> BART gets to withhold the last 5 percent payment for the $2.5 billion fleet until both sets of cars hit their maintenance targets
Is it just me or does 5% not seem like nearly a large enough percent? If I only had to hit 20% of my expected performance in exchange for 95% of my pay... I would have a lot more hobbies.
You have to remember that of the $2.5 billion, almost all of that was spent on materials and labour building the new trains. 5% of the total cost as a performance guarantee will be a very significant, or perhaps even total part of the profit the supplier expects to make on these trains.
Most of these large capital contracts leave very little money for profit upfront. That comes from long term maintenance. If they are the lowest bidder they are probably losing money even at 95% payout.
While true, once you reach a certain point, that's all water under the bridge, and the only question that remains is how motivating it is to pursue that last 5%.
I’m not sure about civil projects. I’m mildly familiar with commercial construction projects. Those have milestones and due dates built in. And if those are missed the GC doesn’t get paid until they are met. If dates are missed they can incur penalties. This is done to ensure the GC doesn’t pull resources off to another project.
I guess it would all depend on the rules or how the contract is written. Certainly taking care to have the right incentives in place is a good idea, though I'm not sure it's always practiced.
The Swiss national train company has their own share of issues with trains built by Bombardier. After years of delays, what was finally delivered is horribly unreliable and passengers also don't like the shaking feeling when they do run.
Bombardier produced the new IC2 trains in Germany. There were a lot of issues (including the carriages rocking from side to side which made people sick) and things breaking repeatedly. Seems like Bombardier's MO.
NYC has also had problems with Bombadier and banned them from bidding on new contracts. Ongoing deliveries from them have been frozen until their problems are fixed (bad welds being the most dangerous but reliability overall being terrible).
Kind of off-topic, but Bombardier was running a really terrible ad on TV in Canada a few years back.
It featured a couple of tourists in Europe asking a lady to take a photo for them. She purposefully waited until a train blocked the shot, so they got a photo of the train instead of the view they wanted. She then shows them the sabotaged photo and says something like, "I made that train! It's Bombardier."
I think the point of the ad was that they're an important exporter that creates good jobs and that earns international recognition. It was clearly designed for strengthening political support from the provincial and federal governments, not for selling trains. To me, though, it just made them seem like selfish assholes.
I wish I could find the ad, but Google just returns a mountain of news reports and marketing videos.
Manchester's Metrolink uses Bombardier M5000's ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_M5000 ) that seem to have worked OK.
But I do wonder - is there anyone other than Bombardier who makes tram/underground vehicles these days?
>anyone other than Bombardier who makes tram/underground vehicles these days?
See this link [1] for a summary of the current situation (start about halfway down). It doesn't look great. Nippon/Sharyo is going to be at a disadvantage in bidding because their Amtrak contracts with California and Illinois were cancelled due to the prototype cars failing safety tests. It looks like Siemens will play a part in the replacement for those, which perhaps may convince them to try out transit cars in the USA. Competition would be good.
What we have now is CRRC Sifang America (a Chinese state-owned company) has built a factory in Illinois and has orders from Chicago and Boston. The first prototypes are expected this year. We will see if they can deliver.
As mentioned Siemens (SF Muni) and Stadler (SMART) both make trains. Both have had some fairly serious problems, but none quite as bad as BART is having.
The worry was that gusts would blow the trains off the track when crossing the Golden Gate. The trains were made wider for stability. The line across the Golden Gate was never built.
Change Control for trains is fun, because there's lots of safety testing it can take a lot of time for a change which is either purely cosmetic or fixes something that has a well-understood workaround to actually make it to production.
Several years ago the main type of train I use, Class 444 Desiro got a firmware upgrade to teach it Selective Door Operation. Meaning now it knows this platform is 8 carriages long, this is a ten carriage train, so disable the doors in the rear two carriages and make an announcement automatically. Nice. But the firmware upgrade messed up the clock. So for example maybe it's about lunch time, the train displays 12:05 but is it actually 12:05? Nah, might be 13:20 or 11:50. After several months they fixed the clock, but now it is only shown intermittently. So when it says 12:05 that's definitely 12:05 but it might not remember to show the time for five minutes which is little help.
They took months to ship firmware with a fixed clock.
The SDO change also resulted in the computer becoming convinced in certain places that, as it annunciates, ""There is a fault with the door system, this is being attended to. Please do not operate any emergency equipment". There isn't a fault. But since "Ignore spurious door message" is a workaround there is no hurry to qualify a new firmware release that fixes it.
