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.
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.
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 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.
> 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?
Wikipedia has a good survey [0].
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.
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.
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...
BART has a non-standard rail gauge size that precludes it from interoperability with other rail networks.
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.)
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...
As a related aside, the Chicago Transit Authority still ran freight on its tracks until not that long ago. Maybe the early 2000's?
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?)
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.)
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Who's fault is that?
Asking because I have been the customer with Uncommon Option Q enabled.
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.
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.
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.
> it was still notably slower than driving, so many if not most people still drove everywhere
I'd argue that those folks are missing the point. Sure, when I was commuting by Minneapolis public transit, it was slower than driving. But you know what I wasn't doing while I was on the bus/train? Driving! I was reading, writing, daydreaming, sleeping, any number of activities more pleasant than sitting on I-94.
Standing out there in the winter could be brutal, I'll admit. Then again, the light rail stops were heated, and the park & ride I transferred at in Plymouth had a nice climate-controlled lobby. The only time I was really out there was standing in the driveway in front of my office, waiting for the shuttle to pick me up.
Twin Cities public transit is a damn sight better than what we have in Milwaukee, that's for sure. Low bar, but the Twin Cities clear it handily.
Sadly, my neighborhood had long waits between buses that connected to university ave, and neither my neighborhood or university ave had heated stops. So, odds were pretty good that I'd suffer the weather for 20-30 minutes each trip.
I also tend to get motion sickness if I read or use a laptop in cars or busses, so there really wasn't anything I could do on them that I couldn't do by driving anyway.
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.
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%...
Interesting, tidbit you added here. But snark is needed for this situation.
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.
https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/BART_FY24%2...
It also looks like public transportation is mostly paid for with sales taxes, federal loans/grants, and $1 billion of taxes on diesel fuel.
1. See chart A on page 24, and chart F on page 28: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/budgets/docume...
- Prior to the pandemic, BART got >60% of its operating costs from riders (p9 in your linked doc)
- Ridership is still way down relative to 2019 even though costs are up in absolute terms
- Even from 2020 data, BART was hitting 50% https://lovetransit.substack.com/p/most-profitable-public-tr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_...
The subsidy in BART is higher than anyone would like it now, but I do think that's still a transient response to the pandemic; either more people will have to eventually go back to riding public transit, or we'll need to drop the emergency funding it's been receiving.
Public transit is widely touted as being more efficient than the alternatives, but for most trips it's cheaper (factoring in maintenance, depreciation, gas, etc, and pretending that BART is as convenient and reliable) to drive than to take BART, and not by a little bit.
Income just from gas taxes, tolls, and registration cover ~half the infrastructure maintenance, so there exists effectively another $200-$300 per capita per annum subsidy, but that's nowhere near enough to make BART cost less than just driving, even if I had to account those extra fees against my driving.
Why is that? How is BART worse than driving and still losing money when it's supposedly a more efficient solution? Is it just low volume? Is the organization making bad bets? Is the premise that trains are more efficient flawed?
Transit in the bay area fails at pretty much all of those things. Service is just infrequent enough to make things difficult, and unreliable enough that you worry that a late or missing bus or train will make you late. Cleanliness is inconsistent, and there are often people on drugs riding around all day, spouting nonsense. We do have some subways, but not enough of them, and there is no light rail line in SF that runs only underground, so they can only be a maximum of two cars long (otherwise they'd be too long for a single city block in some areas). All of the above-ground light rail is at mercy of car traffic (with tracks in some areas actually running in the same lanes as cars), stop signs, and traffic lights (which do not prioritize the trains). We do have some dedicated bus lanes, but they're dedicated bus+taxi lanes, and Ubers/Lyfts and regular passenger cars abuse them with little risk of being ticketed.
The end result of this is that people see that it takes 10 minutes to drive and 40 minutes to take public transit, but that they really need to add on an extra 15 minutes to the transit trip to account for delays and unreliability. So even though they don't want to to deal with parking, or pay 5-10x as much for an Uber/Lyft fare, they value their transit time more, and drive or get a car ride from an app.
Earlier this year, SF Muni was experiencing a large budget shortfall. They managed to save many jobs from being cut, which is commendable, but instead they reduced service. This just causes more people to look at the situation and choose to find an alternative that will get them where they're going faster, and more reliably.
It’s like saying crime is a problem in this world because of your lack of engagement in stopping crime.
Bitching on HN is one small form of engagement I can afford and I’m hoping at least one bart official sees it and realize what a shit job he’s doing or one government official sees it and realizes what a shit government official he is and changes something. Minuscule hope but why not.
Instead we get random people who will only benefit from fixing the bart actually trying to defend it as if it’s their favorite sports team.
If anything the Bay Area has utterly failed to provide systems software of lasting value to address public needs like these.
They have very little money left for paying engineering and construction staff.
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.
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.
the real problem is thinking they are different or that they need to innovate. Trains are common and they need not innovation but minor improvements over time.
If you had to buy a special car to be allowed to drive on Bay Area roads because they weren't the same as the roads in Chicago or Boston then a Honda Civic would cost $1M.
There isn't much different about bart.
If it can be made differently or done differently BART will absolutely try to do so.
the real problem is thinking they are different or that they need to innovate.
The notion of a startup running BART is fucking horrifying.
I didn't read the comment criticizing VC's for not investing in BART or a company to make BART better, I read it as a criticism of the American system for letting things like VC's and other rich entities/people lock up unconscionable amounts of wealth for either hoarding or funding stupid shit as opposed to make sure our country still functions and people can eat.
