A computer upgrade shut down BART

The cheap easy take: it's tragically ironic that the software running the infrastructure in Silicon Valley is such a problem

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.

And yet NYC .gov sites, apps, and functionality makes SF still look like a shantytown after all this time.

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.

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?

Beating a bar that is on the floor is none too impressive.

Too high. I think NK transit system is incomparably safer and cleaner than BART.

Riding without a ticket? Jail.

Littering on the platform? Straight to jail, right away!

Doing any violent crime in NK transit? Believe it or not - death by firing squad.

Here is a quick overview of how the system works: https://youtu.be/eiyfwZVAzGw?si=CnOMa8F6NkiyhifE

BART is a government organization and all California government employee pay is public. You can see that BART has about 40 software engineers and they earn about 70% of the market rate:

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=compute...

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=compute...

It seems to me that they are over-worked & under-paid and are doing a good job given the circumstances.

NIMBYs have blocked BART in Silicon Valley. BART doesn't reach Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Stanford, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Santa Clara, or Cupertino. A few years ago, it finally reached San Jose.

A separate train (CalTrain) goes from SF through Silicon Valley. Last year they switched to electric trains which are faster and run more frequently. The SF CalTrain station is inconvenient (20-mins walk from downtown, under a highway), but they are working to extend CalTrain to the central SF station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce_Transit_Center#Futu... .

So Silicon Valley transit is getting better, slowly.

SF doesn't run BART, though.

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

This dead horse ain’t gonna beat itself back to life. Might as well give it the ol’ college try, eh?

We're in agreement about the facts on the ground.

Setting aside safety for a moment, consider just hygiene: BART is shockingly dirty. Which suggests mismanagement, above and beyond just a lack of detterence of criminality.

As for safety -- firing squads are probably not in the cards, but would jailing the violent be too much to hope for?

I didn't know that, but please accept SF as a sloppy metonym for bay area. :-)