The Los Angeles Metro solved the clock problem by showing the day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, …) in a large font, with the time hidden away in a tiny font [1]. The time is usually wrong, but nobody can read it anyway. It's been like this for years; that photo is from 2016. Since the trains don't run on a schedule, I guess it doesn't matter.
I'd be very curious to see what causes things like this, and especially the code... but then again, maybe seeing the code will just put me off ever riding in one.
I thought BaRT had technology from either Siemens or Daimler but that was wrong. Their rolling stock has been provided by a variety of manufacturers[1]. One thing that makes things expensive for BaRT is the choice of non-standard gauge they are bound by. That’s not going to change.
About 20 to 25 years ago, I took a trip from the US (where I'd lived most of my life) to travel around Europe by train, and I was immensely impressed by its far superior train system. The best trains of all the countries I visited were in Sweden, which had trains which were so modern that they seemed like something out of the future, even compared to the best trains I'd seen in the US by that time, Amtrak trains.
The new BART trains that are only now rolling out remind me a lot of the Swedish trains I saw more than 20 years ago, except that the BART trains have flat panel screens in them that I doubt those Swedish trains had back then, but the Swedish trains had doors that would silently and easily slide open when you held your hands up to them -- that was something that had greatly impressed me back then, because all the trains I'd been to before had really heavy doors that you'd have to struggle with to open by hand, while on the Swedish trains you just held your hand up and the doors would glide open like on the spacecraft on Star Trek.
The whole experience had left me embarrassed for the US, which I'd seen as a technological leader up to that point. I came away from that trip with an impression that the US was very backwards in many ways. The train system and train differences were just one glaring example, but also politically and in many other ways the US was very backwards.
Now finally these new BART trains rolling out, some NYC trains were also modernizing some about a decade ago, but I haven't been to Sweden or much of the rest of Europe in a long time, and I wonder how much further they've progressed.
It’s not really a fair comparison. In terms of where people actually live (the upper two thirds of Sweden is almost empty) its roughly comparable to Ohio: about ten million people clustered in 4 or 5 major cities within a few hours drive distance from each other. Of course it will be easier to provide superior rail service there. This is not so say that Ohio has its act together as far as public transit is concerned (ha), but getting that level of service to the US as a whole would be a totally different beast.
The Acela corridor in the north east US connects DC, Philly, NYC, and Boston. Many trains run per day and most of them are full capacity. The Acela corridor revenues support the entire other ~Amtrak routes. Most cities along the Acela have sufficient public transit and density to not require car rentals on arrival.
Funnily enough, the Midwest is pretty much a spoke and hub of medium sized metro areas focused around Chicago.
There’s the Northeast corridor (and its cousin the Southeast corridor going down to Atlanta).
The PNW cities also are clustered like this but have difficult geography.
California and the Central Valley with the Bay and LA also meet this criteria, but CAHSR is run by a mix of incompetents and constrained by the wording of the ballot initiative that got it approved.
> The PNW cities also are clustered like this but have difficult geography.
Not really. It's pretty flat here in the Willamette valley, where the majority of Oregon's population lives, and relatively flat going north into Washington to Seattle... But the best we've got for long distance trains is Amtrak which shares the tracks with commercial traffic, where Amtrak gets basically the lowest priority on the tracks.
The Bay Area is one of the richest parts of the US on paper sure but much of that wealth comes from absurdly inflated land valuations that are taxed at very low rates.
I think their point is that one city (SF, not the entire US) took 20 years to get trains that Sweden had throughout their country 20 years ago. Their comparison is actually worse for the US than comparing the entire US train system (ha) to Sweden. That's really sad.
Can we just start with Ohio? Ohio has the population density of Spain and twice the GDP per capita, but it lacks passenger rail service almost entirely.
Columbus has an average commute time of 21.8 minutes [0], among the best in America. Would public transit do better? Is it a good use of funds to replace what’s working well?
The impression I get from the US is that inter-city passenger rail is usually an afterthought tacked onto a massive freight network. You travel the same speed as whatever cargo is being transported, never mind that it takes longer and costs more than an equivalent bus route.
> Now finally these new BART trains rolling out, some NYC trains were also modernizing some about a decade ago, but I haven't been to Sweden or much of the rest of Europe in a long time, and I wonder how much further they've progressed.