And please just spare me the capitalist apologia. I get it, people wanna be rich. On balance I don't give a shit, get as rich as you can, just as long as it doesn't require millions of people to suffer so you can. If you having objectively, factually, more than anyone needs to be happy requires a ton of people to go without necessities, IMO, that is not a right you should have, and I don't care how communist that makes me.
You could take 90% of Bezos', Musk's, or Gates' wealth and they would still never have to work again and live in exceptional luxury. There is no goddamn reason in the world to let them keep it while we have people starving.
Their first reflex when it comes to paying for infrastructure and maintenance is to think what that'll do to their short term CAP rates. And then they get angry.
BART does now accept credit cards at the turnstiles now (I think this started 2 years ago). Agreed that it took a long while to get there, much much longer than in other places.
Personally I prefer the Clipper method, as it's generally faster to scan than a contactless credit card payment (that's going to always be the case for closed-loop payment system). I also like that BART (and Muni, Caltrain, etc.) will pay less to Visa/Mastercard/whomever in transaction fees if I use my Clipper card and periodically top it up (which, as I have my Clipper card on my phone, happens automatically if the balance ever falls below $10). Credit card tap-to-pay is a nice convenience for out-of-town visitors and for locals who rarely use transit and don't have Clipper (or who use a physical Clipper card but forgot it at home), but I don't think it's a great way to pay for transit day-to-day.
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.
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.
Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Dubai, Japan, UK. The USA is supposed to be among the top in terms of technology but infra is just garbage. The BART is pathetic. I don't know why you defend it with pride. Attack it, because if you hate it and you are vocal about it, things are more likely to change.
I'm sick of people defending something that's shit because of pride. It's garbage.
Cars are anti-fragile and decentralized.
Cars fail open in the short term.
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 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'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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has
without massive upzoning and more infill stations.
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
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.
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.
Why? Last I checked, it's
* Depart SFO via BART
* Get off BART at the first stop, Millbrae
* Exit BART and enter Caltrain
Fortunately they've since reverted back to always running to Millbrae from the airport.
NYC is definitely the top dog. There was a recent ranking for metro areas ranked by walkability, bike-ability, public transit, and some other urban score, but divided by average rent price for a 1BR apartment. NYC still came out #1 despite the rather large denominator.
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).
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.
[1] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/FY26%20Adop...
BART taxes are not even in the top 100 list of expenses I worry about personally.
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 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.
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.
https://i.redd.it/rviipp7czy131.jpg
And the rail fatalities are only that high because of people using it for suicide.
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.
Enjoy the return of 80s era San Francisco.
I might argue that the bay area focuses on transportation technology that is flashy and gets around existing regulations because it is new, with hardly any regard at all for how it scales.
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…)
Maybe it's a matter of breaking down the costs for everyone to see, or maybe it's a matter of the city providing bus wifi so you can get some guaranteed access to the internet while riding, or maybe it's a matter of putting a police officer on every train.
But busses, aside from rush hour in probably the 10 largest cities in the nation, are always going to be way less convenient than a car. It has to stop a million times, there's no good way to guarantee you'll arrive on time (it's impossible to create a bus route where they stay evenly spaced like a train might handle better), and they never actually get you where you're going - just kinda nearby. Maybe you can transfer onto a bus now, but that's two modes of transportation. And God forbid there's a number of people combining their bus usage with a bicycle. Gotta wait for them to walk around front, unhook it, and hopefully put the bike rack back up so the driver doesn't have to get out and do it himself... etc, etc, etc.
Plus, I'm too busy to find it at the moment, but there's a study showing most people just want public transit so some other people use it and get off the highway. As in, they just want public transit so their car commute improves.
This will almost certainly never get major support; it's just too miserable of a system to overtake our already-crazy-convenient cars.
First off, you're not too busy to find it. Because you're probably not used to doing it. All you have to do is to tell your favorite map app where you want to go, then switch to the public transit tab. You should try it.
Right now if I look at routes from Newark to OAK or SFO, it shows around 40 minutes by car and 1:40 hour by public transportation. If I had a plane to catch in 2 hours, I'd never take the bus. Here's why.
About 40 minutes of that 1:40 involves walking to the nearest bus stop. You could take an Uber instead and cut it down to 10 minutes. But that's problem A, public transportation doesn't have enough coverage.
There are 2 bus changes involved. The first one, Newark to Union City or Palo Alto, depending on whether you're going to OAK or SFO, runs every 30 minutes. That's problem B, the routes are not frequent enough.
The last bus change, very close to OAK/SFO, are design flaw- problem C. You really should be able to get off BART and take a short walk or shuttle to terminal. Instead, it's another bus ride that'll take 40 minutes.
From a regular commuter's pov, problems A/B/C are the issues that'll discourage someone from taking public transportation. Like other comments mentioned, it's not really a resource, infra or tech issue. It's a social/political issue that's preventing public transportation from expanding, both in coverage, frequency and in terms of connecting big population centers where it matters. All the issues that you mentioned, like stopping million times, guarantee of arriving on time, bicycles, and even safety and cleanliness, will go away if you solve the problems I mentioned- speaking from my experience taking public transportation for 30+ years in the US and abroad.
I wish there were more bus options that connected the outer East Bay (Dublin, Pleasanton, San Ramon, Walnut Creek, etc.) to the inner East Bay.
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
I think there are many people in the Bay Area who start their weekend trips Friday afternoons and evenings.
In NYC people going out of the city for the weekend (Airbnb or their own house somewhere).
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.
By "self hosted" I'm not referring to it being run directly by the government, but that in comparison to every other government-run transit system, everything at BART is done the BART way, limiting access to an entire industry of light rail infrastructure, reducing safety and reliability, while significantly increasing costs.
I thought it was interesting and I'm sorry a hint at it is all I can offer right now
