mean in this context. It works, but it slows everything way down.
I don’t know, but I would imagine, there’s still a block based setup as a failsafe backup in most or all modern rail systems.
Yeah, we literally invented positive train control because trains crashed too often.
The New York Times had a very visually compelling article a few months ago about how a good part of the city's subway system is still manually-operated.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/20/nyregion/nyc-...
For me, this was the best picture:
https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2025-03-10-subway-...
Someone has to stand at that machine 24 hours a day and push and pull levers to keep the trains from whacking one another.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for us to have higher standards for quality and safety than we did 100 years ago.
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks
Building a replica set of tracks that runs parallel to the current tracks just to avoid sharing doesn't strike me as a good use of anyone's time/money.
> "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded
And how are you going to notify them that they are excluded when the network is down?
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight doesn't require it to run on the same set of tracks.
We're talking about BART, which uses a track gauge of 5'6" instead of the standard US rail gauge of 4'8.5". They can't run on the same tracks.
(Actually, this is generally true even for those systems that do use 4'8.5" gauge track--I suspect that the standard US freight car envelope doesn't actually fit on most subway systems.)
They would not, the term you're looking for is "Loading Gauge"[1]. The US freight loading gauge is one of the larger ones.
That said there are other reasons a subway could end up being subject to Federal Railroad Administration[2] rules. I will note that I'm not an expert on those rules. But, generally passenger rail systems in the US are subject to Positive Train Control[3] or equivalent. It appears BART is actually one of the earliest adopters of Automatic Train Control[4], which appears to be a PTC equivalent. If not more automated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loading_gauge
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Railroad_Administratio...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit#Automat...
(Actually, this is generally true even for those systems that do use 4'8.5" gauge track--I suspect that the standard US freight car envelope doesn't actually fit on most subway systems.)
As a related aside, the Chicago Transit Authority still ran freight on its tracks until not that long ago. Maybe the early 2000's?
Standard US freight envelope doesn't even fit on the standard US freight line, famously there are tunnels and bridges in the East that prevent Superliner and other double-stack cars from getting into New York and other places.
It is certainly possible to send a freight train that will fit in most subway tunnels of the right gauge, but you may need a short locomotive and short cars.
(After all, what are the maintenance trains but a form of freight?)
> Standard US freight envelope doesn't even fit on the standard US freight line, famously there are tunnels and bridges in the East that prevent Superliner and other double-stack cars from getting into New York and other places.
The standard US freight envelope probably counts as Plate C, which is 10'8" wide by 15'6" above the rail. Plate H is the standard for double-stacked containers, which pushes the height to 20'2".
(The part of the loading gauge that I'd be most concerned about is actually the width of the cars at the bottom of the carbody--passenger cars tend to be somewhat narrower than standard boxcar, and given a desire to minimize the platform gap, I'd think there's a decent chance that most freight would strike the platform.)
Last freight service was 1973.
> Just because it uses the same rail gauge as intercity freight
BART has a non-standard rail gauge size that precludes it from interoperability with other rail networks.
https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220708-2
I was going to say, it just happens to be one of the handful of systems in the entire continent that does not use standard gauge.
Other ones I'm aware of are Washington DC's metro, and Toronto's subway and streetcars.
The very first transcontinental railroad included telegraph communications infrastructure. [0] The dependence is necessary because it's so critical for safety and scheduling.
The US congressional committee that recommended construction of the railroad was called the "Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad and Telegraph".
So it seems very early it was decided that no, rail transit systems should not be built without communications/publishing infrastructure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_railroa...
Our modern transit system has no correlation to the complexity of transit service previously. Enjoy fewer schedules, more delays, and higher costs; pick three.
Edit, for the pedantic: There's a huge difference between horizontal complexity (i.e. variety of transit options) and vertical complexity (complexity of a particular option). We have less horizontal complexity than we used to; but vertical complexity of a modern railroad is obscene compared to historical standards.
> But if it did, I assume "local-first" entails other traffic just being excluded when an emergency in the local system necessitates it.
No dice; as consider just 14 hours ago:
https://x.com/SFBARTalert/status/1963772853947355630?ref_src...
How does a local-first train safely operate if it could go through a police zone? You need communication, by definition, not local-first.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Is it that we have more or less complexity? The public transit system was far more complex in the past. Between trolleys, inter urbans, and passenger trains, we’ve lost a LOT of routes.
Theres things police could/can attach to the rail to signal trains to stop.
I think our over reliance on the telecom network has lead to safety issues- mostly in terms of "what to do when the telecom goes down." Because on the whole, its astoundingly reliable.
There's a fourth factor here: labor costs.
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)
Sure pal, that's why the internet enabled the existence of buses and trains.
Did the upgrade also break scrolling on their site?
Your ad blocker is probably blocking a modal popup, badly.
Why is a site that needs to be ADA2-compliant showing anything modal?
You'd think trains would use a rolling release
Also surprised they don't have the ability to rollback
Not having redundant rails in case of breakdowns is something BART is well known for
Maintaining roll backs is incredibly expensive for what you get.