Unfortunately very little in Sweden. Really the only thing of note close to Sweden would probably be the subway in Copenhagen. Maybe Spain would be impressive, but most of it is happening in Asia these days.
Does the U.S. have the curse of being first? Europe got to largely rebuild their rail from scratch after WWII whereas U.S. rail has been where it is for a very long time.
I think there’s a general feeling (propaganda?) that the US is a technological leader, but... there’s nothing to support that, especially when it comes to infrastructure. The US is really far behind other developed countries in a lot of ways but few people in the US notice because most Americans rarely ever look outside their culture bubble or see another country.
There are big-ass tech companies, of course, but the country itself is not exactly a paragon of progress.
I think you are oversimplifying the issue. There are cultural differences that influence things like that too. As priorities shift things can change. So in US you have people living in large houses driving large cars and on average having crappy public transport infra. In Europe you have people living in much more modest size houses mostly driving tiny cars and often having good public transport infra. For me European option is better cause I do not drive my wife much prefers the US option.
I think you are wrong here, what you said is mostly about how it is in big cities versus the rural areas, same thing is in Europe. You will not find a lot of mass transit in European countryside, sure there are buses and trains probably more abundant than in USA but be prepared to walk a few kilometers to the nearest station.
Your point would make sense if USA had high-speed trains linking big cities but it doesn't, and the train routes that do exist experience all sorts of delays which makes people choose planes even for shorter distances under 500 km which would take ~2 hr on high speed train.
Where did I say that it's about rural areas vs big cities ? In most US metro areas majority of people of people live in houses. In US people either drive or fly. There is good infra for long range driving. This has nothing to do with large cities vs rural areas for the most part.
There is still a serious linguistic disconnect here. You’re talking about what are essentially suburbs. Big cities are mostly apartments and condos. This is true throughout the developed world including in the US, but for some reason in the US we ended up calling every group of houses and a general store “city”.
I mean, if you want to split hairs, then yes most Americans live in the suburbs of metropolitan areas, which is because of and also the reason for shitty American infra. If you are looking for Berlin+ levels of density that would be the 7th percentile of American zip codes.
The person you are responding to never even used the word cities.
Yes. It’s not splitting hairs, it’s looking at the root of the problem: Americans live inefficiently and in our bubble it seems “normal” because we have normalized severe deviance from good social, economic, and environmental practices and lifestyles.
Yeah. In the UK a city needs central government paperwork (notionally through the Queen). They hold competitions to pick new ones. If a million people go live somewhere that's a really big town, but it only becomes a city when the Queen says so. Being a city makes no direct practical difference to anything, it's like being elected homecoming king.
In the US city status makes an important practical difference to how an area is run and what the people running it can do independently of the State they're in. So it makes sense every settlement with a general store and a paved road would want that status.
> n the US city status makes an important practical difference to how an area is run and what the people running it can do independently of the State they're in.
The status of various municipal designations varies greatly based on state laws. Generally, government levels go state->county->municipality. The type and form of a municipality generally only affects how it is organized, not its level of independence from higher levels of government. Some states restrict types and forms based on size, though.
I find it scandalous the perception that anything that is not a SUV is tiny.
One of the most sold cars in Europe is the Volkswagen Golf; I don't see how that is tiny.
Interestingly, I see that mid and large size classes (mid-size being a "large family car") originated in USA, which makes me wonder if that's a typical American perception.
I'd even argue that 1400+ kg for moving around an average of 1.5 person/120 kg (I think an average of 2 people is too generous), during a time of ecological crisis, is tragic, and in my opinion, describes perfectly how there's no hope.
> I think there’s a general feeling (propaganda?) that the US is a technological leader, but... there’s nothing to support that, especially when it comes to infrastructure.
I feel like it's worth making a distinction between having the relevant capabilities/resources for a technology vs. actually deploying it in its infrastructure?
It's not propaganda. The US went to the moon, this is something sweden can never pull off. What's going on in the US is not a technology problem. It's a problem with politics and business. There is no business or political interest in building up public transportation in this country.
For historical reasons, the U.S. legal system offers citizens an unparalleled number of veto points at which they can attempt to block government projects. Any infrastructure project bigger than painting a schoolhouse thus has to either fight out the reviews and court cases for years, or buy off the opponents, or more likely, both.
The lack of infrastructure definitely affects perception and quality of life. Make no mistake though, currently the united states is one of the technology leaders of the world. Key word: currently.
Thanks - I just opened HN and saw the replies to the comment now and it does seem like it descended into unproductive discussion. I’m glad it was marked off-topic and removed.
Why are they buying new trains instead of fixing the tracks? There are many places on the BART system where the track have not been replaced in so long that trains have to slow to a crawl for safety reasons. New trains don't solve that.
“In 2018, we replaced 22 miles of track, reprofiled 231.6 miles of track to reduce railway noise, overhauled a critical track section near the West Oakland and 12th Street Stations, and replaced five miles of 34.5 kV electrical cable system in downtown Oakland to provide reliable power for trains. All these improvements will collectively create a more reliable, quieter, smoother and safer experience for our riders.”
I’ve noticed Siemens’ trains out of London have quiet electric motors, whereas even the other new electric trains have noisy humming motors.
I believe the AC motor wave forms maybe smoothed out, I was very impressed by it. To the UK train companies just not value it? To me it was an impressive quality improvement. It is a detriment to all the other trains I travel on.
> “I don’t know everything these new trains can do — they probably have artificial intelligence or something — but I know they’re better than these buckets of steel we’re sitting in,” said Board President Bevan Dufty.
Maybe this guy shouldn’t be president of the BART board? I mean, lots of other people quoted in the article seem to know what they do.
Is anyone else concerned about the surveillance in the new BART trains?
It looks like there are 7-9 small CCTV cameras in each car. This means that there is nowhere inside the vehicle where you have private space to enter a password, or check your work email, or pull out a laptop to do some programming.
For people who spend 60 minutes (or more) commuting, this is obnoxious.
Also, this is another step toward pervasive surveillance in the public sphere. Default-on all-angles video recording normalizes what infrastructure operators (and their third-party contractors) are allowed to learn about you, your work, and your life.
I think realistically that level of surveillance is going to be needed to keep people safe and accountable on public transport somewhere like the Bay Area where people are very vulnerable.
I mean people are vulnerable inside a sealed train carriage in a dense urban area with a lot of issues and crime. San Francisco is a leading low level crime location in the nation and there are assaults and robberies on the BART system.
> For people who spend 60 minutes (or more) commuting, this is obnoxious.
I’m sure it’s merely obnoxious for you - but it’s there for people more vulnerable than you who get assaulted.
Once you witness a robbery or an act of violence on one of those trains and it scares you silly, you'll quickly rethink the "over surveillance" stance..
No, with the rising amount of increasingly brazen crime on Bart (I just saw a photo yesterday from a mutual acquaintance who has his face smashed in over a laptop bag) they need to add more deterrence in the form of better fare gates, increased police presence, and very obvious surveillance mechanisms. I value privacy but of the many places it should take precedence, public transit in a dangerous city isn’t one of them.
3) If they got rid of cameras you'd still not be able to use your computer during your commute because you'd almost certainly be robbed within the year if you were to use it every day on the BART for a year. In fact, even with cameras this will be true.
That's complete hogwash. It is very common to commute 60 minutes, for example looks like half the workforce at Salesforce lives in Fremont. In the morning the train fills up right at warm springs and gets empty at embarcadero. This legend that Bart is mostly for short rides is just that, a legend. Most people using Bart have pretty long commute from Concord, Dublin and Fremont into the city.
I don’t know if that is true or not but rider enter/exit flows are open data provided by BART in their web site, in case anyone wants to settle the debate.
I will say that Warm Springs is one of the least-used stations so I somewhat doubt this story of full trains departing. It only has 4400 pax/day.
at warm springs you get about 70% of the seats filled on an old style train and it's rapidly increasing week over week as more people start using it. At Fremont you have every single seat occupied and several people standing. By the time the train leaves Union City most cars are what you would consider at capacity. After that it gets more and more uncomfortable until the pressure is released at Embarcadero.
Cameras don't deter crime as effectively as uniformed patrols. And uniformed patrols aren't eventually going to drain into a massive pool of recordings that can be mined for your every movement.
Most of BART’s challenges stem from 180 software packages and 30 microprocessors that make up each Bombardier vehicle. Each is a complex symphony of systems that communicate over an Ethernet backbone. A bug in one line of code could shut the whole thing down, requiring a rigorous safety review process that may take months before engineers can reinstall the software."
Not that this makes the Bombardier problem trivial, but that seems fairly simple compared to most cars on the road today, which have over 100 micros. Software can be done well in complicated systems if you have the expertise, design, time and money to get it right.
Makes you ask just one question: why? Why is the architecture not controlled by a redundant master system and a bunch of microcontrollers that act as glorified relays.