If you've ever been in, on, or near bart you wouldn't be.
They clearly need to rebuild this as a Rails app
Apparently there was too much Rust on the Rails?
If it was rust, they'd still be compiling.
Broken release train breaks train brakes
nice.
Works on my local environment <points to train set> choo choo
so you're saying BART should run in a container?
The cheap easy take: it's tragically ironic that the software running the infrastructure in Silicon Valley is such a problem
It's a shame that SF politics are so dysfunctional it can't have a metro at the same level of quality as, say, North Korea.
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.
You think that's setting the bar too high or too low?
Maybe expected though that high salaries there depress incentive to work in these jobs even more than other cities?
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.
There is a strong correlation between hiring low end people and being or becoming ever more bureaucratic. Bureaucracy like everything else is there for a reason.
And yet NYC .gov sites, apps, and functionality makes SF still look like a shantytown after all this time.
Beating a bar that is on the floor is none too impressive.
I'll bite: Silicon Valley isn't known for good infrastructure, we are just able to roll back changes very easily. The cost of getting software wrong for BART is far higher than if my div is padded incorrectly.
BART barely goes into Silicon Valley. Fremont was the closest stop up until 2017. Now it gets to North San Jose. Even if was funded, any further extension wouldn't be complete for over a decade.
break things and don't move at all
edit: lmao, so many upvotes yet my comment has been moved so low. No more snark than a loving brother would provide. TY for your attention to this matter
fed combinator startup decelerator
Should have taken the car!
Tech capital of the nation and yet the tech powering its public services are abysmal.
Tech was supposed to make our lives easier yet it’s yet another tool used to extract funds from the public to fund tax cuts for billionaires.
edit: oh, and sfmta backend relies on _floppy disk(s)_ [1].
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/5-25-inch-floppy-dis...
The bart is basically the crowning achievement of US public transit. As for the solutions coming from everyone's favourite bay Aryan Elon Musk, they are...somewhat lacking.
You're probably not going to believe this but the Hyperloop in Las Vegas:
- is now just "the loop."
- only has 8 stops
- doesnt go to the airport
- most stations are unprotected park benches in the desert sun
- vehicles arent driverless
- speeds are 26 miles per hour instead of 155
- it can take up to 20 minutes for a ride to show up
- it does not go to or from the airport.
- it only runs for 11 hours a day at some stations.
- cost taxpayers fifty-three million dollars.
Just because the Hyperloop is a boondoggle doesn't mean public transit is bad.
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.
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.
If you compare it to the commuter rail systems in those places, BART feels impressive (though less so with the service cuts). I was a regular rider on the Metro North New Haven line and had experience with SEPTA and NJT commuter rail and I was really impressed with BART when I moved out here. Peak frequency was pretty good (at least on the Red line I primarily used) and when things were on time they were very on-time ("on-time" Metro North trains were always at least a few minutes late in my experience).
If you compare it to the NYC subway, it's obviously not impressive at all (though the tech is less dated). As a rapid-transit system, BART isn't exactly a commuter rail or subway system exactly, but I think it's closer to the former than the latter.
>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.
Moved to the west coast from NYC area many years ago, public transit here is atrocious in comparison to the northeast.
but does it go to the airport at least?
The hyperloop idea (which was just a presentation with no plans to build it) is an entirely different thing from the boring company tunnels
If ain't broke, don't fix it.
Alternatively, get good at doing rolling releases so you don't take down the entire system and have some sort of canarying process.
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.
This is not how software works. Although I guess this isn't quite as catchy:
Assume all software is broken at all times. Constantly try to ensure it works and is secure. Sometimes updates break things. Test before production. Ensure test environments are similar to production. You're going to break things.
I’m at a conference at Stanford University right now. I was going to take BART and the Dumbarton Express to avoid having to drive in traffic, but when I drove to the Dublin BART station, I found out BART wasn’t running. I ended up having to drive to Stanford, since the only public transportation over the hills separating Dublin/Pleasanton from the inner East Bay is the Altamont Commuter Express, which is much less convenient due to its few runs. Thankfully traffic wasn’t that bad today, but going home is going to be a traffic nightmare since it’s a Friday.
I wish there were more bus options that connected the outer East Bay (Dublin, Pleasanton, San Ramon, Walnut Creek, etc.) to the inner East Bay.
> but going home is going to be a traffic nightmare since it’s a Friday.
I've never understood the Friday traffic issue. Are there people that normally stay in the city during the week and only go home on Fridays causing more traffic? How is there more traffic on Friday and the rest of the week? Friday being one of the forced RTO days, but the Friday traffic thing was known well before WFH/RTO fights. Then again, the root cause of most traffic always seems much more anticlimatic
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.
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.
You make it sound like this is a Bay Area thing. It's not. I've never lived in the Bay Area, yet everyone still dreads Friday afternoon traffic. I get holiday weekends but just a random Friday still gets that vibe
> 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).