I really hate the new cars. Yay more standing room but now everywhere you stand you are awkwardly in the way. So happy I’m moving out of the bay and won’t have to ride them more than once or twice a year anymore.
108 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadIs it just me or does 5% not seem like nearly a large enough percent? If I only had to hit 20% of my expected performance in exchange for 95% of my pay... I would have a lot more hobbies.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBB_RABe_502
Two examples doesn't make a trend, but seeing how similar the issues are, maybe there is some systemic issue plaguing them.
Very little these two things have in common other than the name.
It featured a couple of tourists in Europe asking a lady to take a photo for them. She purposefully waited until a train blocked the shot, so they got a photo of the train instead of the view they wanted. She then shows them the sabotaged photo and says something like, "I made that train! It's Bombardier."
I think the point of the ad was that they're an important exporter that creates good jobs and that earns international recognition. It was clearly designed for strengthening political support from the provincial and federal governments, not for selling trains. To me, though, it just made them seem like selfish assholes.
I wish I could find the ad, but Google just returns a mountain of news reports and marketing videos.
See this link [1] for a summary of the current situation (start about halfway down). It doesn't look great. Nippon/Sharyo is going to be at a disadvantage in bidding because their Amtrak contracts with California and Illinois were cancelled due to the prototype cars failing safety tests. It looks like Siemens will play a part in the replacement for those, which perhaps may convince them to try out transit cars in the USA. Competition would be good.
What we have now is CRRC Sifang America (a Chinese state-owned company) has built a factory in Illinois and has orders from Chicago and Boston. The first prototypes are expected this year. We will see if they can deliver.
[1] http://www.chicago-l.org/trains/roster/7000.html
[1] https://www.alstom.com/our-solutions/rolling-stock/citadis-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom_Citadis_Spirit
Siemens, Alstom, and Mitsubishi off the top of my head. There probably is some Chinese companies but I’m not familiar with them.
Edit: turns out this business was sold to Hitachi. I didn't know that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnsaldoBreda_Driverless_Metro
Several years ago the main type of train I use, Class 444 Desiro got a firmware upgrade to teach it Selective Door Operation. Meaning now it knows this platform is 8 carriages long, this is a ten carriage train, so disable the doors in the rear two carriages and make an announcement automatically. Nice. But the firmware upgrade messed up the clock. So for example maybe it's about lunch time, the train displays 12:05 but is it actually 12:05? Nah, might be 13:20 or 11:50. After several months they fixed the clock, but now it is only shown intermittently. So when it says 12:05 that's definitely 12:05 but it might not remember to show the time for five minutes which is little help.
They took months to ship firmware with a fixed clock.
The SDO change also resulted in the computer becoming convinced in certain places that, as it annunciates, ""There is a fault with the door system, this is being attended to. Please do not operate any emergency equipment". There isn't a fault. But since "Ignore spurious door message" is a workaround there is no hurry to qualify a new firmware release that fixes it.
[1] See the top photo here https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/design-and-architecture/e...
I'd be very curious to see what causes things like this, and especially the code... but then again, maybe seeing the code will just put me off ever riding in one.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit_rolli...
The new BART trains that are only now rolling out remind me a lot of the Swedish trains I saw more than 20 years ago, except that the BART trains have flat panel screens in them that I doubt those Swedish trains had back then, but the Swedish trains had doors that would silently and easily slide open when you held your hands up to them -- that was something that had greatly impressed me back then, because all the trains I'd been to before had really heavy doors that you'd have to struggle with to open by hand, while on the Swedish trains you just held your hand up and the doors would glide open like on the spacecraft on Star Trek.
The whole experience had left me embarrassed for the US, which I'd seen as a technological leader up to that point. I came away from that trip with an impression that the US was very backwards in many ways. The train system and train differences were just one glaring example, but also politically and in many other ways the US was very backwards.
Now finally these new BART trains rolling out, some NYC trains were also modernizing some about a decade ago, but I haven't been to Sweden or much of the rest of Europe in a long time, and I wonder how much further they've progressed.
There’s the Northeast corridor (and its cousin the Southeast corridor going down to Atlanta).
The PNW cities also are clustered like this but have difficult geography.
California and the Central Valley with the Bay and LA also meet this criteria, but CAHSR is run by a mix of incompetents and constrained by the wording of the ballot initiative that got it approved.
Not really. It's pretty flat here in the Willamette valley, where the majority of Oregon's population lives, and relatively flat going north into Washington to Seattle... But the best we've got for long distance trains is Amtrak which shares the tracks with commercial traffic, where Amtrak gets basically the lowest priority on the tracks.
BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone
Comparing long distance train service to Bart would be weird.
https://storage.googleapis.com/titlemax-media/2018/03/averag...
Unfortunately very little in Sweden. Really the only thing of note close to Sweden would probably be the subway in Copenhagen. Maybe Spain would be impressive, but most of it is happening in Asia these days.
There are big-ass tech companies, of course, but the country itself is not exactly a paragon of progress.
Your point would make sense if USA had high-speed trains linking big cities but it doesn't, and the train routes that do exist experience all sorts of delays which makes people choose planes even for shorter distances under 500 km which would take ~2 hr on high speed train.
The person you are responding to never even used the word cities.
In the US city status makes an important practical difference to how an area is run and what the people running it can do independently of the State they're in. So it makes sense every settlement with a general store and a paved road would want that status.
The status of various municipal designations varies greatly based on state laws. Generally, government levels go state->county->municipality. The type and form of a municipality generally only affects how it is organized, not its level of independence from higher levels of government. Some states restrict types and forms based on size, though.
One of the most sold cars in Europe is the Volkswagen Golf; I don't see how that is tiny.
Interestingly, I see that mid and large size classes (mid-size being a "large family car") originated in USA, which makes me wonder if that's a typical American perception.
I'd even argue that 1400+ kg for moving around an average of 1.5 person/120 kg (I think an average of 2 people is too generous), during a time of ecological crisis, is tragic, and in my opinion, describes perfectly how there's no hope.
Are compact cars tiny? That is debatable. Compared to a 1961 Lincon Continental with suicide doors it is very tiny.
I feel like it's worth making a distinction between having the relevant capabilities/resources for a technology vs. actually deploying it in its infrastructure?
For historical reasons, the U.S. legal system offers citizens an unparalleled number of veto points at which they can attempt to block government projects. Any infrastructure project bigger than painting a schoolhouse thus has to either fight out the reviews and court cases for years, or buy off the opponents, or more likely, both.
The lack of infrastructure definitely affects perception and quality of life. Make no mistake though, currently the united states is one of the technology leaders of the world. Key word: currently.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547137 and marked it off-topic.
https://www.bart.gov/better-bart
I believe the AC motor wave forms maybe smoothed out, I was very impressed by it. To the UK train companies just not value it? To me it was an impressive quality improvement. It is a detriment to all the other trains I travel on.
Maybe this guy shouldn’t be president of the BART board? I mean, lots of other people quoted in the article seem to know what they do.
The role of President is to gladhand and otherwise maintain relationships necessary for the partners to feel safe continuing their contracts.
That kind of “aw, shucks” mentality is very useful for this.
A bart train car (an electric train) should have like 50 - in Silicon fucking Valley) - and/or a giant induction charger in the middle.
Dont give me crap about the homeless - give that to the city.
We are silicon freaking valley and if you hVe never been to any other country with public transport we look like freaking idiots.
Sweden, japan, Singapore, china, all have severely more advanced transport systems than we.
Bart is a pos embarrassment.
It looks like there are 7-9 small CCTV cameras in each car. This means that there is nowhere inside the vehicle where you have private space to enter a password, or check your work email, or pull out a laptop to do some programming.
For people who spend 60 minutes (or more) commuting, this is obnoxious.
Also, this is another step toward pervasive surveillance in the public sphere. Default-on all-angles video recording normalizes what infrastructure operators (and their third-party contractors) are allowed to learn about you, your work, and your life.
> For people who spend 60 minutes (or more) commuting, this is obnoxious.
I’m sure it’s merely obnoxious for you - but it’s there for people more vulnerable than you who get assaulted.
2) It turned out a lot of BART cameras were fake. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Repl...
3) If they got rid of cameras you'd still not be able to use your computer during your commute because you'd almost certainly be robbed within the year if you were to use it every day on the BART for a year. In fact, even with cameras this will be true.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Your comment would be fine without the first sentence.)
I will say that Warm Springs is one of the least-used stations so I somewhat doubt this story of full trains departing. It only has 4400 pax/day.
I also don't believe Bart's stats, the incompetence of the people running it is so massive that everything they do is suspect in my eyes. An example: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/BART-escalator-repairs-...
The password issue you raise has some merit though.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/02/16/property-...